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SF: Well, maybe as kind of an expansion of that you could just talk a little bit about Morita therapy and Naikan therapy as kinda sort of based on Buddhist...

RI: Yeah, I know Morita and Naikan therapies have gained some popularity here. I think a lot of it's due to this work of David Reynolds who wrote his doctoral dissertation on that, and he's quite a prolific writer and started a institute. I think they're out on the East Coast, and they generate a lot of material. So, and it seems to add legitimacy to say they're Buddhist-based. And there are certain characteristics there that do come from Buddhist practice, such as the meditation and the introspection and all that. And it's said that Morita is tied to Zen Buddhism and Naikan to JoudoShin Buddhism. There's, there's a lot of similarity but again, Buddhist, Buddhism is not a therapy. All these therapies are initiated when someone comes in with a problem. Okay, so they're supposed to fix the person to become functional and normal and even Naikan and Morita. Whereas Buddhism is a way of life that is more preventative than curative. That if one adopts a Buddhist attitude, then one still has problems, but -- it's like a duck with water on the back, the water slides off. It still gets wet, but the water doesn't adhere to the feathers. And Buddhism plays that role, that we can go through the most difficult challenges in our life, not run away from them because we're afraid of being hurt, but to go through them and accept the pain or the hurt and then be able to move on from there. And I think this is the main contribution. It's much bigger than anything psychology even attempts to address. And so hopefully this kind of perspective will be a big part of my work in clarifying for myself also this interface more clearly, but not allowing the American or Western kind of colonialist mentality to reduce Buddhism to just a technique. And there's dollar signs all over it. So that's why it's become such a point of contention is because people want to repackage it and sell it. If you go to any Barnes and Noble or bookstore, and you see it all. Something, Zen something or Buddhist something and application, and people buy and re-buy those books and think it's the real thing, but it's not.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.