[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 22:25 -0700, jkirk wrote:

> "We are born with a dominant type."
> By this reckoning, nurture is passe, nature is everything. 
> 
> How can this idea be compatible with Buddhism and its views on no
> essence (anatta), on transitoriness (anicca), and on karma?

It is fully compatible in every possible way. The doctrine of karma as
it was developed in abhidhamma is a form of the observation that every
deliberate action one does has the immediate effect of reinforcing a
habit. The collection of all the habits one has defines our character.
Changing habits and character is acknowledged within Buddhism as very
difficult---if it were not, we would all become buddhas within minutes
of admiring our first buddha and wanting to become like her. The fact
that it takes decades and decades of practice to move a few inches
closer to buddhahood is a testimony to the difficulty of altering karmic
propensities. The fact that we can move at all is a testimony to
impermanence.

Enneagram teachers tend to say that we cannot move out of our basic
personality type, but we can move to a much healthier manifestation of
it, and the healthier the manifestation, the more freely we can manifest
the healthy aspects of all the other types as well. Buddhaghosa says
pretty much exactly the same thing. In most forms of abhidharma, one of
the principal features of en enlightened being is intellectual and
emotional flexibility. That is precisely what the enneagram, used
carefully as a tool, is designed to help one cultivate.

Enneagram teachers and Buddhists are in full agreement that our
personality (samskāra-skandha) is not the self; both systems, in other
word, agree on the doctrine of anātman. What some enneagram teachers
(Don Riso and Russ Hudson, for example) say is that our true self, our
essential nature, lies hidden by our personalities. Riso and Hudson call
this essential nature by various names ("Spirit" being their favorite),
but when they describe it, the description ends up sounding remarkably
like what some Buddhists call Buddha-nature.

So I think if one looks a little below the level of literalism, one
finds a remarkable compatibility between Buddhist terminology and the
language of the enneagram.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico