[Buddha-l] monks, meditation and trauma

[Dan Lusthaus]

Steve Feite writes:
"Matthieu Ricard points out in his Google talk that when talking to
various refugees who escaped from Tibet who were severely abused and
tortured by the Chinese, one of their greatest fears was *that they'd
lose their ability to feel compassion for their to torturers* (!). So
much of who they were and what they did and how they saw the world
was about generating and maintaining lovingkindness for all beings,
that the thought of losing that ability was just unthinkable."

I would be very cautious about taking these sorts of reports too seriously,
or without further examination. I know Tibetans who don't find a healthy
expression of outrage something outside their "practice." And there are some
courageous Tibetan women who were abused and raped in Nepal while escaping
from Tibet who have attempted to organize and mobilize to bring some justice
to the situation and to make such passage safer. Anger is not absent from
their vocabulary.

After the Khmer Rouge were deposed and the aftermath of their carnage and
torture of their fellow Cambodians became known, visitors and reporters
repeatedly explained to a (disbelieving or admiring -- select your
preference) western audience how devoid of malice, revenge, etc. Cambodians
were, and all sorts of explanations of how their notions of karma provided
them with this "healthy" forgiving attitude were offered. They were not even
interested in justice or finding or prosecuting the guilty. The Asia Society
Magazine had a detailed essay (with pictures) in the mid-80s (it went
defunct a year or so later).

As a little more time has shown, the Cambodians were not a nation of
forgiving Buddhist saints. Rather the entire country was in stunned shock,
and it took more than a decade for the real anger, grief, despair, etc., to
emerge and find expression. The shock has worn off and the pain is now
searing with more recognizable and predictable effects.

As for searching for ancient Buddhist cures for PTSD, that would be naive.
PTSD as a diagnosis is not simply about flashbacks, or exactly what was
understood as shellshock, etc. Sex abuse, especially of young children, is
also a common cause, and in such cases there are few if any "flashbacks"
(therapists are rather worried about false memories, an issue Freud already
came to recognize). What makes PTSD a distinct diagnosis, and not just a
fancy name for trauma or haunting memories, is a full complex of symptoms
and issues which typically engulf and thoroughly influence a person's entire
behavioral and mental orientation, and it is frequently suicidal. When
properly diagnosed, it is not your garden variety traumatic aftereffect, and
remains, even for the leading professionals, very difficult to treat.

There are some Buddhist manuals that describe various types of mental issues
and meditation problems, such as (usually very brief) discussions of "Zen
sickness," but none with the sort of etiological richness or therapeutic
depth that one would expect from a modern psychological prognosis and
treatment plan. And I have never seen anything in such texts that remotely
reminded me of PTSD.

Let's keep in mind, for instance, that mental illness was a *disqualifying*
condition from being accepted in the sangha, and grounds for expulsion if
manifested by someone already a cleric. In general Buddhists "professionals"
(monks, etc.) were not in the business of curing major mental disorders.
Some forms of practice kicked up dangerous and scary samskaras, which the
texts do give advice on dealing with, but this is not easily transferable to
serious mental disorders except as loose analogies.

It is probably not simply by historical accident that in China, for
instance, it became the Daoists who were considered the masters of exorcism
(Buddhists were masters of funerals and certain types of festivals). Fox
exorcism remains a big money maker and a significant portion of the training
of Soto monks in Japan, but probably due to the absence of Daoists and the
morphing of the native shamanistic traditions into Buddhism. In Korea,
shamans would still be the average person's first choice for serious
problems of this sort, not the local Buddhist monk.

Dan Lusthaus