[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 01:55 +0100, Vicente Gonzalez wrote:

> thanks so much for the link. Some names appearing in that text are
> quite popular in the Spanish speaking world. Probably the Enneagram
> it's just a remake of kabbalistic stuff. It is not strange that such
> thing comes from South America. There is an important amount of
> new-age ideas arising in that area from 70's.

There is an informal logical fallacy known as the genetic fallacy. It
consists in dismissing something because of its origins. The reason it
is fallacious, of course, is that things tend to evolve after they are
originated, and evolution sometimes brings improvements. The enneagram
of personality is something that has evolved considerably during the
past thirty years or so. So even if the diagram of the enneagram of
personality was (as some have claimed) originally largely the product of
one Bolivian's peyote-induced visions, so much has happened since the
1970s that the enneagram in its current form deserves to be examined on
its own merits. To say it more accurately, each of the many
enneagram-based typologies of personality deserves to be examined as
they now are.

The enneagram of personality that Riso and Hudson discuss, especially in
their book The Wisdom of the Enneagram, incorporates some of Gurdjieff's
teachings on personality types, a certain amount of Myers-Briggs
typology and underlying Jungian theory of personality, a basic framework
of Karen Horney's discussions of motivations, quite a bit of George
Vaillant's work on defense mechanisms, and a very light touch of Ken
Wilber's work. Riso and Hudson also mention, mostly by way of passing
reference, the discussion of cardinal sins by some of the desert fathers
and the root causes of duḥkha as taught in Buddhism.

Riso and Hudson make the claim that human beings at their very best are
nurturing, honest, compassionate, curious, trusting, cheerful,
courageous, peaceful and healing. The nine personality types, they say,
are ways of failing to be fully human in those ways. As they like to put
it, "When you fail to show up, your personality type shows up instead."
Our personality is what we send to work or to a party when we don't feel
like going as ourselves. (It's worth remembering that "persona" comes
from the Greek for a mask worn by an actor in a tragedy or comedy.) So
for Riso and Hudson, study of the enneagram is a method one can use to
gain insight into the specific ways he or she fails to manifest the best
of being human.

It's interesting that when Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, presents the
enneagram of personality as a tool in Christian contemplative work, he
claims that Christ did not have a enneagrammatic personality type. In
current enneagram theory, personality is a type of failure. Perfected
beings do not have personalities. I can very easily imagine a Buddhist
wanting to insist that buddhas, being arhants, have no personality
types. They do not fit on the enneagram any longer. One might say that
the sole purpose of studying where one fits in the enneagram typology is
to find out how not to fit within the enneagram typology any more. Can
one ever really transcend personality? Perhaps not, but one can at least
move in that general direction. (My own conviction is that no one has
ever been a buddha, but it is still worthwhile to try to move in the
general direction of being as much like a buddha as one can.)

> Probably that people made the same thing, and today the Enneagram is
> passing into psychotherapy.

In her book on the Enneagram, Helen Palmer has an appendix with data
from various empirical studies done by psychologists. She seems to be
especially interested in finding correlations between enneagram
tyypology and the Myers-Briggs Type Index and several other
psychological persoanlity typologies.

It may be worth noting that Riso and Hudson and Helen Palmer present the
enneagram almost entirely as a tool for better self-understanding (of
the sort that Socrates, the Stoics and the academic skeptics would
admire). One will find nothing at all in their work that makes the
enneagram resemble astrology, numerology, necromancy, geomancy or
oneiromancy or anything having to do with the occult or oracles.


-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico