< Issue No. 19 (2024)
Article
Dreaming Buddha: Dream Interpretation in Buddhism and Contemporary Psychotherapy
McCullough, Glenn, University of Toronto
Shiu, Henry C.H., University of Toronto
Abstract
This paper is a dialogue between a scholar of Buddhism and scholar of psychotherapy about dreams and their interpretation in early Buddhist texts. We explore five dreams attributed to the Buddha, and their interpretation, followed by the Buddha's purported interpretation of seven dreams of his prominent disciple Ānanda. Both the dreams and their interpretations are provided in these texts, but what is not provided is the hermeneutical process of interpretation. Our overarching question is whether these ancient dreams and their interpretations have any resonance with contemporary psychotherapeutic methods of dream interpretation. While exploring this question, we engage the on-going debate in the academy of religion between newer approaches that posit a thoroughgoing historicism, and older approaches, indebted to myth and folklore studies, that identify transhistorical archetypal motifs in religious traditions. In general, the dreams of the Buddha and Ānanda give us a unique window into the significance of the Buddha's enlightenment, the founding of the Buddhist Sangha, and the early anxieties of that community as it anticipated the Buddha taking leave of the earthly plane. The dreams also illustrate a kind of Buddhist "psychotherapy," where dreams and waking life exist in a dialogic relationship of mutual illumination and relativization. Both dream experience and waking experience can provide valuable insights, but both can also be left behind as disciples focus more intently on the spiritual path of true awakening.