The Rise of Bodhiology
Bodhiology is a comprehensive modern textbook on Buddhist psychology.
How does Buddhism give rise to psychology? Why can a religion be described as a psychology? Buddhism is the oldest atheist world religion as it does not accept a personal Divine Creator such as God. As soon as a religion throws out the concept of Creator God, the questions about what makes us as we are, where we come from, where we are heading and the like arise. Don’t they?
Gotama the Buddha, has ready answers. In the words of the Buddha, the sentient beings have doings as their possessions, are the inheritors of their own doings, have doings as their maker, doings as their relatives and doings as their refuges.
In short, we are on our own. There is no God to save us. We are to fend for ourselves. The only savior available to us is our own doings. This is known as actionism (kammavādo) in Buddhism. The Buddha is called an actionist (kammavādī).
The Buddha described his religion as Sāsanā (The Taming System). After perfection of his own actions and awakening, the Buddha started his taming system. Everything the Buddha taught in his discourses (Suttāni) is to do with how to progress from crude actions to perfect actions, which guarantee awakening as the ultimate goal.
In the Buddha’s teachings, action means intentional doing. The Buddha even equated intention with action (cetanāham kammam vadāmi, ‘I declare intention as action’). Thus, our actions, be they physical, verbal or mental, are based on our minds headed by intention.
Since crude actions can come only from crude minds, to tame the crude minds and replace them with the good ones is the primary goal of the Buddha’s Taming System. Needless to say, the prime focus of the Buddha’s discourses delivered non-stop for 45 years in 600 BC is on the affairs of the mind.
The psychological database left in Pāli language by the Buddha and his disciples is huge and impromptu. The need for making this raw database stepwise and systematic has lured the author into the world of Pāli scholarship as the password to that ancient Cosmic vault. And, to fulfill the above need, there is no better way than presenting those impromptu data in the format of a science textbook. Thus, I have rearranged and reworked the Buddha’s psychological teachings into a comprehensive modern textbook in original English language. That is how Bodhiology came about.
In elucidating the Buddhist concepts of mental sphere, Bodhiology uses real life scenarios and situations found in the modern western nations.
I wrote Bodhiology in the beginning of 1993 and finished it in 1996. As I published it in 2013, there was a time lapse of more than 16 years. During the past 16 years, I have tested Bodhiology by reading and re-reading many times to ascertain if it should be released to the public. Each time I read Bodhiology, I felt refresh and renewed. After each reading of Bodhiology, I emerged anew as though I was reborn without a physical death.
So, I thought, there may be people who are ready for radical transformation of their minds or even those who simply want to experience the un-routine states of mind harmlessly. For such people, Bodhiology has been released.
Suan Lu Zaw