The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought

by Hubert Benoît

A classic text on what Zen thought had to offer the practising Western psychiatrist.

Genres: Spirituality, Zen, Psychology, Religion, Philosophy, Buddhism

Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Hubert Benoit (1904–1992) was a 20th-century French psychotherapist whose work foreshadowed subsequent developments in integral psychology and integral spirituality.[1][2] His special interest and contribution lay in developing a pioneering form of psychotherapy which integrated a psychoanalytic perspective with insights derived from Eastern spiritual disciplines, in particular from Ch'an and Zen Buddhism.[3] He stressed the part played by the spiritual ignorance of Western culture in the emergence and persistence of much underlying distress. He used concepts derived from psychoanalysis to explain the defences against this fundamental unease, and emphasised the importance of an analytic, preparatory phase, while warning against what he regarded as the psychoanalytic overemphasis on specific causal precursors of symptomatology.[4] He demonstrated parallels between aspects of Zen training and the experience of psychoanalysis. He constructed an account in contemporary psychological terms of the crucial Zen concept of satori and its emergence in the individual

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

is this REALLY the Supreme Doctrine? Or is it just the old Way, Truth and the Life in modern dress?

We've all experienced sudden onsets of fear in the middle of an otherwise normal time in our lives...

Be it self-conscious stage fright, a sudden feeling of mental paralysis, or a distant fearsome memory - all of us have felt the iron grip of cold, icy distress from time to time for no apparent reason.

Christians might call it an intuition of an evil outside ourselves. But isn’t that skirting the issue a little?

Dr. Hubert Benoit, a psychotherapist in WWII France, was inclined to call it a deep existential dread in the face of death. At least that's my take on his weighty words and theories.

But, before I go further, first I’ll take a look at the MAN, Hubert Benoit.

Who exactly WAS he?

Well, as I said, he was a learned psychiatrist - BEFORE June 6, 1944. In the raging battles that followed D-Day in the vicinity of the Allied landing, he was critically wounded in the crossfire, and was disabled. He became bedridden and was in extreme pain for a very long time afterward.

But Benoit had experienced breakthroughs in distress and sudden cures with his patients, real releases from turmoil and anxiety.

He KNEW there was a way, as Wittgenstein said, to get the "fly - us - out of the fly-bottle - our psychological impasses,” and find true freedom.

By concentrating, he enhanced his awareness.

Light became brighter, colours more vivid - and his pain more intolerable.

But he heard about the novel approach of Zen Buddhism to ending all our hangups. So he decided to get HIMSELF out of a life of dependence in the same way, through thought, reading and meditation.

He saw in people around him the patterns of fear and subsequent avoidance of reality we've described above, and had a feeling he could release HIMSELF forever from that icy spasm of nothingness - with the help of the tranquility of his forced inaction and a close psychotherapeutical attention to his own thought patterns.

Did he succeed?

He says he did, though he downplays the fact.

After all, he was a doctor and followed professional protocol.

But he presents to us the intellectual raison-d’être of a satori-in-process, from a MEDICAL point of view. And I think from the sounds of that, his experiences were Real.

To hear him tell of it, it all begins when traumatic episodes in our lives leave a residue of muscle contraction - a seizing up, say, of our solar plexus in a sudden nameless anxiety.

But he says we’re not stuck with that problem forever if we don’t WANT to be.

Not if we face it straight on, in disciplined meditation.

If we do that, faithfully and prayerfully, in time that icy numbness will melt away in a new feeling of lightness and freedom.

And, you know, simple Faith can do the trick too! The hard, real truth of religion...

If we put our faith and all our thoughts in a Higher Being - and leave everything to Him as a routine habit of prayer -

As we relax, we will come to see that all our contractions were just our little, worried, exaggerated selves, automatically working off in some corner of our body in reaction to subconscious dread, squeezing our muscles in empty existential anxiety around an empty centre.

We were - quite simply - giving ourselves grief for no good reason. Banging our heads against a wall...

And can you imagine being free from THAT forever?

He says we can.

This is a good (and extraordinarily difficult) book, but fascinating in its insights - remember, they’re couched in psychological and medical lingo.

And, as I say, as I grow older with the mature introspective certainty of advanced age, I’ve had similar insights on my own.

When I was 20, I was hospitalized and frantic attempts were made to bring my burgeoning ‘brain fever’ to an abrupt halt.

Through extensive conditioning, “don’t go there” signs - so to speak - were posted on the tortuous synapses of my forebrain.

But now, 50 years later, I’ve succeeded in removing most of those threatening signs from my preconscious mind, secure in the calm serenity of my faith.

What have I found?

Strange to say, more and more I see a simple, unclouded and continuously uneventful present moment stretching before my attentive awareness.

And it’s wonderful.

And for me, simple truth doesn’t get much more Supreme than that.

If love and attention can continue peacefully like this into an indeterminately long future -

Without angst or fear -

I’d say that’s a pretty good idea that Heaven is Real.

Wouldn’t you?

And yes - I’d say the new Supreme Doctrine is just the old Tried and True Way of Tradition!

[Paul Kotheimer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absolutely amazing, but extremely hard to get through. It's almost as difficult as reading Nietzsche. Benoit is explaining in "occidental" terms to "occidental thinkers" what is meant by Zen literature when it asserts that "From the beginning nothing was" or "Attention, that is the whole of the teaching." He says that these things ARE explainable, and he does a very good job of doing so.

So like the Taliban think of time in decades and not minutes, hours, and days, and the American aggressors in the region have no chance of winning the war because we think with our watches and our timetables--so Eastern people think of these Taoist/Buddhist/Hindu concepts. Our Western minds need a Rosetta Stone in order to decode these elusive Eastern ideas, and to me, this book is it.

Very dense, very rewarding. Or "Great doubt, great effort."

[Aldemir Lachapelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book through various references in other books, but specially because it was highly treasured by beloved Zen teacher Joko Beck.

Of all the books I have read on Zen (and they are quite a few), this is the most "intelectual" of all, and attempts to explain Zen from a very thorough psychological perspective. This makes it, I believe, very hard to grasp for someone new to the Zen path. So I would recommend it for more advanced Zen disciples.

I myself will be reading it again sometime in the future, hoping to better understand it.

[Krystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very difficult read! Grateful for my book club leader to guide us through this one. I do recommend but with one who can help interpret the content.

[Emdeewee · Rating 3 out of 5]

To my mind, The Supreme Doctrine does exactly what it wants to warn against: it never escapes the trap of 'trying to transcend thinking by thinking.'

What it does do, is explain the basics of Zen thought, and it does that in a very French, as in extremely wordy, way - but it does it well. All in all though, it embodies something different to me: it embodies the analytical way, a position outside of things, looking from a distance, but still trying to figure out how things work from the inside. This results in a language that is, to my mind, a disembodied language.

I did find numerous beautiful and sharp insights into Zen thinking and the Zen way, though. To name a few:

'Satori is not the crowning of an ultimate success, but of absolute defeat.'
[So true: one could argue that the whole idea of the Zen daily life, it's monastic way, the intensified retreats, ideally have one point of culmination: that of defeat, and thus of surrender. In fact, in the Dao de Jing it says: 'If you want to be given everything, give everything up'.]

'The man suffering from anguish has his attention turned towards the screen of this imaginative film, by which he tries to escape from the dangerous and real No-self.' In this way Benoit does explain the workings of the ego in a way I hadn't read before.

So the screen onto which we project our imaginative film, the project we have made out of ourselves, is actually threatened by everything that it is not: the true reality. '[The ego] escapes into the world of imagination.'

And there is more there.

That being said:

A book about Zen without mentioning the breath even once? Without mentioning the diaphragm? Belly breathing? Now there it is: this book is all about dualism here, dualism there, but it is trying to explain to you without making a vertical jump. One cannot stop thinking by thinking. One needs to breathe.
- All those divisions and discriminations, all the three-four-five-fold aspects of everything, my God. It's so overly technical and contrived, it just nauseated me. Cerebral to the highest degree.
- The image of someone after enlightenment, after Satori, annoyed the hell out of me. It is almost like Nietzsche’s übermensch, a very flat and stereotypical character, devoid of all depth and dimension. If I had to believe Benoit, someone after Satori has stopped being human altogether, he is just an inhuman functioning of the cosmos. But picturing this person, I continuously saw a cliché, a sitting zen machine, with all the humour, sadness, eyes and ears- all that is human - squeezed out of him.

I think this was an interesting read, too analytical and disembodied for me, but I did get to have a better insight into the psychology of our fight: everything that I think that i am feels threatened by life itself.

I hope and pray that one day I will so courageous as to just give it all up. I pray this happens before the day that I actually croak.