Title:
Zen and Behavior Analysis
Abstract
Zen and behavior analysis share several characteristics that serve as springboards for analyzing how Enlightenment and Samadhi could result from known behavioral processes. The affects of meditation and koan study on verbal behavior are considered, and the concept of stimulus singularity is introduced to account for enigmatic descriptions of Zen practice’s outcomes. It is argued that statements within Zen’s frame of reference are automatically meaningless because meaning is a non-verbal context created by Zen techniques. Therefore Zen can be studied via the methods Zen masters have used for millennia but not explained in any conventional sense. This raises the question of how a science of behavior is to study a repertoire that by definition allows no verbal distinctions.
Introduction
If Shakespeare had been a Zen Buddhist, Hamlet's famous options could have been "To be or not to be or neither". How is such a statement to be understood? A Zen monk might say that Hamlet's first two options exemplify the illusory distinctions cultures regularly transmit, but adding the or neither shows that Hamlet has moved beyond the verbally framed normal-life worldview and is following the Dharma, possibly to Enlightenment. A behavior analyst might argue that understanding Hamlet’s statement requires a functional analysis of the conditions under which it was learned and used. Juxtaposing these two reactions creates the issues explored here: Is there a bridge between behavior analysis and Zen? Would a behavior analysis of Zen contribute to either area? I will argue the affirmative for both and especially the second. The unique repertoire called Enlightenment has been created for 2500 years, and if Zen Enlightenment results from behavioral processes, behavior analysis must apply. Unlike most other analyses of Eastern philosophy (Jung , 1959; Rosen & Crouse, 2000), this one will not follow a "their term X=our term Y" formula. The goal is not to create a reductionist or operationalist thesaurus but rather to discover what grows in the estuary made by Zen and behavior analysis.
Whether behavior analysts find these issues interesting or not, one thing is certain--mentalism is uniquely ill-suited for dealing with Zen’s extreme parsimony. To step back from agency accounts (Vargas, 1996) and explanations "that appeal to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms" (Skinner, 1950, p. 193) is to step toward Zen. Just as importantly, behavior analysis and Zen preserve no subject-object distinction. When contingencies are the units of analysis, the individual is part of a larger context--not the focus and not the epistemological starting point. So Zen’s central notion of the "individual-inseparable-from-the-world" is consistent with behavior analysis and evolutionary biology. In addition, Zen matured in China where a practical emphasis on techniques and outcomes whittled away the mysticism from its Indian origins, a process similar to behaviorism’s role in psychology. This is not to suggest that, given time, Zen would become behavior analysis, or behavior analysis, Zen. But it does illustrate how they share at least some common ground that is the starting point of this analysis.
Zen Practice and Behavior Analysis
Probably the easiest way to explore those commonalities is to follow a beginner entering Zen practice. The results of such training, though actually a continuum, will be divided into stages for purposes of exposition.
Stage 1: Before Zen
As children acquire verbal behavior, they develop discriminative repertoires, stimulus equivalence classes, establishing operations, etc. that the verbal community assembles into a collection of paradigms we call a worldview. So the kinds of things there are (mental, physical, spiritual, etc.), their properties (spatial, temporal, etc.), and the kinds of relationships that can exist between them (e.g., cause-effect, correlation, metaphorical, etc.) are culturally given. A child’s reality is largely defined by his consistent use of and response correspondence with these culturally shared paradigms that are so generally accepted they often are taken as given in some basic, possibly genetic, sense (e.g., Kant’s categories of understanding (Humphrey, 1992, Russell, 1945) and Chomsky’s (1968) deep structure. How such paradigms can affect perception is an issue often dealt with as discriminative stimulus control. For example, a musician’s ear training and a painter’s instruction in texture and composition bring behavior under the control of stimuli that were always present. So just as a word’s meaning can vary across verbal communities (e.g., slang), so can the discrimination training that affects our perceptions. Indeed, Skinner (1976) held that the study of private events is largely the study of verbal behavior within a given community.
Zen beginners bring their cultural training to the Master and often expect to get more of the same--or at least explanations that fit within their current worldviews. That doesn't happen. A famous anecdote in the Zen literature relates how a new monk was invited to tea with his Master, a high honor. The Master poured tea into the monk's cup until it overflowed and then continued pouring even as tea flowed onto the table and floor. The shocked and confused monk backed away and looked at the Master who said "You’re like this cup of tea, you come to me overflowing. You must empty yourself before I can teach you."
Here, "empty" means to eliminate the affect the individual’s verbal history has on private and public responses. This is a daunting task because this affect is so fluent the Zen neophytes can’t stop it. They must be taught how to peel verbal behavior way from the rest of their repertoires, undoing stimulus control established and nurtured since infancy. This is the central task of initial Zen training.
The distinction between Zen and verbally-influenced public and private events, especially those affected by commonly held cultural paradigms, does not mean that Zen practitioners are anti-intellectual as some have charged (Bronowski, 1973). Quite the contrary, they do not strive to destroy or dismantle one’s normal-life worldview. Instead, they apply techniques to it that develop a complementary, verbally unmediated repertoire discussed later.
Stage II: Becoming Quiet
Zen instruction typically begins with meditation training in the lotus position or an approximation of it. Walking meditation is interspersed between sitting meditation. A Zendo, where meditation occurs, is usually very plain, often with wooden floors and walls of a uniform, typically white, color. Rituals are observed in varying degrees over Zendos, but during meditation, no talking occurs. Individuals meditate daily for at least 20-40 minutes, although during sesshins, 15-16 hours per day for several days or even weeks is common (see Enomiya-Lassalle, (1987) for more on meditation techniques.)
Beginners often find meditation fraught with disorganized thinking that jumps between topics. Dealing with this involves a balancing act. Zen instruction clearly indicates that verbal behavior should diminish during meditation, but that goal should be accomplished with minimally intrusive techniques. For example, monks are taught to "walk their attention back to being quiet", counting breadths in cycles of 10, and saying "No" when attention drifts. One must avoid creating a verbal editor that simply exchanges one verbal intrusion for another. The worst-case scenario is becoming so upset with a lack of control over verbal behavior that establishing operations like anger and ruminations spiral into ever greater disruptions. So verbal tactics are used to control verbal behavior but can themselves become interference unless precisely applied. Anyone who has used prompts can see the parallels here.
Besides the techniques described above (counting breaths, saying "no", and walking one's attention back) are:
(a) Candle meditation--viewing a lit candle while sitting.
(b) Using a feedback system where, for example, one imagines a marker moving from the side to the top of one's head as verbal behavior decreases.
(c) Being struck with the Zen Master's stick (which is also used more benevolently to prompt correct posture, awaken a sleeping monk, etc.)
Not all Zen Masters strike students and such tactics may seem extreme but in some cases it clearly works and students will occasionally request a strike when their meditation is undisciplined. The establishing operation problem was described above and applies here, too. Clinical behavior therapists long ago identified the problems with negative ruminations (Ellis, 1962; Emed, 1998; Kwee & Ellis, 1998; Lazarus, 1971) and recently some cognitive behavior therapists advocated Zen tactics as a way to overcome these and related problems (Gillani, Noor, & Smith, 2001). Zen Masters likewise noted the problems with aversive control and generally prefer the slower, but more positive, tactics.
Zen's teachings not related to meditation and Enlightenment per se stress how marvelous the world is—hence the importance of an environmentally unintrusive lifestyle with acceptance and gentle care of all living things (Katagiri, 1998; Young-Eisendrath & Martin, 1997). Although literally altruistic, this view also advances in several ways one’s preparation for Enlightenment. First, a central theme in Zen is that the world is marvelous far beyond what our paradigms can suggest. So appreciating that world in its fullness requires extending our knowledge in a way paradigms cannot. Second, practices necessary for achieving Enlightenment (e.g., meditation and the strict discipline of Zen monasteries) are more likely to occur as stimuli associated with such practices (e.g., talking about it, honoring those who achieve Enlightenment, etc.) become increasingly reinforcing. This is similar to how scientific communities assimilate young, unrecognized researchers. Third, when Zen practices begin to yield results, the private events that accompany them can be frightening. Sometimes described as "detached" or "bright", they can be unnerving because they are very unlike those from normal-life. So the discipline Zen requires and the emotional accompaniments of breaking down normal-life paradigms may be more palatable if interpreted as necessary for becoming not just an observer of, but rather continuous with, a marvelous world. This tactic is like advertising: Individuals seek vicariously established reinforcers they have never had direct contact with.
Meditation and Stimulus Control
Skinner (1976) described Zen’s practices as "extracting the essentials" i.e., attenuated stimulus control that allows one’s personal history to exert itself: "This same principle underlies the practice of Zen, in which the archer, for example, learns to minimize the particular features of a single instance…the archer [is] said to 'transcend' the immediate situation; they [sic] become 'detached' from it" (pp.196-197). The foregoing discussion of meditation, though, suggests that this account cannot be complete. Zen meditation does not minimize all features of immediate situations, it attenuates and eventually eliminates a class of controls--verbal behavior. "When Tokusan was asked, ‘What is the most remarkable thing in Zen?’ he answered ‘There are no words or phrases in Zen.’" (Suzuki, 1971, p.39). Skinner neither mentions nor suggests that altering verbal behavior is a key tactic in establishing Zen’s stimulus control--though his discussion clearly does not rule this out, either. Individuals functioning with reduced stimulus control are often handicapped (e.g., learning or developmentally disabled), but Zen is a sharp stimulus control that is complete in its own way, a way I will try to make clear as this discussion progresses.
Verbal stimulus control during meditation can be attenuated by concentrating on a single word or image (e.g., mantras), but some Zen teachers, usually those in the Rinzai sect, take this a step further and give unsolvable meditative themes. For example, one may be asked to meditate on "All things return to the One; where does the One return?" Clearly there's no logical answer, so verbal behavior is weakened via extinction--its use without resolving the question. Weakening normal-life verbal behavior may result in resurgence with novel responding increasingly influenced by Zen training. Koans, logically impossible problems considered later, have this same function and more. The use of mantras probably originated in India where they are also called "dharani" which in English means "spell" in the sense of transfixing someone on a single point--a condition some Zen Buddhists call "stationary". In Zen, this stationary responding does not denote weakened stimulus control, as with habituation, for example, but rather verbally unmediated attention. This does not imply that one is not perceiving or is oblivious to one’s surroundings. Quite the contrary, perception in this state is very clear but undifferentiated in the sense that no tacting occurs.
Meditation and Consequences
The Premack Principle may account for the fluctuating verbal activity during a beginner’s meditation. For example, if low rate verbal activity is a reinforcer and follows higher rate activity, it may adventitiously create cycles. If so, a feedback procedure that mildly punishes high rates (e.g., the "leading attention back" technique) may help suppress unwanted verbal intruders.
Another tactic is the Zen technique of using "No". Individuals just beginning or having difficulty with verbal intrusions are sometimes coached to subvocally say "No", thus leading attention back from fantasy and distractions to unmediated (or less mediated) sitting. This "No" technique is not for stopping ideation, feelings, etc. It is for eliminating verbal mediation that draws attention away from observing the world "as it is": "The basic form of abuse of No is to interpret and practice it in a negative way, using it to make the mind blank and shut out reality instead of using it to make the mind clear and open to reality" (Cleary, 1997, p. 5). In behavior analytic terms, Zen techniques are designed to move an individual from verbal, especially conceptual, responding to verbally-free contingency-shaped behavior.
Describing Zen
Requests to describe Zen are resisted because of a catch-22: Meditative practices are designed to minimize the effects of verbal behavior, the very medium one is being asked to use when describing the outcomes of such practices. Any answer consisting of rule-governed behavior or language games would take one farther from what one seeks, a point made by Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhists (Shibles, 1969). No answer in the conventional sense can be an answer; the only answer is the Zen technique’s effect, not the effect’s description. Zen Masters bring about what the questioner would have them merely describe. This is why Buddhists say that Zen’s answers are so clear and simple that they are missed: The questioner seeks a verbal reply, but the Master provides the reply’s context. A Zen Buddhist might say that the goal is to hear the sound, not the echo.
Stage 3: Establishing and Discriminating a Zen Repertoire
As the verbally-unmediated meditative repertoire develops, it begins to generalize and be discriminated from normal-life, verbally-mediated behavior. This contrast is often metaphorically described as either a peaceful backdrop (possibly a conditioned establishing operation) for the bustle of everyday activities, or as a body of water where the surface can be rough yet the depths serenely calm and unaffected. Since English has few terms for this condition, descriptions of it are often metaphorical.
When this calm background becomes increasingly prevalent and functionally independent of changes in the stream of contingencies affecting the rest of one's repertoire, moments of sustained perceptual lucidity occur that lack distinctions commonly imposed by one's verbal repertoire. In Zen this is called "Samadhi", which implies a unification with the world. A literal translation is a "state of one-pointedness", of intense concentration where, if words functioned as response mediators, they would degrade the stimulus control. This one-pointedness concentration should not be confused with Enlightenment, which penetrates all parts of one's repertoire.1
Of special interest to behavior analysts is that first occurrences of Samadhi usually accompany fluent responses:
Such a phenomenon is probably not unique to Eastern cultures. For example, mountain men described a heightened perceptual experience they called the shining times. Like Zen monks, their lifestyle required developing highly fluent behaviors over long periods of time in settings devoid of conventional verbal communities. The mountains imposed a monastic lifestyle that may have produced some of the Zen repertoire. My Samadhi typically occur with a particular fluent behavior, bicycling. I have been an avid bicyclist for over 25 years, but Samadhi did not occur until I was in the midst of an intense cross-country trip from Wisconsin to deep in the Colorado Rockies. The sheer simplicity and repetition of pedaling and shifting gears over weeks created fluent responses requiring no verbal mediation for long periods of time. The number and duration of Samadhi rose following my return to Wisconsin where my time spent meditating increased. Similar conditions are fostered in Zendos where tasks such as raking stones in Japanese gardens, making pottery, and practicing archery, swordsmanship, meditation practices, and the tea ceremony are done repeatedly over years within the narrowly defined parameters of centuries-old rituals. So from a behavioral point of view, Samadhi can result from this sequence of events:
1. Meditation reduces rates, and possibly negative accompaniments of, verbal behavior. This creates a constant, relaxed, verbally-unmediated repertoire.
occur simultaneously (yielding the backdrop and ocean metaphors).
repertoire from normal life is exceptionally fluent, therefore requiring few or no verbal mediators.
Samadhi is far more sustained than the "aha" experience produced by contingency adduction (Epstein, 1993; Epstein, Kirschmit, Lanza, & Rubin, 1984). In my case, 20 to 40 seconds is common, but Zen monks often report far longer durations (up to several hours) and the ability to control its occurrence. This may partially account for Zen’s unique contributions to haiku literature, oriental gardens, martial arts, minimalist paintings, etc. (Suzuki, 1959).
Can this Zen repertoire be described literally? Distinctions drawn from normal-life paradigms would be meaningless because they are the barriers to a Zen repertoire and what Zen techniques eliminate. A Zen repertoire appears to be the antithesis of our normal-life point of view, but even that is wrong because "antithesis" implies an opposite, and such distinctions are lost when creating the Zen repertoire. It is not a repertoire one can juxtapose to anything because juxtaposing and comparing are not part of it. As Zen Buddhists repeatedly comment, all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in and is meaningless within that repertoire. Consequently, one does not simply change points of view in the Zen repertoire because there's no "one" and no "point of view", there's not even a "no" or negation because that implies affirmation and such polarities are absent. But we have to start somewhere, just as we do when introducing someone to behavior analysis.
A starting point advanced here is that Zen is an equivalence class of all things—a stimulus singularity: No distinctions are possible because all are equivalent--hence "one". A verbal repertoire's distinctions therefore cannot be applied in any meaningful way (an outcome of koans discussed below), and establishing a stimulus equivalence singularity would require long periods of verbal-less activity (an outcome of meditation). Once established, equivalence classes devoid of verbal distinctions could be joined into an equivalence singularity by the usual processes (e.g., contingency adduction, transitivity, and transformational functions (Dougher, Perkins, Greenway, Koons, & Chiasson, 2002). That such processes are critical, and not their private accompaniments, accounts for why Zen Masters warn monks to ignore the experiential sideshows resulting from Zen practice--they do not lead to Zen for the same reasons they do not lead to behavior analysis.
Koan Study
Though not typically discussed in Zen literature, the Eastern etymology of "nature" and "koan" may make Zen more accessible to Westerners. "Nature", in Japanese, is written with two kanji symbols--one means "self" and the other means "being". This can be translated as meaning "things exist in themselves"--they are their own existences, totally independent of paradigms we impose on them. Zen, we are told, gets us to things in themselves i.e., independent of distinctions we bring. In a sense, Zen is ancient, Eastern science.
"Koan" means "where the truth is". They are often used in what's called the "transmission of Dharma", which can be roughly translated as establishing prerequisites for Enlightenment or bringing about small Enlightenment episodes (sometimes called "little Satori). Speaking behavior analytically, this transmission involves (a) continuing the development of a Zen repertoire, (b) using koans as transitivity tests to measure the development of that repertoire, and (c) using koans as contexts for producing generativity or contingency adduction. These points may be illustrated with 3 of the Mumonkan’s 48 koans that Zen Masters have used for centuries.
Koan 1: Zhaozhou's dog. A monk asked "Does even a dog have the Buddha-nature?" Zhaozhou answered "No".
A generally accepted interpretation of this koan is that every Buddhist is taught early on that all sentient life has the Buddha-nature and that fact was well known by the monk asking this question. Zhaozhou, the Zen Master, replied "No" not to the question, which from the Zen point of view was meaningless because its answer within a normal-life framework was obvious, but because the question is an example of such normal-life reasoning and therefore has no place in Zen. So this "No" was not a response to the question, it was an admonition to stop the entire edifice of normal-life, relativistic reasoning. The monk asked the question as if from the point of view of normal-life logic, Zhaozhou answered from the point of view of a Zen Master.
An untrained observer may well have answered the question "Yes" and pointed the monk to the relevant teaching, thus perpetuating the monk's irrelevant discussion. That the monk asking the question already knew this basic point indicates that he was testing the Master, a common practice in Zen exchanges, a sort of koan duel.
So in summary, this koan is about the question of whether Enlightenment can be found via everyday normal-life reasoning and discussion. Zhaozhou's answer is "No"—the special "No" that quells an uncontrolled flow of private events during meditation. To stop such thoughts is a step toward cessation of "The whole worldview, one's personal idea of reality is suspended." (Cleary, 1997, p.5). This is prerequisite to Enlightenment but should not be confused with opting for ignorance or ignoring the world. Koan two deals with that mistake.
Koan 2:Wild fox. Zhaozhou's Dog emphasizes the need to separate behavior from the organization imposed by language (logical, culturally-bound distinctions), but the wild fox deals with cause and effect--specifically, that Zhaozhou’s "No" does not negate cause-effect observations. A summary of this relatively long koan is that a Zen monk asked Master Baizhang whether Enlightened persons are subject to causality. The Master replied "They are not blind to cause and effect". This immediately enlightened the monk.
Zen commentators often indicate that this koan juxtaposes normal-life and Zen i.e., that cause and effect, actually relationships in general, can be simultaneously held in two ways. On the one hand is the normal-life interpretation like Master Gao Feng Miao’s who "denies the presumption that it is possible to attain real liberation by denying causality, and [he denies also] the assumption that recognition of causality means loss of freedom" (Cleary, 1997, p.15). This view is very close to Skinner’s explanatory fictions (Baum, 1994, Skinner, 1969) because it rejects causality that includes "limitations psychologically imposed by fixation on fabricated causal chains [italics added]" (Cleary, 1997, p.14).
On the other hand, cause and effect from a Zen point of view is not conceptual: "Zen practice does not exempt; it frees us to see what is really happening" (Cleary, 1997, p.12). Within this framework, Zen is a direct conduit to cause-effect relationships, a conduit devoid of pre-cast, verbally-mediated paradigms affecting what is sensed. So cause and effect within Zen is fundamental to paradigms for interpreting the world [we are not blind to causality] but simultaneously is not blinding us to verbally-unmediated perceptions of, and interactions with, that world, either. This koan, like many, requires a Zen monk to hold normal-life and Zen worldviews concurrently, a skill necessary for stage 4.
A related Zen lesson is "Zhaozhou’s shoes". Zhaozhou visited a Master who posed a question as if expecting a logical reply. Zhaozhou put his shoes on his head and walked out of the room. A common interpretation of this story is that Zhaozhou illustrated how a tool (shoes/words) for achieving our ends (exceeding the limits of verbally-mediated behavior) is using us, and thereby restricting us, to only those ends it can achieve.
Koan 3: One finger. Zen Master Judi's answer for all questions was to point his index finger upward. A servant boy imitated this when asked what his Master taught. Judi learned of this exchange, cut off the boy's finger, and, as the child ran away, called the child's name and raised an index finger. The child was immediately Enlightened.
Explanations of this koan often refer to how a finger pointing to the moon should not be mistaken for the moon itself, emphasizing again the distinction between things and representations. The child had to lose the symbolic representation for Zen before a paradigm-free Zen repertoire could develop.
How koans work. If Zen koans contribute to creating a repertoire where verbal behavior’s effects are minimized or suspended, probably several behavioral principles dovetail to produce this result. Extinction and related processes would occur following years of work on a koan with no logical answer in the conventional sense. At the start of koan study, Zen monks are often told that they will feel as if they have swallowed a molten pellet that will burn until resolved. Monks often cannot sleep or eat and some are driven to such extremes that their Zen Masters changed their koans. This probably reflects the strength of verbal repertoires whose use is encouraged throughout life and is left to operate unrestrained by instruction on how to control its affects on the rest of our behavior. Koans target those affects by posing questions normal-life worldviews cannot solve. The resulting extinction and resurgence could generate novel behavior that is consistent with Zen teachings and gains control as normal-life solutions are exhausted. When changing a repertoire as pervasive and fluent as verbal behavior, the extremes needed for resurgence would require huge numbers of unreinforced responses. To arrive at a problem-solving repertoire where the individual develops a verbal-less solution could indeed take years--probably decades--of work, which is what commonly occurs.
In his research on creativity, Epstein (1993) described the use of inconsistent antecedents to occasion creative and insightful behavior (e.g., a stoplight with red and green lights lit simultaneously). Zen is laden with such stimulus control: You are to answer koans, but in ways that do not follow conventional logic; a question is posed, but the answer cannot be given in the verbal medium of the question; two individuals give the same answer to the same koan, but only one is correct.
In summary, koans lead not to answers in any normal life sense, but rather to an inexpressible behavioral change. To understand a koan is to undergo the effects it produces on our verbal behavior. Koans are not designed to be interpreted, they are not antecedents occasioning more verbal behavior. They are instead a mechanism for unraveling verbal behavior’s effects on the rest of what we do.
Tacts may be critical here. For example, children are taught many discriminations, including "I", that range from those we can’t overtly identify to "obvious" conventions transmitted culturally. To escape such distinctions requires breaking them down. In short, Zhaozhou’s shoes are on our heads--verbal behavior is no longer used to make worldviews, it is the maker of worldviews. To be affected by the larger context that Zen says we can know directly, and behavior analysis assumes everything is a subset of, requires severing the verbal ties that bind us to the normal-life limits defining what we know. That's why koans cannot be explained with normal-life verbal repertoires founded on the distinctions Zen is designed to counter. As Zen Buddhists note, "According to Zen teachings, there is really no way to comprehend koans except through themselves" (Cleary, 1997, p. XVI).
Stage 4: Enlightenment--Merging Two Repertoires
Despite the decades of work and personal anguish required to develop a Zen repertoire, it is not enough for Enlightenment. That, according to the Zen literature, involves unifying the Zen and normal-life repertoires into a third called the "Middle Way". So the confluence of those repertoires is the road to Enlightenment.
That road may be paved with stimulus equivalence and related phenomena. If Zen practices create a large, verbally-unmediated stimulus equivalence class whose members are merged within a single, "absolute", class (Nirvana), then combining such relations with normal-life stimulus equivalence sets could account for descriptions of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment life. For example, consider "All things have an eternal property that has always been there, but out of sight until entering Enlightenment." Under a stimulus equivalence interpretation, elements of the Zen equivalence class lack normal-life distinctions and are, in that sense, absolute and unmediated. A common Zen metaphor describing this relationship between Zen and normal-life repertoires is the immovable axel that allows a wheel to turn. As Wumen wrote in the 13th century, "The inclusion of relative reality within absolute reality; whatever relative reality may be, or however it may be described, it is enveloped and pervaded by absolute reality" (Cleary, 1997, p. 188). Wumen seems to be suggesting that relative reality is the more obscure and difficult to grasp. In the West, to "understand" is to encase the world in a paradigm. In Wumen’s China, the opposite held: The world contained the paradigms, so to grasp the world directly required standing outside the paradigms. This distinction may be part of why Zen is so difficult for Westerners.
Since a mature Zen repertoire has one, or, during early development, a few, stimulus equivalence classes, solving one koan to achieve Enlightenment should give, or closely approximate, the answers to others. Thus, Shibayama (1974) quotes Zen Masters as saying "If you break through one koan, hundreds and thousands of koan have all been penetrated at once" and "It is like cutting a reel of thread: one cut, and all is cut" (p.23). This suggests that all koans have the same function and, in a sense, the same answer--one based on developing and merging normal-life and Zen repertoires.
This stimulus equivalence model could also explain the speed with which Enlightenment commences.2 It is like insight--an immediate, automatic transitivity relationship. In fact, if one thinks about the answer, it is already incorrect because, as Zen Masters point out, it is being approached from the relativistic point of view. So under this behavior analytic interpretation, koans are transitivity tests--assessments of how well developed one's Zen repertoire is and whether it is ready for merging with normal-life behavior. If it is, and Enlightenment occurs, this is still only the first step in a lifetime process. The merging of Zen and normal-life repertoires continues because the normal-life repertoire is constantly changing.
Verbal Behavior, Zen, and Behavior Analysis
Zen poses several problems for studying its verbal behavior. Skinner (1957) emphasized the social component (e.g., audiences, verbal behavior as a socially mediated responding, verbal community’s role in teaching a listener, rule-governed behavior, etc.) This may contribute to why research questions (e.g., Sundberg, 1991) do not address what would happen if normal-life verbal processes were eliminated. Under such conditions, verbally unmediated "free-range" stimulus equivalence relations and referential frames could form and then converge into a stimulus singularity. As noted, this would fit the Zen literature's descriptions of a unity or "oneness" (no distinctions are possible in a singularity), an indescribable point of view (verbal behavior’s distinctions are eliminated), and tremendous despair leading up to Enlightenment (the individual's non-Zen point of view would be irreconcilable with everything previously believed). Yet such irresolvable differences may be exactly what is needed to create the context for the kind of repertoire-merger Zen requires. If these opposites were homogenized via redefinition into paradigms, nothing qualitatively new would emerge. (Instead, we’d simply have more articles about Zen, like this one.) What’s needed is research on verbal behavior commonly called worldviews and discussion on how one can study Zen repertoires that, by definition, are devoid of verbal behavior. Kuhn's (1970) notion of incommensurability, that persons operating within different paradigms literally do not perceive the world in the same way and so may not be able to effectively communicate, can be seen in the extreme within Zen. That may be why Zen Masters communicate so clearly with each other yet their statements baffle those operating from normal-life points of view. Skinner wrote that "Different verbal communities generate different kinds and amounts of consciousness or awareness" (Skinner, 1976, p. 243). This statement’s context is the argument that the study of subjective states is the study of verbal communities' practices. Of course the critical point here is that the verbal history--not consciousness or self-knowledge--is the issue. Zen is especially interesting in this context because it does not build new verbal distinctions via increasingly discriminative contingencies. Instead, it reduces distinctions by reducing verbal behavior’s effects. It puts our verbal community's typical practices into reverse to create a self-consuming anti-language that eventually merges with normal-life verbal behavior to create a third repertoire—what Zen Buddhists call "the Middle Way". This merger salvages the features of each, i.e., Zen Masters can see the whole in each part and perceive unfettered by normal-life influences, and yet retain the option of operating within culturally given (language-based) paradigms.
This analysis also explains what are, at least to us, Zen Masters’ baffling conversations. Members of existing stimulus equivalence classes can be given new functions that are automatically passed throughout an equivalence class (Hayes, Hayes, Soto, and Ono, 1994). For example, conditioned reinforcement and punishment (Dougher, et al., 2002; Greenway, Dougher, & Wulfert, 1996) and respondent functions (Roche & Barnes, 1997), but more importantly for this discussion is research on discriminative stimulus functions such as discrimination itself (deRose, McIlvane, Duke, Galpin, & Stoddard, 1988) and contextual stimulus control (Hayes, Kohlenbreg, & Hayes, 1991). If Zen training reversed these, as meditation, koans, etc. may, then very different relations would result (probably aggregates of previously discriminated stimuli) and, with them, different private events (e.g., a sense of "wholeness", "oneness", etc.) Such histories would create a small pool of individuals who consistently draw distinctions the mainstream culture cannot make. And that is what happens—Zen masters immediately grasp koans whereas those without such backgrounds may take decades to achieve that for just one.
The stimulus singularity model would also shed some light on how Zen deals with the concept of meaning. Clearly, referential models do not fit Zen’s usage, nor do equivalent words i.e., those established with similar histories, nor do operationalist criteria such as meaning as the method of measurement. Instead, Zen poses the problem of expressing meaning without distinctions. This is a function of koans where the stimulus singularity context, or steps toward developing that context, is their meaning i.e., a repertoire that by definition allows no verbal distinctions within it. The creation of such meaning is the behavioral event that is Zen’s core enigma.
So Zen and behavior analysis part company on this issue: In Zen, meaning is communicated by creating indescribable changes in our verbal behavior--the singularity that yields a koan, whereas behavior analysis requires describing and controlling the conditions under which a word is used. This difference is why Zen Buddhists state that Zen is so literal its meaning is missed—meaning is the immediately given paradigm-free context, and the instant description begins, that context is lost. Conversely, behavior analysis, indeed all of science, cannot begin prior to such description and analysis. The Zen and normal-life repertoires are products of histories producing this difference. In behavior analytic terms, Zen is a large and strong contingency-shaped repertoire not just devoid of rule-governed elements, but consisting of a verbal-less equivalence class, what is called here the stimulus singularity.
That concept also raises a question regarding epistemological primacy that I will state as a slightly revised meditative theme given earlier: If knowledge returns to models and words, where do the models and words return? Both behavior analysts and Zen Buddhists may agree that it returns to a larger world that generates verbal behavior, but is not itself affected by verbal behavior in anything like the way normal-life repertoires are. The difference between them is that Zen strives to create an unmediated mirror of that world whereas behavior analysis creates models. In science, verbal behavior is the currency for moving between paradigms and is used to keep them distinct. In Zen, non-verbal practices such as koans and meditation assume that role and are used to create a verbally unmediated stimulus singularity. Zen’s challenge for a science of behavior involves describing the effects of verbal histories designed to eliminate the effects of such histories.
Hamlet’s Question Revisited
Following a monk’s initial Enlightenment, what behavioral processes could operate as verbal repertoires become less controlling during the emergence of Nirvana? The foregoing analysis suggests that stimulus equivalence relationships organize repertoires independent of verbal influences. During Samadhi, verbal behavior is disengaged from other responses concurrent with perception becoming exceedingly clear and immediate. This "present-centeredness" results in forming verbally unmediated stimulus equivalence classes. These could have the private accompaniments described by Zen Masters and yield what is often noted about their public behavior--it is fluent, very sensitive to the environment, and seemingly without mediation.
As these verbal-less stimulus equivalence classes grow, they are more easily discriminated from verbally-mediated behavior. That accentuates the arbitrariness of common distinctions within our verbal behavior. For example, subject-object discriminations would be minimized as they are in Zen’s and behavior analysis’ literature. With no "I" or "self" i.e., no agency, the world is not what we know, it is what we are--without division between us and it. Other distinctions born from an "I-world" (subject-object) relationship would also become untenable. For example, with no "I", there's no life or death and no "I" that suffers: "If a man understands the Tao in the morning, it is well with him even if he dies in the evening" (Suzuki, 1949, p. 22-23).
The reduced number of verbally-mediated distinctions mixed with increased numbers of stimulus equivalence classes devoid of verbal components and discriminative contextual relationships could create, with years of difficult work, a single class. As noted, this would be, in a sense, like a cosmological singularity where everything exists united within a distinctionless universe. Such behavior devoid of verbal influence could be described as Hui Neng (6th Zen Patriarch, 638-713) said "From the first, not a thing is" (Suzuki, 1972, p. 22) which is consistent with descriptions of Nirvana: A "oneness" purged of verbal distinctions. And when distinctions imposed by language are gone, so is the cycle of life and death, as are all normal-life paradoxes and polarities. This would allow an Enlightened Shakespeare to reflect his normal-life and Zen repertoires as he writes "To be or not to be, or neither".
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Footnotes
1
Soto Zen does not use koans and typically yields gradual Enlightenment rather than the sudden Enlightenment of Rinzai Zen described here. Koans’ effects on stimulus equivalence may be the reason for this difference.2
An established literature of physiological correlates exists where, for example, reports of such states are associated with reduced or diminished cortical activity (West, 1987) and increased alpha wave frequency with reduced amplitude (sometimes called the "alerting procedure") (Bagchi & Wagner, 1957, Kasamatsu & Hirai, 1966). For a complete, recent account, see Austin (1998).Author Note
Dr. Roger F. Bass, Education Department, Carthage College.
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Roger Bass, Education Department, Lentz Hall, 2001 Alford Drive, Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin, 53074. Email: RFB53074@aol.com
Key words for indexing: Zen, verbal behavior, Enlightenment