Friday, February 4, 2011

Catharsis from a Buddhist Perspective

Catharsis or katharsis (Ancient Greek: κάθαρσις) means "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."

Sometimes people will talk about a particular creative act as being cathartic, for example, writing a novel, script, play, song, or doing something that we think feels freeing, enlivening, or uplifting.

Someone might write an autobiographical play (even while possibly denying it's autobiographical) and claim it was a cathartic experience, while representing the characters in that play, people from that person's own life, in an almost exclusively negative light, without having carefully weighed the implications of stripping the "fictional" character of any positive qualities due to what the author's experience with that person may have been. Such is the slippery slope of creative work: it can positively finely hone the mind of self-cherishing and further our refusal to take ownership of our karmically and kleshically conditioned subjective experience.

In telling any story, are the characters represented in all their depth and nuance or are they represented as one-dimensional beings incapable of redemption, evolution, or transformation because of how they may have treated us? Additionally, is what we consider cathartic sometimes a lamely disguised form of revenge? A way to hang on to hurts and disappointments? What do we offer the reader/viewer in the way of character transformation?

For a Dharma practitioner, these are important questions to ask in relation to creative activity. The depth and worth of a creative work is determined on the basis of how characters and/or ideas are represented and how they interact in such a way that each character is acknowledged as having qualities that we ourselves fully accept as existing within ourselves.

In this way we can prevent creative work from being a series of unquestioned projections of our own shadow, rather than expressions of equanimity, real understanding of cause and effect, and transformative potential and healing as we tell a story.

When events are recorded in such a way as to potentially injure others on whom our characters may be based, however well intended that record may be (unless we have had a direct realization of emptiness), and however fairly we believe we have recorded it (since "creativity" gives us "license"), we have to face the possibility of foreclosing the chance for our own peace of mind and actual catharsis in representing others either through "fictional characters" or characters we acknowledge as being based on people we know.

From a Buddhist perspective, the actual experience of catharsis is whatever serves as an antidote to the kleshas, and not what is popularly called cathartic by those unable to identify what the kleshas are, how they are perpetuated, and how they prevent actual and sustainable freedom.

Worldly catharsis is far removed from the true cleansing and purging offered by the Buddhist path through close vigilance of the changing parts that make up an individual's experience, and through ethical guidelines designed to facilitate and expedite that lasting catharsis.