Excerpts from The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology

Readings on the nature of meditation, mind, and psychology. With forewords by Daniel Goleman and Kidder Smith.

The year was 1975, the setting a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche had invited me out to dinner to tell me about his plans for a new educational institution he was founding, Naropa Institute. At one point in the conversation he leaned across the table toward me with a conspiratorial air, looked me straight in the eye, and said emphatically, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.”

That proposition made immediate sense to me. I had recently received my doctorate in psychology from Harvard, and returned there as a visiting lecturer after a year of postdoctoral study in Sri Lanka and India. My topic was abhidharma, an ancient Buddhist theory of mind that has been in continual use as an applied psychology for the last fifteen hundred years or more.

Of course, I had never heard of this system in any of my academic psychology studies. The implicit assumption (culture-bound and flavored with hubris though it may be) was that the field of psychology had begun only a century before, in Europe and America —none of my psychology professors had ever heard of abhidharma. I took Rinpoche’s observation to mean that Western students of psychology would soon be hearing whispers of abhidharma that might inspire them to pursue further study of Buddhism.

Indeed, he sprinkled his teachings with nuggets from this rich psychological mine, offering practical hints on everything from one’s state of mind while diapering the baby to transforming aggression. Trungpa Rinpoche was among the very first to offer such glimpses to a Western audience, sometimes casually interspersing these into a discussion and sometimes discoursing on them at great length.

This volume does a great favor for Western readers who want to understand the view Buddhist psychology takes of the human condition, pulling together a lifetime of insights on the subject by one of its most articulate teachers. Buddhism, like Western thought, harbors multiple schools of philosophy and psychology of mind. Several of these are represented here, though there are still more awaiting exploration by those readers who find themselves intrigued. Chögyam Trungpa offers us a rich banquet, with many inviting, intriguing, and delicious glimpses into these Buddhist perspectives on our mind and life.

> Table of contents
> Foreword
> Prelude