[Buddha-l] Re: The Dalai Lama on Self-Loathing

[Katherine Masis]

(a) Joy Vriens offered quotations from Santideva.

Thanks for the selected quotations, Joy.  It’s
interesting that the Dailai Lama’s book, *Healing
Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist
Perspective* (Snow Lion, 1997) is based on Shantideva.
 I haven’t gotten to it yet, but now I’m really
curious to see what his interpretation is!

(b) Joanna Kirk wrote:

"Makes one wonder if severe adult neurosis was simply
absent in many of the Tibetan families, before they
became submerged in industrialized  culture . . .
Self-loathing might well accompany the development of
a conventional self that is based more on me
(industrialized cultures) than on we
(non-industrtialized cultures)."

(c) Jack Hat wrote:

"I wonder whether the important variable was the lack
of self-loathing in people in that part of the world
or the lack of psychological understanding in their
Buddhist teachers. Would a western therapist find
self-loathing in those people?"

Here’s an interesting piece from Alan Roland’s *In
Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a
Cross-Cultural Psychology* (Princeton, 1988):  

"One particular aspect of we-self regard and
structural hierarchical relationships is profoundly
related to caste.  As Bhaskar Sripada . . . has noted
from reflections on his own psychoanalysis, the
particular ego-ideal internalizations of a Brahmin
enhance his or her own self, we-self regard being
further supported by unconsciously splitting off and
projecting any poor aspects of self-esteem onto the
lower castes.  In turn, the lower castes split off
certain idealized aspects of their own self and
project them onto the upper castes, further supporting
the we-self regard of the upper castes." (p. 247)

For us westerners, self-loathing seems to take place
in a smaller "space", within each individual.  In
other cultures, the self-loathing might be projected
onto a larger, social "space."  Perhaps there are some
cultures that lack self-loathing completely, because
they're not part of industrialized culture.  I’m not
sure about this, though.

Katherine Masis




       
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