ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the psychological pressures shaping the development and evolution of a religion. Taking Buddhist history as an example, it considers what were the psychological pressures that shaped the very remarkable development of Buddhist thought from the initial Enlightenment of the historical Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, as he sat under a peepul tree, to the apparently very different vision of the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist schools in the twelfth century CE. The explicit recognition by Buddhism that its religious objects are always “mental constructs” is shown to have had a central place in making this development possible. The emphasis is on the psychoanalytically understandable pressures which shaped the evolution of the religion, and which increasingly pushed for a “silent” (unformulated) part of Buddhist experience to be foregrounded and formulated explicitly.
