What Can We Learn From Zen? A Review and Some Speculations

Concepts deriving from Zen Buddhism have come to form part of popular Western culture during the last twenty years or so.These concepts are often vague and misleading.This paper suggests that Zen can be usefully characterized as a set of techniques designed to bring about specific changes in behaviour and experience.This is also often held to be one of the aims of psychology.As yet, psychologists have paid relatively little attention to Zen, judging from the published literature.This literature is reviewed.Suggestions are made as to what psychologists might learn from Zen; in particular by contrasting the approach of western psychology with that of a highly sophisticated system from a very different advanced culture.During the last twenty years or so, concepts derived, often quite loosely, from Zen Buddhism have come to form part of popular culture.Some attempts have been made to use such concepts within the framework of western Psychology.The purpose of this paper is to review these attempts, and to make some suggestions as to what we might, perhaps, learn in the future.This is not the place to offer a digest of the extremely complex social, religious, and philosophical systems that constitute Zen Buddhism.However, it can be suggested that among these are to be found perhaps the most thoroughly worked out and systematic methods of bringing about changes in behaviour and experience known to us outside the western scientific tradition.They include three groups of techniques that appear to be of particular psychological interest.They may be termed meditation; mental exercises; and training in skills.