Basic Features of Buddhist Psychology

Abstract

Though the discipline of psychology is a well developed empirical science in the west today, few psychologists have dipped into the religious and philosophical literature of the east. Yet the analysis of psychological phenomena in the discourses of the Buddha offers significant insights into the nature of consciousness and the psychology of human behaviour. In fact Robert H. Thouless, the Cambridge psychologist, distinctly comments on the contemporary relevance of the psychological reflections of the Buddha: ‘Across the gulf of twenty-five centuries we seem to hear in the voice of the Buddha the expression of an essentially modern mind.’¹