[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 02:44 +0000, Dhammanando Bhikkhu wrote:

> Though he [Buddhaghosa] accepted the
> sixfold classification of character types and the need to prescribe meditation
> themes in accordance with these, he held that a pupil's type could be
> ascertained only by mind-reading or by interviewing him, and was sceptical
> about the method of diagnosis based on observing the pupil's behaviour.

Good to hear from you again, Bhante. Yes, I do recall Buddhaghosa's
skepticism on this matter, but I thought I might be able to get away
with an oversimplified account of his position. I still remember
laughing heartily the first time I read the relevant passage in the
Visuddhimaggo. He offers a fairly detailed description of behaviours
that might be used to indicate a mentality and then concludes by saying
that by far the best method of knowing what someone's mentality is is
just to ask him. (The possibility of self-deception aside, I was
delighted by the simplicity of this approach. Want to know something
about someone? Just ask.)

In his discussions of mentality and behaviour, my dearly irritating
friend Dharmakīrti holds the position that there is a many-one
relationship between mentalities and behaviour; that is, many different
mentalities can result in pretty much the same behaviour. That means
that it is impossible to use behaviour as an indicator of mentality. A
criminal gifted at lying and a truly innocent man will both say "I am
innocent." A buddha and a charlatan will both say "I am dispassionate"
and appear to act dispassionately whenever someone is watching. When all
one has is the behaviour, concludes Dharmakīrti, one knows nothing about
the contours of the mentality of the person doing the behaving. Perhaps
he had been reading Buddhaghosa before he wrote those passages.

Although I doubt that Riso and Hudson had read either Buddhaghosa or
Dharmakīrti, they say in their book The Wisdom of the Enneagram that it
is folly (as well as pointless) to try to assess another's enneagram
type. It is not the way one behaves that determines the type, but the
underlying mentality. And only a person who has a mentality knows what
his mentality is. Or (as the Upanishads say), perhaps even he does not
know. There is the rather awkward factor of self-deception to contend
with. And I reckon that just about everybody but thee and me is prone to
some degree of self-deception, eh?

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico