고집멸도의 상담 및 심리치료적 이해

Abstract

This paper interprets the four noble truths, an essential doctrine of Buddhism, in terms of counselling and psychotherapy and presents specific a case of psychotherapy. Significantly, this paper interpreted literary documents in light of psychotherapy and suggested a specific case associated with the four noble truths. The discussion is summarized as follows: First, the author understood the stage of suffering(苦) by classifying into aspects of body, personal relationship, psychology and existence and applied it to central symptoms of a counselee in terms of counselling and psychotherapy. A case is concerned with illusion of thrown objects. This illusion prevents a normal life of a counselee or sleep and gives him or her suffering of fear or terror all the time. Second, the author defined accumulation of suffering(集), which is also a definition valid in psychotherapeutic counselling as follows: thirst for something(tanha) is divided into sensuous form, thirst for being, eagerness to become something, and thirst for non-being, eagerness to remove concerns and fear. Illusion of thrown objects presented as a case results from experiences that a client did not feel himself or herself adequately safe but rather attacked continuously ever since young. Third, elimination of suffering(滅) is the stage where symptoms of suffering disappears and spiritual experience is possible. While the literary focuses on spiritual experience, counselling and psychotherapy is more interested in having a client remove psychological suffering and adapt to reality. In a case, the author helped a client go through overcoming illusion of thrown things with the use of psychodrama and image-based meditation. Fourth, it is the stage of the noble path that leads away from suffering(道). This stage is usually referred to as the eight fold noble path. However, the eight fold noble path is used as a way of experiencing its elimination in the stage of elimination of suffering(滅) and the fourth stage of the noble path is defined as a process of exploring new behavior of a client and helping him or her practice it in day-to-day life. Thus, a case in this stage includes practicing how to buy things on the part of a client who could not go out before and practicing how to talk with family members about his or her suffering. As discussed above, the four noble truths refer to a process of practicing meditation and at the same time are considered to provide a frame of very effective interpretation even as a process of counselling or psychotherapy. Tasks to be further discussed are summarized as follows:First, there is need that traditional literary interpretation about the four noble truths should be researched in a more elaborate way. This does not merely the literature of early Buddhism alone. Second, as the four noble truths are applied to reality, it is inevitable that changes take place in its content and that its interpretation can differ according to objects to be researched. Thus, it is a task to come at any time how to integrate views of Buddhist psychology and those of western psychology. Third, in Buddhist study where literary interpretation constructs the mainstream of research methodology, it will be a critical task to perform qualitative research by collecting, analyzing and interpreting materials in the field. The author anticipates that qualitative case study based on values of humanities will be positioned as a new direction of Buddhist study rather than experimental research based on positivism of natural sciences,