A monk on a podcast, a psychiatrist in 1963, and a few hundred students in a Stanford–Texas experiment say the same four things without ever meeting — and disagree about a fifth. On the question what is the point?, and why asking it is not a symptom.
A friend sent me an episode of The Modern Buddhism Podcast in which Gen Rabten, a Kadampa monk, talks for an hour about the question that brought him to the robes: what is the point? I listened to it with what I can only call my logotherapy glasses on, because that is the only pair I own. What I heard was a man arriving, from the other side of the world and a different century's texts, at four things Viktor Frankl put in Man's Search for Meaning — and disagreeing with him about a fifth. I want to lay them side by side, because when two traditions with no contact reach the same place, that is not a coincidence to smile at. It is evidence.
Rabten opens with the sentence the whole hour is built on: "A lot of people feel there's something wrong with me, I can't see the point. And actually I think there's something right with you, because you can't see the point." The pathways society hands you don't go anywhere, he says, and the mind that notices that is not sick. It is working.
Frankl, in 1963, from the consulting room rather than the monastery:
"Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is a spiritual distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs."Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1963), Part II
Same claim, same shape. The question what is the point? is the specifically human faculty doing its job. I teach seventeen-year-old boys, and if there is one sentence I want them to hear from two traditions at once, it is that one. You are not broken because the carrot stopped looking like food.
Rabten's best image is the plainest. Sit long enough and you have to stand: oh, that's lovely. Stand long enough and you have to sit: oh, that's so much better. "Our whole life is various gradations of standing up, sitting down… each time we're thinking, that's better. But it's not better. It's just relief." The headache goes and it feels like bliss; but not having a headache is not bliss, it is zero. "We are mistaking relief of pain for happiness."
Frankl knew that pendulum and knew who first described it. In the section on the existential vacuum he writes: "Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom." And in the camps he called the small pleasures "a kind of negative happiness — 'freedom from suffering,' as Schopenhauer put it."
So the monk and the psychiatrist are both standing on Schopenhauer. The Buddhist version adds what Schopenhauer lacked — that the pendulum gets mistaken for happiness. And Frankl adds the clinical name for the mistake: hyper-intention. Aim at the relief directly and it becomes the treadmill; pleasure, in his phrase, "is, and must remain, a side effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself."
Rabten credits the line to his sister. "There's a hole and they're trying to fill it with all sorts of things that don't fill that hole." Comfort eating, comfort shopping, a bottomless pit.
Frankl named the two shapes the wrong food most often takes:
"Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation."Man's Search for Meaning (1963), Part II
I will add the one thing neither the monk nor the psychiatrist can: I sold both of those for twenty years. I ran the places where men went to fill the hole with the two shapes Frankl names, and I was very good at it, and I know what the men on the other side of the counter were actually buying. It was not what they paid for. The monk is right about the hole. Frankl is right about the shapes. I was the shopkeeper.
This is the best thing in the hour, and it comes from a family gathering. Rabten's little sister, asked how she handles the fear of giving a presentation, said she thinks about "how could this help the people who are going to listen? What difference could this make?" And then, he says, "instead of it being, oh, this is terrifying because there's this ego at stake, there's this genuine enthusiasm."
A monk's sister, with no clinical training, has just described Frankl's second technique step by step. He called it dereflection: attention withdrawn from the self — the ego at stake, watching itself — and redirected toward the task and the people in it. Not distraction; distraction goes anywhere. Dereflection goes toward these people, this room. In The Doctor and the Soul he wrote that the patient "must be de-reflected from his disturbance to the task at hand or the partner involved."
And here is the third witness, and it is not from either tradition. In 2014 a team at Stanford and Texas ran a three-armed experiment on several hundred students doing a deliberately boring task. One group was given a self-transcendent reason to persist — how the work could help other people. One group was given a self-oriented reason — how it could help them. One got nothing. The self-transcendent group solved 36% more problems. The self-oriented group did no better than the group given nothing at all. That is Yeager and colleagues, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014, Study 4 — and it is the single best experimental test of Frankl's central claim that exists, run by people with no allegiance to him.
A Viennese psychiatrist, mid-century. A Stanford laboratory in 2014. A Kadampa monk's sister at a family gathering. No contact between them. Same mechanism. And it fits in one sentence a boy can carry into an exam room, a job interview, or a hospital corridor: who in this room is better off if I do this well?
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Rabten's teacher, put the same thing as a rule for a life: "I know my intention and so I never get discouraged." If the honest reason you are doing the thing is that you want to help, there is no discouragement that can reach you, because the thing you were trying for was never the applause.
Rabten tells a story I will not improve on, so I will only summarize it. A paramedic arrives at a Buddhist festival in rural New Zealand, exhausted, questioning whether many years of the job had made any difference to anyone. At the same table sits a nun who, ten or fifteen years before, had a heart attack and was clinically dead; the ambulance crew defibrillated three times, which is where you normally stop, and the paramedic in charge said let's do one more. The nun looks down the table and says: it was you.
Frankl has a name for where that fourth shock had been all along:
"…in the past, nothing is irrecoverably lost but everything irrevocably stored… Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past wherein he has salvaged once and for all his deeds and his joys and also his sufferings… I should say having been is the surest kind of being."Man's Search for Meaning (1963), Part II, "Life's Transitoriness"
The paramedic's life had not been pointless. It had been in the granary the whole time. She just had not been sitting at the right table.
Rabten locates happiness inside: "what real happiness is, are the states of mind that give us peace." He tells the story of the thief who breaks into Milarepa's cave looking for treasure, and the yogi laughing in the dark — I've never seen anything worth stealing in here; we're looking in the wrong place. The sun is behind the clouds; part the clouds and it was there all along.
Frankl locates meaning outside: "the true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system." Inner states, for him, are by-products, and aiming at them directly is the disease.
That is a real disagreement between a serious Buddhist and a serious psychiatrist, and it should be left standing. But notice where Rabten goes in the same hour, without being pushed: "the thing that gives meaning to our life is helping others… it's not about our own liberation, it's about how can I help everyone." The Mahayana turn is the self-transcendence turn. The clouds part toward other people. Both men end in the same place. They disagree about which door you go in by — and if you are sixteen, you can feel both pulls at once, and you should. That question runs under all twelve sessions, and I am not going to resolve it for you either.