간화선과 심리치료 - 연구 현황을 중심으로 -

Abstract

Ganhwaseon and Psychotherapy : Focusing on Current Research Trend Lee, Pilwon Dongguk University(Gyeongju) Today, we are faced with a variety of problems. The most severe one might be the psychological unhealthiness. Diseases due to stress and negative emotions such as anxiety, depression and anger affect not only the individual’s life, but also people around including family members, which eventually develop into a social problem. In this social atmosphere, ‘practice’ or ‘meditation’ began to receive unprecedented amount of social interest. Not only Vipassanā which is the traditional southern practice method, but also popularized programs such as MBSR or MBCT that applied Vipassanā are currently contributing to solving diverse psychological problems of modern people. Meanwhile, a unique practice method called ‘Ganhwaseon’ has been early developed in Northeast Asia to be succeeded to this day. Recently, research on Ganhwaseon from an aspect of psychotherapy is budding in Korea. However, quantitative research on Ganhwaseon(看話禪) is not yet comparable to other practice method such as Vipassanā. This paper examines the previous studies that contemplated on the psychotherapeutic effectiveness and characteristics of Ganhwaseon and confirmed the inherence of such characteristics in the tradition of Ganhwaseon. For this purpose, research papers related to Ganhwaseon that were ever published in Korea before February in 2015 were searched, which gave out a list of 333 papers. However, there were only six papers that involved psychotherapy. Among these six, only three were the papers that verified the psychotherapeutic effectiveness using psychological method. Meanwhile, there are very few papers regarding the psychotherapeutic effectiveness of Ganhwaseon in overseas as well. Ever since Doctor Jon Kabat-Zinn developed MBSR program in 1979, the psychotherapeutic effects of Buddhist contemplation has been proceeded merely focused on the practice in southern Vipassanā. The reason that there are scarce domestic researches on Ganhwaseon from an aspect of psychotherapy can be attributed to the inherent limits of Ganhwaseon. The biggest challenge of Ganhwaseon is that practice is impossible unless there is a teacher who had precisely cleared Hwadu. Moreover, Ganhwaseon requires a one-on-one approach for solving Hwadu(話頭) and checking between teacher and pupil. In that sense, there are several limitations for Ganhwaseon to become a public program. Nevertheless, Ganhwaseon has outstanding psychotherapeutic effects that stand comparison to any other performances. This can be confirmed in the literature review on the previous domestic studies. If we properly give life to the characteristics of Ganhwaseon and broaden a new level of understanding from a psychological aspect, Ganhwaseon can be reborn as a psychotherapeutic method that possesses a very significant meaning to us in these days.