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S I ELF AND DENTITY IN M P ODERN SYCHOLOGY I T AND NDIAN HOUGHT PATH IN PSYCHOLOGY PublishedinCooperationwithPublicationsforthe AdvancementofTheoryandHistory in Psychology(PATH) Series Editors: David Bakan, York University John Broughton, Teachers College, Columbia University Robert W. Rieber, John Jay College, CUNY, and Columbia University Howard Gruber, University of Geneva COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY A Case Study of Understanding David Leiser and Christiane Gillièron A CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: Interpretation of the Personal World Edmund V. Sullivan CRITICAL THEORIES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT Edited by John M. Broughton CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations Carl Ratner DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES TO THE SELF Edited by Benjamin Lee and Gil G. Noam FRANTZFANON AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPPRESSION Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY: Concepts and Criticisms Edited by Joseph R. Royce and Leendert P. Mos MANUFACTURING SOCIAL DISTRESS: Psychopathy in Everyday Life Robert W. Rieber THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF ETHNONATIONALlSM Dusan Kecmanovic PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORIES OF THE SELF Edited by Benjamin Lee SELF AND IDENTITY IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY AND INDIAN THOUGHT Anand C. Paranjpe THEORETICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Meeting of East and West Anand C. Paranjpe WILHELMWUNDT AND THE MAKING OF A SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY Edited by R. W. Rieher S I ELFAND DENTITY IN M P ODERN SYCHOLOGY I T AND NDIAN HOUGHT ANANDC. PARANJPE Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS New York / Boston / Dordrecht / London / Moscow eBook ISBN: 0-306-47151-5 Print ISBN: 0-306-45844-6 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow Print ©2000 Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers New York All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://ebooks.kluweronline.com To the memory of my revered guru, the late Shri B. R. Ambekar; and to my most respected teacher, the late Professor Erik H. Erikson; great healers who stimulated my thinking about self and identity in their own different ways. P REFACE Some of the common questions that confront all of us are: What does it mean to be a human being? What makes us good and happy persons? And how can we attain happiness, or the highest possible good in life? These are common and yet profound questions that have been answered differently in different societies at different times. In the process of growing up within a specific cultural milieu, we tend to seek answers to deeply personal questions such as “Who am I?” or “What is the best that can happen to me?” in the light of accumulated wisdom of our forebears. As the 20th century draws to a close, the world is rapidly getting smaller, and many of us get exposed to the legacies of several cultures from around the world. The increasing exposure to varied cultures is both an opportunity and a challenge. Born in India during the colonial days, I was exposed to a highly Anglicized educational system and a completely Eurocentric curriculum. The colonial mold of the Indian educational system has persisted throughout the five decades of the postcolonial era. As a student of philosophy in the rnid-1950s, I read such texts as Plato’s Republic, took courses in metaphysics and ethics shaped by thinkers of the European Enlightment, and earned my Bachelor’s degree with a philosophy major without having to learn a single concept of Indian philosophy. Graduate training in psychology in an Indian university in the early 1960s also bore a completely Anglo-American mold, such that the transition to research and teach- ing in a North American system was easy. Nevertheless, growing up in India inevitably involved exposure to the indigenous intellectual and cultural tradition. _ My father introduced me to the Bhagavad-Gita, and the nationalistic movement brought home the relevance of traditional Indian ways of life, philosophy, and ideals. The dual cultural heritage of Europe and India became a matter of personal concern and a constant battle when, as an immigrant to Canada, a sense of Indian identity continued to grow in proportion to the constant pressures for assimilation into the Western way of life. This volume is a product of an attempt to make sense of the dual cultural legacy of Europe and India. Part of the exposure to Western models in psychology was an opportunity to vii viii PREFACE learn Western theories of human development, first through books while in India and then under the tutelage of the late Professor Erik Erikson at Harvard Univer- sity. After several years of studying and teaching Western theories of personality and developmental psychology, it began to dawn on me that lessons learned from the Indian tradition were in some ways very similar -and yet in other ways profoundly different-from their Western counterparts. The Erikson approach, true to its roots in psychoanalysis and the academic milieu, focused on patholog- ical, as well as normal, ways in which individuals cope with inner and outer changes throughout the life span. Erikson speculated on what remains the same and is untouched by constant flux in a person’s passage through the life cycle; he even hinted at the existential significance of the quest for the principle of sameness underlying the continual revision in one’s sense of identity. However, in Erikson’s work, as in contemporary psychology at large, the deeply philosophical and existential issues about self and identity get routinely excluded as unsuitable to the scientific and academic sphere to which psychology is inextricably bound. In my view, such restriction of the scope of inquiry into the nature of selfhood is an incidental product of the historical and cultural background of contemporary psychology. Such restriction did not apply to self-knowledge as pursued in the Indian tradition and there is no reason to regard such a conventional disciplinary limitation as either necessary or legitimate. Moreover, the philosophical and spiritual aspects of psychological thinking in the Indian tradition complement contemporary psychological thinking and offset some of its serious shortcomings. Self and identity remain central topics of inquiry in several related disciplines today: philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, along with psychology. The work presented in this volume is allied to, and yet different from, some of the recent publications in this broad field of studies. Consistent with the readership of this literature, which is spread across various disciplines, I have tried to address this book to an interdisciplinary audience. I also presume an international audience spread across the English-speaking world in the East as well as the West. In terms of its scholarly and historical approach, this book resembles Charles Taylor’s Sources of Self (Harvard University Press, 1989). In dealing with the concepts of person and identity, and in viewing them from philosophical and psychological angles, it resembles Harré’s Personal Being (Blackwell, 1983). However, unlike these works, which are framed almost exclusively within the Western cultural conceptual frameworks, the present work tries to integrate West- ern and Eastern perspectives. In this regard, it strikes a chord with Alan Roland’s In Search of Self in India and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1988), but it does not adopt his clinical approach. Like Steven Collins’s Selfless Persons (Cambridge University Press, 1982), it delves into Eastern traditions but deals with psychological issues more than philosophical ones. It shares some of the spiritual and transpersonal concerns of Eastern traditions that such authors as Alan Watts and Ken Wilber address, but it tries to connect more directly and critically with PREFACE ix classical Sanskrit texts and their scholarly interpretations. Like David Loy’s Nonduality (Yale University Press, 1988) and Working Emptiness by Newman Glass (Scholars Press, 1995), this book considers the practice of meditation within the context of postmodern thought, but unlike them it focuses on Advaita Vedantic, rather than Buddhist, tradition. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been over 15 years since I prepared the first outline of this book. As could be expected, the project has evolved well beyond the contours that I had envisioned at the beginning. This work would not have seen the light of the day without the facilities provided by Simon Fraser University. The University’s sabbatical leave policy allowed me to spend almost 2 years of full-time work on this project at different stages. In 1986, when this project was in its early stages, I was invited to give a series of lectures at the Allahabad University in India. I wish to thank Radhakrishna Naidu, Janak Pandey, R. C. Tripathi, Ajit Dalal, and other friends from Allahabad for giving me valuable opportunities to discuss various ideas. I am very grateful to Krishna S. and Mrs. Leela Arjunwadkar and Ashok Kelkar for guiding me in the right direction and for providing inspiration and encouragement year after year. Teaching a senior undergraduate seminar in personality at Simon Fraser University gave me an opportunity to discuss a variety of ideas about the self, identity, self-actualization, and self-realization in the classroom. A similar oppor- tunity was provided by a course on self and society that I taught as part of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at SFU. Numerous students in these classes helped me in articulating my own ideas and often made interesting comments. Although I cannot list the many members of the classes, I wish to thank them all. I must also thank my friends from the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists (WCTP) group, who provided intellectual stimulation and encouragement at our annual meetings in beautiful Banff. I have particularly benefitted from my dis- cussions with Vaden House, Don Kuiken, Marvin Macdonald, Tim Rogers, and Hank Stam of the WCTP group. I also wish to express my gratitude to a number of colleagues and students at Simon Fraser University who read portions of the manuscript at various stages of its preparation and gave many useful comments and suggestions: Bruce Alex- ander, Ted Altar, Gira Bhatt, John Bogardus, Tirthankar Bose, Jeremy Carpen- dale, Michael Coles, Steve Cunningham, Karen Jackson, James Marcia, Leslie Morgan, Ken Porter, Wyn Roberts, and Randy Tonks. Several friends from India and North America also read one or several chapters and made numerous sugges- tions: John Broughton, Michael Chandler, Ashok Gangadean, Anthony Green- wald, David Ho, Uday Jain, Don Kuiken, Mahesh Mehta, Carl Ratner, Joseph x PREFACE Rychlak, John Shotter, S. R. Talghatti, Gaya Charan Tripathi, and Mukul Vyas. My most special thanks are due to Karl Potter, Lolita Wilson, Ashok Kelkar, and Nalinee Chapekar for taking the time and trouble to carefully read in detail almost the entire manuscript and for helping improve it in numerous ways. Indeed, I have no adequate words to appreciate their help. I am grateful to Lolita Wilson for compiling the index for this book. I am also very grateful to my friend Robert W. Rieber for encouraging me to continue scholarly work and for giving invaluable help in getting my work published in the PATH series. Thanks also to Joan Wolfe for helping solve various problems in word processing. Finally, I must publicly appreciate the patience and unflinching support of my wife Meena throughout this and many other projects. Anand C. Paranjpe P T RONUNCIATION AND RANSLITERATION S T OF ANSKRIT ERMS The transliteration of Sanskrit terms used in this book follows the most commonly usedformat.Whatfollowsisageneralguide,ratherthanastrictphoneticaccount, of Sanskritterms transliterated inRoman equivalents. The vowels are transliterated and pronounced as follows: a as u in cut e as ayin say _ a as a in far ai somewhat like ai in aisle i as i in fit o as o in go _ i as eein see ou as ouin out . . u as uin put m or n nasalizes the preceding vowel r. somewhat like rin bird h. sound like hwith a sharp exhalation of air The consonants are generally similar to English with a few exceptions. There is a series of “alviolars” (t, th, d, dh, n) pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the gum ridge, and a series of retroflex sounds (t. t.h, d., d.h, n., l.) by curling the tongue backward. The s is a similar retroflex. The c sounds like chin chair, j as injin jug, s'likeshin shirt, ñ like its equivalent in Spanish señor, and n. like nin king. The aspirates (kh, gh, ch, jh, t.h, d.h, th, dh, ph, and bh) are pronounced with a clearly audible breath following the consonant, for example t.h as in anthill, and d.h as in bald-head. A note of citation of Sanskrit sources: Sanskrit sources cited in the text are indicated by the name of the author followed by the numbers (in parenthesis) of chapter, section, and verse where applicable. The dates of numerous texts of the Indian tradition are not known, or known only approximately, and as such their original dates of publication are not given. xi

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East meets West in this fascinating exploration of conceptions of personal identity in Indian philosophy and modern Euro-American psychology. Author Anand Paranjpe considers these two distinct traditions with regard to historical, disciplinary, and cultural `gaps' in the study of the self, and in th
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