[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 12:16 +0800, Piya Tan wrote:

> Interesting, Six is the Guardian.
> 
> And I suppose you are an Eight, the Confronter.

No. Strangely enough, three and eight are the enneagram points on which
I have by far the lowest scores. 

Determining the types of other people is, of course, pretty nearly
impossible. That's fortunate, since it's also pretty nearly useless. Far
more important is to gain some insight into those aspects of oneself
that are obstacles to the very goals one most longs to attain.

For most of my life personality typologies have fascinated me. The first
one I encountered was a Myers-Briggs test I had to take as part of a job
application. When it came to the interview stage, the personnel officer
showed me what the Myers-Briggs profile of the most successful people in
the job I was seeking. He then showed me my profile (INFP) and pointed
out that it was precisely the opposite of the profile of a success
(ESTJ) in that job. He said I would probably hate the job, hate most of
my colleagues and hate myself for being there. He was, I am sure, right
on the money. I came to think that Myers-Briggs had probably saved me
from a bad experience.

A few years later I became intrigued with Upatissa's typology in
Vimuttimaggo (still one of my favorite books), which is also found in
Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimaggo. I identified myself (correctly, I think) as
a hate type, full of anger and rage. Not wanting to be stuck there, I
took up metta-bhāvanā practice and eventually (say, thirty years later)
became somewhat more mellow and a bit closer to the more healthy side of
a hate type, which Upatissa calls the discernment (buddhi) type.

About fifteen years ago a student introduced me to Helen Palmer's book
on the enneagram, and I then identified myself as a type one (also
driven by anger and rage). In subsequent work I've come to see that a
much more accurate fit is type nine (still very much anger-driven) with
a strong one wing. I still mostly do mettā-bhāvanā, but have lately been
wondering whether other practices might complement that and help to
break down, or at least reduce the effect of, a few other barriers that
get in my way from time to time.

Something that a lot of people I have come across have noticed is that
most people have a tendency to gravitate to spiritual practices that are
least likely to transform them and most likely to keep them stuck in
unhealthy patterns (and thus fail to be spiritual practices at all). For
example, people with a strong tendency to withdraw from problems rather
than face them head on tend to become dhyāna addicts. Dhyāna practice
can be a kind of narcosis. (I've certainly done a hell of a lot of that
particular form of escaping into narcotic samādhi during my life, and it
has probably done me very little good at all, and it has surely caused a
lot of problems for the people who have had to live with me.) 

-- 
Richard