Whatever connections there may be, it is hard to see a common ground. Husserl is concerned with knowing, while Buddhism is concerned with suffering, the causes of suffering and the end of suffering. Phenomenology is a means to an end, while meditation (and mindfulness generally) is aimless, selfless and objectless. Husserl belongs firmly to the European tradition of the pursuit of knowledge, while Buddhism is a practice whose most significant western parallel is probably Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia.

But I would be interested to hear what others have to say! And, indeed, you probably have your own ideas on this…

Hej Karin!

There is an interesting thesis from School of Nursing at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, I think the defense was around 2004, and the supervisor might have been Betty Davies. It was a filed work at a hospice in California informed by a Buddhist tradition including meditation modalities. To what I remember it is an interesting work with efforts to link  Buddism to phenomenology. Unfortunately do not remember the name of the scholar

Kind regards

Joakim

Dear Karin, I agree with your hunch. There is, indeed a connection between Husserl's phenomenology and Buddhism. Unlike Ronan, I am not completely convinced that Buddhism is about suffering: quite in the contrary, it is about happiness and joy, liberation and enlightenment. (Buddha will never appear suffering as Jesus does, by the way. Not in the Japanese, or Indian temples, f.i.).

Both phenomenology and Buddhism coincide in the need for changing our attitude. That's what Husserl calls transcendental phenomenology, precisely. it is about the shift from the natural attitude toward the phenomenological attitude. Suffering would belong to the natural attitude (suffering, poverty and death, if we follow Siddhartha's own experience before the searching for the path to enlightenment).

Meditation fulfils an analog role as the various epoché's in Husserl' s phenomenology. 

Hello Karin, not sure you will remember me but our paths have crossed before (lucky me!). This connection has been explored in the past by varied scholars such as Francisco Varela and Piet Hutt (the only ones I know, but there are probably more). I recommend the following reads to start with, I hope these help:

- Varela & Depraz (2003). Imagining: Embodiment, phenomenology, and Tranformation. In Buddhism & Science: Breaking New Ground By Ed. B. Alan Wallac

- The embodied mind: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind

- Piet Hutt's stuff: https://www.ids.ias.edu/~piet/publ/TucsonIII/tucsonIII.html

Cheers, 

Laurent

As a kind of reminder of what may be obvious -- at their foundation both phenomenology and Buddhism seek to enhance our lived appreciation of existence through an attentive analysis of the basic fundamentals of how conscious experience works. And in that activity both give a great deal of respect to "bracketing" the process whereby we ascribe "existence assumptions" to the objects of our awareness. 

I'm not expert in Husserl, but I've always found descriptions of his practice of epoché quite analogous to, for example, forms of vipassana meditation, where each attends to the rise and fall of objects in our phenomenal awareness, with an appreciation for our penchant to "cling" to the notions of "own-being" that we ascribed to phenomena.

(And to reference some of the earlier comments -- it is actually through such "knowing" of how phenomenal experience works that "suffering" comes to be alleviated, through the consequently liberative dissipation of illusion.)

In general, I find it not uncommon that strong parallels between contemplative/ introspective traditions can be discerned when we look first at their respective practices, and only then, secondly, at their expressed findings and conclusions. There can be apparent differences in the latter which often prove only to be in fact apparent, once we've come to appreciate the original experiential activities -- e.g., meditative procedures -- that gave rise to them in the first place. In other words, we always need to "operationalize the constructs."

I wasn't putting forward my opinion about Buddhism being about suffering. The Four Noble Truths, the absolute foundation of Buddhism, place suffering as the central issue to be tackled. If there were no suffering there would be no need for Buddhism.

In this, it differs radically from Christianity, in which suffering is an unexplained phenomenon. In Christian theology, the suffering of Jesus was the one, complete and all-sufficient act that redeemed humans. This leaves a very famous and difficult theological problem: what has God got in mind by allowing humans to suffer?

Buddhism sees that suffering is a complex web where every action a person takes either brings us all on the road to well being (the noble eightfold path) or travels the same path in the wrong direction - towards ill-being.

I'm not making this up as a personal view. Have a look at Ñanamoli's excellent translation of the Buddha's first formulation of his insight:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.nymo.html

When Siddhartha, quite before becoming the Buddha, discovered suffering, he decided to devote the rest of his life to overcome it. Whether in the form of waging, illness, or death. That served, so to say, as the engines that led later on to Enlightenment. The Four Noble Truths are not about suffering but about overcoming error and mistakes suffering and wrongness. 

Dear Karin

I am currently writing up my thesis which concerns mindfulness training for people with long-term conditions. I have used phenomenology as the underpinning paradigm for research methods that aimed to capture the contents of participant experience and their essential features and believe that there are various meeting points between Buddhism and phenomenology. These include the key role of intentionality, the inter-subjective nature of being and the embodied way our consciousness integrally connects to, and is shaped by, the mode of interaction with our environment.

Husserl’s quest to find an accurate means of describing and explicating the "lived body" and "lived experience" was supported by the “phenomenological attitude,” suggesting the alert and non-judgmental stance of mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness itself offers multiple reference points for the exploration of consciousness including body sensations, feelings, thoughts and emotions and I have become quite excited about the use of embodied research methods to support understanding and support participant meaning-making within the context of mindfulness practice. Here are a few references that may be of help:

Brown, K., and Cordon, S., (2009). Chapter 4: Toward a Phenomenology of Mindfulness: Subjective Experience and Emotional Correlates, pp. 59-81 In: Didona, F., (ed). (2009). Clinical handbook of mindfulness. New York: Springer

Childs, D. (2011). Mindfulness and clinical psychology, Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. 84, pp. 288–298

Felder, A. and Aten, H. (2014). Mindfulness at the Heart of Existential-Phenomenology and Humanistic Psychology: A Century of Contemplation and Elaboration, The Humanistic Psychologist, 42, pp.6–23, 2014

Dear Karin,

When reading the Cartesian Meditation by Husserl and a Commentary on the Heart Sutra of Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh, I noticed a parallel (at least at first glance), which i found very interesting, i.e. Husserls notion of the Universal Horizon ("Universalhorizont") also called the Horizon of all Horizons ("Horizont aller Horizonte") on which all the Horizons emerge/appear and the buddhist notion of "form is emptiness, emptiness is form". At first glance it seems to me, that in both, there is a concept of - so to say - an empty or groundless foundation, on which every thing and phenomenon can appear.

Thank you all for fascinating answers, I am overwhelmed by you taking your time to support me in this investigation. After some holiday time I will now tend to this subject again, gudied by your thoughts.

In Ideas ,Husserl presented phenomenology with a Kantian/transcendental path of looking for conditions of the possibility of consciousness generally, leaving aside about reality beyond phenomena.  Husserl then discovered the method of epoché (abstaining from belief) by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience.  I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a Eucalyptus, with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.

In my teen age years I began to practice an Indian technique of meditation and after a while this bracketing attitude in normal experience become also a second nature.  When I began studying human vision, I naturally used that bracketing for paying close attention to my visual experience and this is what actually led my research.  It became my natural approach to research and only a few years later when I discovered Husserl’s phenomenology did I made a connection with what I had been practicing without having give it a name.  I also realized around that time that Goethe was practicing that same type of phenomenological approach to scientific research which he called ‘’delicate empiricism’’.   I later made a connection that it was probably my meditation practices that had led me to this.  I think that any one regularly practicing meditation is naturally able to pay attention to his consciousness in this manner.

Thank you very much for this very interesting answer! 

I smiled reading this because this is also my own experience, almost identically. Although it was Buddhistic meditation that led me onto this path. Both my own meditative experiences, "observing" my own thoughts moving, and listening to the guiding meditations that are presented by an ex-monk that now lives in Sweden, have so many tomes told me that there is a strong connection between the two fileds.

Instesting also with Goethe, who I know inspired R Steiner, who developed the school of Anthroposophy, and who also emphasises meditation as a path to health.

Now, what still bothers me is that I cannot find enough good words to describe this. I therefore look for texts that can help me. Do you for example have that Gothe reference? Or any other text you can recommend med to read?

Kindly,

Karin

Just a post-scriptum: it was not I who said that Buddhism was concerned with suffering, but the Buddha. it's the first of the four noble truths, which are the fundamental principles of Buddhism. As Thich Nhat Hanh is fond of pointing out, Buddhism delineates the road to ill-being (which is probably a better word, but the "suffering" is the usual translation) which is simply the road to well-being taken in the wrong direction!

Karin Dahlberg,

My research journey without me knowing have followed the same path as Goethe and Haeckel and other philosophers of the late 19th century: Bergson,Mach,Dilthey,Von Uexkull, etc  It is the perception of trees that guided me all along my research and I came to realize that trees and everything are perceived in our visual system along the same path of their ontogeny. I developed a morphogenesis theory of vision.  

Regards

Isn't it true however that Husserl's model is "based on" the Cartesian duality thing? Which is fundamentally (?) different from dependent origination? How do you reconcile that?

:)

 Yes, the phenomenological idea of co-constitution, that falsifies all kinds of dualisms, goes well together with Buddhism :)

You can find interesting the lectture of Michel Bitbol on "Pure experience, from Zen to phenomenology":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sU16yomiqQ&t=4576s

Thank you very much!

I have not had the opportunity to listen to the lecture so far but will try this week. It seems to be interesting. 

Thank you very much, this is indeed one of the best replies I got from my question! I will read this with great interest. Thank you very much,

Karin

There is nothing BUT connections between phenomenology and Buddhism

Well, while agreeing with Brad, I have to say that there is one crucial and rather profound difference: what to do with the understanding (that everything external is interpreted by the mind). While phenomenologists tend to address, similarly as philosophers in general, the interpretative workings of the mind in intellectual terms, Buddhists put the teachings into practice through meditative practices. Differently put, while phenomenologists 'illuminate the foundations of human experience by providing a research method for exploring how human consciousness engages the world' (as Hanna, Wilkinson and Givens, 2016, 145 wrote), Buddists attempt to make phenomenological reductions de facto when pursuing the path of liberation from the discontentment that the impermanence of everything generates in the 'natural attitude' of living, as Jussi Omaheimo (who also commented this thread) wrote in Finnish in niin & näin journal.

But in order to go deeper in the relating between phenomenology and buddhism, I think it is important not to take such broad categories as single entities. For instance, in Schutzian phenomenology, there is little said about transcendence or about conducting epochés of any sort – apart from stating that there are multiple realities and that people typically act in a 'natural attitude'. Then again in buddhist stances differ a great deal between Theravada buddhism and Tibetan buddhism, for instance.

Hanna, Fred J., Brett, T. Wilkinson, and Joel Givens. 2016. Recovering the Original Phenomenological Research Method: An Exploration of Husserl, Yoga, Buddhism, and New Frontiers in Humanistic Counseling. Journal of Humanistic Counselling, 56: 144–162.

The article by Hanna et al., do you have it and can mail to me?

Karin

Dear Ossi Ollinaho

While appreciating what you add (and, I think, agreeing), another way to have a really full and good understanding of Buddhism is to read a complete, comprehensive summary of ALL the words of the historical Buddha: http://mynichecomp.com (i.e. this is a summary of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism). This will be more true as an overview than about anything. (It is < 100 pages. )

I guess I could note that [deciding] " what to do with the understanding " is something all we humans do anyway (so, such goes, even if unsaid).

Thank you!!!!

Hello Karin. I don't know if you are still researching this question, but I found this thread since I had quite the similar question, more specifically about the relation of the doctrines in Zen (Chan) Buddhism and phenomenological reduction.

I found the following paper which might interest you:

Bossert, Philip J. 1976(!) Paradox and Enlightenment in Zen Dialogue and Phenomenological Description. Journal of Chinese Philosophy V.3(1976), pp 269-280.

http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-JOCP/jc26897.htm

https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/konstituirovanie-drugogo-soznaniya-v-buddizme-i-fenomenologii