Buddhist Studies

Before ‘Buddhist Psychology’—and Its Making: Reading the Early Discourses in Conversation with Modern and Postmodern Psychological Imagination(s)

This fifteen-session seminar takes as its primary task the close reading of key textual passages in the early Buddhist discourses bearing on what might be provisionally called psychological matters, or a theory of mind. Working across parallel versions in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan, we will attend closely to how the texts themselves articulate, among other things, conceptions of self and ego, latent tendencies, subjectivity, relationality and intersubjectivity, ethics and integrity, sensory experience, expressions of vitality, presence or mindfulness, compassion, desire and a range of notions of attachment, freedom and epistemic conceit.

On this textual basis, the seminar will address how the idea of a ‘Buddhist psychology’ (more accurately, a plurality of Buddhist psychologies) has been transmitted, received, and constructed, and how notions of suffering, pain, and dukkha/duḥkha have been grafted onto modern frameworks of psychopathology and clinical or psychotherapeutic practice. This construction unfolds within institutional settings—academic disciplines, clinical professions, monastic and convert Buddhist communities, publishing and teaching networks—and is bound up with questions of identity, authority, and belonging, including who is positioned to speak for ‘Buddhist psychology’ and on what grounds. Epistemological and intellectual-historical framings serve this inquiry, considered in light of the early textual record as well as of later developments in Buddhist traditions.

By holding these two tasks together—sustained work with the sources, and critical attention to their reception—the seminar aims to open onto a broader, collegial discussion that remains text-historically grounded, resisting anachronistic harmonization as well as internalized synchronic and largely ahistorical (if not perennialist) readings, and asking how, when, and under what conditions these categories have come to be read together at all.

Languages and class preparation The seminar's textual basis is the corpus of early Buddhist discourses — the Pali Nikāyas together with their parallels in the Chinese Āgamas, in Sanskrit (occasionally including Gāndhārī witnesses), and in Tibetan. The relevant passages will be assigned each week, with cross-canonical parallels indicated where they bear on the reading. The seminar presupposes competence in at least one of the principal canonical languages of the early Buddhist primary sources — Pāli, Sanskrit, Buddhist Chinese, or classical Tibetan. Participants are not expected to read in all four: one is sufficient, and each will work from the version(s) in the language(s) they command while we read and discuss together. That said, the Pali versions of the discourses will be specially foregrounded for our in-class readings, so there will be ample space for closer textual work with Pali materials. Participants are asked to come to each session having read the assigned passage(s) in the original, in Pali if possible or in the language of their competence, ready to discuss the text and the teachings it conveys closely; reference editions and tools for locating the parallels will be circulated in advance. Reading secondary literature in advance is not required: preparation consists in coming to each session having read the assigned passage(s) in the original.