[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 08:20 -0700, jkirk wrote:

> Back in the 1940s, the psychologist William Herbert Sheldon
> created another mind/body classification of so-called
> somatotypes, the ecto-, endo-, and mesomorphs, that associated
> body types with temperaments.  This system became a pop party
> game, but soon lost credibility. A google search on it just now
> produced a whole bunch of body building websites, so I guess it
> has moved into that realm. 

About five years ago, just for the fun of it, I took a course designed
to teach people to be physical trainers. There was a lot in that course
on somatotypes and the kinds of physical exercise and diet appropriate
for each. It has turned out to be a fairly helpful tool in physical
training. Like any tool, of course, it is only a heuristic. If one
approaches somatotypology (or enneagram personality typology) in
approximately the same way a mādhdyamika approaches Buddhism, there is
not much danger. The potential danger comes when one accepts any of
these heuristic tools in the manner that a Fundamentalist approaches the
Bible.

During this past semester I read through Dharmakīrti's critique of
Āyurvedic theory. The āyurvedic folks of his generation had a notion
that one's humors influenced (or perhaps even determined) one's bodily
nature and one's mentality. People with a preponderance of wind (vāta)
were supposed to be thin and dry-skinned physically and prone to
delusions (moha) temperamentally. People with a preponderance of phlegm
(kapha) were supposed to tend to excess weight and oily skin
physiologically and were prone to passion (rāga) temperamentally. People
with a lot of bile (pitta) were said to be muscular and energetic and
prone to anger and hatred (dveṣa). The root causes of duḥkha were meant
to be addressed by following a balanced diet and exercise routine. 

Dharmakīrti, of course, would have none of this āyurvedic theory. He
observed that one finds plenty of thin and dry-skinned people who are
full of anger and contempt, and one can find plenty of "full-figured"
people who are prone to delusions. There is, in other, words, no mapping
of physiological types to temperament. If one is in the realm of
psychology, argued Dharmakīrti, one should look at the psychological
(that is, karmic) causes of psychological states, not to body
chemistry. 

>  Somatotyping, like enneagramography,
> no doubt leads to un-insightful labeling.

I doubt that any typology necessarily leads to labeling that lacks
insight, but I supposed if anything is used by a person who lacks
insight, the result is likely to be non-insightful. 

> Vicente is right--the practice of dharma doesn't need personality
> typing.

That is beyond dispute. That notwithstanding, quite a number of dharma
teachers over the ages have found it useful to used personality typing
to help people find the most productive practices for their temperament.
Upatissa and Buddhaghosa both observed that behavior tends to come in
clusters. People who dress in certain ways are likely to eat in certain
ways and to have certain kinds of work habits and certain ways of
speaking to others. By studying behavior, they claimed, one can make a
pretty good guess at which dhammas are at work "under the hood". If one
can make an educated guess about a student's mentality, one can give
them practices that work for them and avoid giving them practices that
could actually make them worse. (Upatissa observes, just to give two
examples, that a person prone to anger should be given well-lighted
accommodations with lots of pretty-colored flowers to look at and should
avoid such practices as gazing at decomposing corpses or awareness of
the loathsomeness of food, while a person prone to sensuality should be
given drab accomodations and meditative practices that focus on
unpleasantness and impermanence.)  

> And, one can fiddle
> around with the questionnaire.

But why would one want to do that? The point of the questionnaire is to
help one cultivate the habit of being honest in one's observations about
one's own mentality. It is fully recognized that most people are not
fully honest with themselves and therefore may misidentify their type.
For this reason, it is recommended that one work with other people who
will help one be honest in the complicated task of self-appraisal (which
kind reminds me of the notion of a sangha). 

>  Has any psychoanalyst or
> psychiatrist written a critique of the enneagram system?

There is not a lot of substance to the enneagram system itself. It is
really just a bare-bones schema that has to be filled with content.
Various psychologists and spiritual directors fill the enneagram schema
with different contents. Jesuits, for example, associate the points of
the enneagram with the nine cardinal sins written about by Evagrios and
other of the desert fathers. Some Buddhists have filled the enneagram
with a more Buddhist content, associating each of the points with a
different pāramitā (perfection of virtue). Some Jungian psychotherapists
use the enneagram as a tool for playing around with archetypes of the
collective unconscious. The type of questionnaire a person develops
depends entirely on how one he or she plans to use the enneagram. And of
course one need not use a questionnaire at all. There are other (and I
would say probably much better) ways of learning what personality type
one has; it's just that Americans seem to like questionnaires.
  
> There's another issue: a psychoanalyst like Sudhir Kakar of
> India, has shown that Indian personality/temperament is quite
> different from what we find in the USA, according to his clinical
> practice and research, anyway. So if we find that enneatypes
> "work" here in the US, how would enneatypes work in the various
> Asian contexts, Buddhist or otherwise? Probably wouldn't.

I have a feeling the underlying typology could be used in almost any
culture, but questionnaires are bound to be specific to a given culture.
In other words, I am fairly sure there are plenty of, say, Enneatype
Ones in India, but I doubt very much that a questionnaire designed in
the United States would be of much use in helping an Indian Type One to
correctly identify her type.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who studied the enneagram under Jesuit
spiritual directors, likes to associate different countries with
different types, just to help give a sense of how people tend to
stereotype both groups of people and individuals. He uses a common
stereotypical view of Mexico as an example of an Enneatype Nine culture:
laid back, casual, friendly, open-hearted and consistently willing to
put things off until some other day. The stereotypical view of the USA
serves as the image for Enneatype Three: obsessed with success,
contemptuous of failure, driven to seek excellence, prone to
self-adulation, willing to engage in deceit in order to try to bolster
an image of success. (What else would one expect of a country that Mitt
Romney repeatedly called, to the great embarrassment of many of us
non-Three Americans, the greatest nation in the history of the human
race.)

Now of course if all one does is say, "Yup, Amerricuns are hard-working
folks who love to succeed, and Mexicans are amiable but lazy folks who
mostly want to take jobs away from Amerricuns," nothing much of value
has been achieved. But if one happens to live in the United States and
realizes that some of that Enneatype Three drivenness manages to work
its way into the mentality of almost everyone who lives in the USA, just
because it's in the drinking water, then one can begin to work with that
by being a little more mindful of it.

There are thousands of ways of being more mindful. The enneagram can be
one of those thousands of ways for some people. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico