This article discusses the hypothesis that jatakas-narratives about the Buddha's past births-can be interpreted as a kind of protocols of ancient psychotherapy sessions in the format of fairy-tale therapy. It is important to analyze jatakas as a peculiar phenomenon of Buddhist culture, which has a powerful harmonizing and, accordingly, therapeutic potential. The urgency of such a problem is caused by the urgent need to understand the depth of the psychological foundations of socio-cultural regulation both in traditional cultures of the past and in modern Western culture. In this case, the methods of cultural comparative studies are adequate tools for the problem.

Buddhist anthropology - the study of human action, its motives and psychocosmic consequences-focused its adherents on the acquisition of mental health, which was equated in the tradition to the elimination of extra-reflexive affective motivation of actions, to the acquisition of creative freedom of behavior, regulated only by the moral norms of the teaching.

Let us consider how the principle of socio-cultural regulation of the psyche was implemented in the life of the Buddhist community-the sangha. As tradition shows, the established routine provided for public self-reports, which members of such a community regularly made at general meetings. In the canonical literature, such gatherings of direct disciples of the Buddha are described as follows. The monk-the guardian of religious discipline-read out the Pratimoksha (the disciplinary rules laid down in the second section of the Buddhist canon - the Vinaya-Pitaka) to the audience, and the members of the Sangha alternately announced which of the vows or rules they had committed a sin.

Each of these misdemeanors was subject to discussion, and the plot of everyday life that led to the negative action was reproduced. The participants expressed their opinions about the situation as a whole, about each of its participants, and together with the Teacher analyzed the behavioral and affective aspects of this situation. After that, when the collective (group) analysis was brought to the original source of the unwholesome act (i.e., to the three basic affects - the roots of unwholesome: greed, hostility, and ignorance), the sangha member in question had to make a public confession.

Repentance in this case did not involve actualizing feelings of guilt for what they had done, but conscious acceptance of the results of group analysis and recognition of the unacceptability of the affective motivation that took place. Such motivation was considered unacceptable in Buddhism, primarily due to the fact that the affect embodied in a behavioral act only rooted a person in samsara-according to Buddhist philosophy.

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according to religious doctrine, it caused an unfavorable new birth. Lying, whitewashing oneself, or hushing up on misdeeds and the real situation did not make sense, since lying and hiding were a separate sin against one of the vows and were also fraught with negative karmic consequences [Ermakova and Ostrovskaya, 2001, pp. 67-80].

After offering penance, which was considered a good verbal action that removed a possible karmic consequence, members of the sangha were invited to listen and discuss a metaphorical illustration that clearly demonstrates the structure and nature of the situation analyzed. Jatakas - stories from the Teacher's own past lives-served as such illustrations.

Later, at the historical stage of the written recording of the canon, a collection of similar stories was compiled, which was included in the Vinaya-pitaka as its completion. However, in the Pali version of the canon, which became widespread in Sri Lanka and later in a number of Southeast Asian countries, such subjects were included in the Sutta-pitaka (sankra). Sutra-pitaka) [Lysenko, 2003, pp. 31-36]. The genre of these narratives has gained wide popularity not only among the educated Buddhist monastics, but also among the so-called simpletons, i.e. groups of the population who did not know written culture.

The diversity and richness of the Buddhist literary heritage remained inaccessible to Europeans for a long time and appeared in the field of view of Western and Russian researchers relatively recently. The first literary monuments that came from India were works of ancient Indian narrative literature, which in the mentality of a Western person are perceived as collections of fairy tales, parables and fables.

Jataka means " a tale of past births." In the canonical heritage, this genre forms a fairly large section, which is included in the collection "Khuddaka-Nikaya". In addition, jatakas are also found in the Abhidharma Pitaka, the third section of the canon, which accumulates samples of early Buddhist philosophical discourse.

The jataka genre also developed in the post-canonical period. In particular, the collection "Garland of Jatakas", attributed to the authorship of Arya Shura, an early medieval Indian poet who wrote in Sanskrit, is widely known. Post-canonical jatakas are works of fiction that proclaim Buddhist religious and doctrinal values. Such texts were not used in Sangha meetings, and the use of their psychotherapy resource is very problematic. The jatakas tell stories from the past lives of the founder of the Siddhardha Gautama faith, Shakyamuni Buddha. An enlightened teacher recounts in the jatakas the events connected with his past births as a human, animal, and celestial being.

The text of each jataka in the canonical collection is divided into five parts: "a tale of the present "(an introductory story that describes the circumstances under which the Buddha told his disciples the following story about one of his past births); "the story of the past" (the main part of the jataka, narrated on behalf of the Buddha); gatha (the verse part of the jataka, which summarizes the moral outcome of the story); grammatical commentary on the gathas; "connecting part" (the final part in which the Buddha "identifies the birth", i.e. tells each of the listeners who they were in their past births in connection with the story being presented).

It is the structure and content of the text that, in my opinion, allows us to reconstruct the group psychotherapeutic situation that took place at the meetings of the Buddhist sangha in the format of fairy-tale therapy.

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How does a fairy tale "work" in the sociocultural dimension? In the practice of a psychologist or psychotherapist, the functional features of a fairy tale as a folk genre, formed in the process of cultural genesis, are used purely pragmatically, taking a focus orientation. This becomes possible due to the fact that the fairy tale is connected with the deep processes of forming symbolic attitudes and imaginative thinking.

First of all, the function of a fairy tale is to create a metaphor, the reading of which naturally evokes associations that can objectify the space of mental reality of a child or adult, giving the therapist the opportunity to reconstruct this reality. Thus, the aggregate associative picture allows us to delve into the content of psychic reality.

Active study of fairy-tale material begins when we ask ourselves the following questions: why did the hero act in this way, why was the consequence of his act exactly like this? Investigating the motives of the fairy tale character's behavior, we compare its content with possible solutions to situations that arise in our minds. This opens up the prospect of an up-to-date understanding of the specific content of the studied psychic reality and how this content is embodied in self-esteem and behavior.

A similar process takes place in everyday culture. Adults, telling a child a fairy tale and discussing its content with him, gain an intuitive understanding of what is happening in his soul, clarify and correct the child's attitude to reality. It is natural for children to want to illustrate a fairy tale with drawings and embody its plot in a game. In the terminology of D. V. Winnicott, being in the "transition space" of the game contributes to the gradual "growing" into reality [Winnicott, 2002]. In general, a fairy tale in the process of socialization of a child contributes to the internalization of the value-normative axiomatics of society. Undoubtedly, the priority in this process remains with folk tales.

As for the author's fairy tales, they, being the product of individual artistic creativity, inevitably carry correlates of psychological conflicts of the creator. And the unformed child's psyche, accordingly, extra-reflexively internalizes the potential of hidden conflict contained in the author's text.

Jataka texts allow us to reconstruct the situation of self-regulation of interaction between the Buddhist community: at a meeting of members of the sangha, everything that has happened recently was presented for discussion. The most significant or conflicting events were identified and suggested for discussion. The problem received, in general, a genetic solution - this was already in the past. Due to the fact that we are in the space of Buddhism, the ontogenetic is extended to the number of "past" lives and has a common space with phylogenetic experience. A story about the past demonstrates what this situation was primarily like and what karmic consequence it has realized in the present. The therapeutic meaning is contained here, in identifying the present and the past, in identifying the essence of the problem situation by comparing and identifying a similar conflict that has already taken place. And the identification of the group members with the heroes of the "tale of the past" creates a safe atmosphere for working out the problem. The correlation between the situation that occurred in the past and the current one that was put up for discussion makes it possible to acquire new experience based on a kind of genetic interpretation.

Many of the Jataka narratives have the character of cross-cultural universals. Thus, upon initial acquaintance with the story "About the Wise Prince Adasamukha" (in the Pali Canon this is jataka No. 257, and there are 547 of them in total), the European reader discovers a significant similarity of the plot conflict with Shakespeare's " Venetian-

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a Russian merchant", although the South Asian cultural specifics are by no means correlative to the European Renaissance. For a long time, literary critics have tried to consider such typological convergences in the context of the question of plot borrowings and so-called wandering plots (A. N. Veselovsky). It was not always possible to find out the fact of borrowing and, apparently, it is more justified to talk about the universal nature of such plots-situations, since they capture a deep psychological experience that unites different branches of human culture in civilizational terms.

At the same time, jatakas are the most valuable source of cultural knowledge. Major Russian orientalists and indologists-I. P. Minaev (1840-1890) (the first translator of these works into Russian), S. F. Oldenburg (1863-1934)-pointed out the exceptional cognitive historical and cultural significance of jatakas. The jatak texts contain a wealth of information about the material culture of South Asia during the ancient and early Middle Ages, crafts, urban planning, trade, village life and much more. And of course, the jatakas clearly present Buddhist views on human nature.

We will demonstrate the psychotherapeutic role of jatakas by means of a comparative analysis of similar works in their plot - the famous fable of I. A. Krylov "The Wolf and the Lamb "and the canonical"Jataka about the Leopard". Separated in the historical time of their creation and cultural spaces, these works contain a number of semantic dominants that characterize basic typological differences in the influence of culture on the formation of narcissism.

Let us first give the text of the fable of I. A. Krylov:

The Wolf and the Lamb

In the case of the strong, the powerless is always to blame:
We hear a lot of examples of this in History,
But we don't write stories;
But about how they say in Fables.
The lamb went to the stream to drink on a hot day;
And trouble must happen,
That there was a hungry Wolf prowling around those places.
He sees the lamb and seeks the prey;
But, to give the case at least a legal look and sense,
Shouts: "How dare you, impudent, unclean snout
Here's a clean muddy drink
My
With sand and silt?
For the audacity of takovu
I'll rip your head off." -
"When the brightest Wolf allows it,
Dare I tell you what's down the creek
The grace of his footsteps makes me drink a hundred;
And he is pleased to be angry in vain:
There's no way I can muddy his drink." -
"That's why I'm lying!
Worthless! Have you ever heard such impertinence in society?
Yes, I remember that you are still in the warm summer
He was rude to me here once:
I haven't forgotten that, mate!" -
"For God's sake, I'm not even a year old yet.", -
The lamb speaks. "So it was your brother." -
"I have no brothers." "So this is kum il swat

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And, in short, someone from your own family.
You, your dogs, and your shepherds,
You all want to hurt me
And if you can, you always do me harm,
But I will divorce you for their sins." -
"Ah, what's my fault?" "Shut up! I'm tired of listening,
Free time for me to sort out your guilt, puppy!
It's your fault that I want to eat."
He said so and dragged the Lamb into the dark forest (Krylov, 1983: 44-47).

Familiarity with the text, even on the surface, reveals that it belongs to the Christian culture with its specific basic system of metaphors. The lamb as a literary image draws the reader into a chain of evangelical associations-the Lamb, the sacrifice, and the sacrifice is certainly good, acting as the highest value of this culture. The wolf is also an image drawn from the gospel context. Wolves, that is, obvious aggressive enemies of Christ's teaching, the flock; wolves-secret enemies dressed in sheep's clothing. The chain of such associations can be extended almost indefinitely, extending into the vast semantic space of patristic literature and other genres of Christian didactics.

The plot of the fable, if interpreted from the point of view of the analysis of mental conflict, is tied to the desire to absorb, appropriate, destroy, coupled simultaneously with a sense of guilt, awareness of one's own boundless "badness" (Kernberg, 1998), i.e. inconsistency with the highest values of culture, and the experience of this "badness" is unbearable. Accordingly, the only way to satisfy this desire without the painful experience of guilt is through projection. The negative hero in this situation has no choice but to demonize the object of absorption-accusing the lamb of hostile intentions, turning it into a"fiend of hell". Only then can the lamb be eaten with impunity.

Leaving aside the satirical content of the fable under consideration and its semantic connections with the social context, it is necessary to recognize that in the space of Christian culture, the situation embodied in the images of the aggressor and the victim is tacitly approved. The position of the victim, voluntarily or involuntarily occupied by a person in certain socio-cultural contexts, is welcomed and legitimized, and the pathological component of this victim position remains unreflected, a "blind spot".

The interaction between the aggressor and the potential victim is completely different in the Jataka of the Leopard.

Jataka of the Leopard (426) 1

Saying, "Is everything all right, are you all well?" the Teacher - who was living in the grove of Jeta at that time-began the story of the goat:

"Once the venerable Maudgalyayana settled in a mountain gorge with a single entrance. A small area at the entrance served as a courtyard for him to walk around. Somehow the shepherds decided: "Let the goats graze here!" "they went into that ravine with their herd and lived there to their heart's content. One evening they gathered their goats and set out for a new place. And one goat, which was grazing at a distance, did not notice that the others were leaving, and stayed. When the goat started to leave the gorge, a leopard noticed it and, intending to eat it, blocked its path.

The goat, looking around, noticed the leopard and thought: "He is hiding there to kill me and eat me! If I turn back and run , I won't be saved! I'll do what people do in these cases!" And with that thought in mind, the goat stuck out its horns and ran straight at the leopard. And even though the leopard was already experiencing a sweet thrill, believing that he was about to grab the goat,

1 The text of the jataka is given in the translation by B. Zakhar'in [Novosti..., 1989, pp. 45-47].

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she managed to avoid his claws. She ran as fast as she could, caught up with the other goats, and joined the herd.

The venerable Maudgalyayana, who saw all this, went to the Tathagata's house the next day and related what had happened, saying: "That goat, O all-good one, managed to choose the right course of action and, having accomplished the feat, escaped the claws of the leopard!" The teacher objected to that: "O Maudgalyayana! This time the goat did indeed escape from the leopard, but it had also happened before that the leopard would grab a goat that was bleating loudly and deal with it!"And, yielding to Maudgalyayana's requests, the Master told him about the past.

"In ancient times, a Bodhisattva found his earthly existence in a rich family that lived in a village in the kingdom of Magadha. When the Bodhisattva reached adulthood, he gave up worldly desires, became a hermit, and attained the highest perfection in the art of concentrated meditation. For many years he lived as a hermit in the Himalayas, but one day, being in need of salt and spices, he came to Rajagriha, set up his leafy hut in a gorge among the rocks and lived there.

It was just like that time: the shepherds brought a herd of goats there, then the herd left, and one goat fell behind the others. And when a certain leopard saw her walking alone toward the mouth of the ravine, he decided, "I'll eat her!" and blocked her way. The goat, on seeing the leopard, thought: "I will not live to-day, unless I can think of a way to soften his heart with sweet and pleasant conversation. Otherwise, I'm finished! " And, thinking so, the goat approached the leopard, deciding to try to start a pleasant conversation with him from a distance, and first sang:

"Is everything all right, are you all well?
Is life safe, Uncle?
About your happiness mother
And I want to find out for myself!"

The leopard thought, " This rascal is trying to deceive me by calling me uncle! She doesn't know how fierce I am!" And he sang back to her:

"Goat! When you stepped on my tail, you disturbed me! Don't you think I'll let you go for 'uncle'?!"

The goat pleaded, " Uncle, don't say that!"

And she sang again:

"Ah, uncle, you're facing me
They were standing, and I was walking towards them,
And the tail is from behind - how do you like it
Could I have crushed him?!"

The leopard cried out: "What are you talking about, goat?! There's no place where my tail isn't!" and he sang back:

"On all the four sides
of the earth, on all the seas, on all the mountains
My tail is outstretched, O goat!
How can you not hurt him?!"

Hearing this, the goat decided: "He, who is steeped in filth, cannot be seduced by sweet words; I will speak to him as to an enemy!" and she sang:

"My father, my brother, and my mother also spoke to me before,
That the villain's tail is long, but I was flying through the air!"

"I know," said the leopard, " that you have been flying through the air, but on your way here you have defiled my table!" and he sang:

"The deer herd you, goat, flying, startled; nautek
It rushed in fright - I was left without a meal!"

At these words, the goat shook with fear and could only cry out through her sobs: "Oh, uncle! Don't be cruel and spare me!" But the leopard grabbed the goat by the scruff of the neck, killed it, and ate it."

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And here are two verses filled with the wisdom of the All-awakened One:

The leopard grabbed a goat by the neck, calling out to him:
You can't feed the villain with beautiful speeches!
And for the villain, there are no rules, there is no dharma-the beauty of speech,
Nothing can restrain him - he only knows strength!"

And in concluding this dharma instruction, the Master interpreted the story by linking rebirths in this way:: "The goat at that time was the same goat, the leopard is the present leopard, and I myself was a hermit."

In the axiomatic values of Buddhist culture, the victim, the victim position of the individual was rejected as something meaningless and not corresponding to the tasks of overcoming suffering. If in the Judeo-Christian tradition suffering was considered as a sign of divine marking, i.e., as an absolutely positive characteristic of earthly existence, then in Buddhist culture suffering was rejected as an unacceptable consequence of past bad deeds, as evidence of unworthy motivations realized in future births. Therefore, victimhood, which acts as a personal position, certainly did not find justification and legitimation.

So, a situation was brought up for discussion that caused surprise to one of the Buddha's disciples - Maudgalyayana, the famous author of one of the canonical philosophical treatises in the history of Buddhism. It represents a new experience of behavior in a situation of danger. The story, told from the Buddha's perspective, is intended to show members of the community the difference between two possible ways to respond to one type of aggression. The text reveals in detail what thoughts and feelings led the Goat to death. Initially, she tried to resort to a trick, i.e. actualize one of the affects in her behavior. (Recall that in the Buddhist anthropological concept, cunning is an affect responsible for one of the negative ways of activity [Ermakova and Ostrovskaya, 2001, pp. 46-131].) But what does it mean to soften the Leopard's heart in this situation? This is a counterproductive construction of one of the paradigms that allows the Leopard to realize its desire in a pair of "aggressor-victim". The Goat's "trick" opens up the possibility of projection and thus removes the sense of guilt from the aggressor Leopard. The heroine of jataka, assuming the role of an ingratiating party, as if tells her killer on an unconscious level: "I am bad", and accordingly he recodes this message as "I am good", i.e. obviously justified by his victim. Thus, the conscious actualization of the cunning affect leads the unfortunate Goat to lose control of the situation. She no longer has control over the course of the conflict, and all available opportunities are open to the Leopard: kill the Goat, enjoy their victory and its humiliation.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, the counterproductivity of the Goat's "trick" is obvious: hoping to soften the Leopard's heart, she initially built the dialogue on increasing the narcissism of her opponent. The goat believed that he was able to sublimate his desire into experiences of "greatness" and " generosity." But the aggressor was absolutely dominated by the desire for absorption, which required direct satisfaction of the desire, and not its sublimation [Kernberg, 2000, p. 111-131].

From the point of view of Buddhist anthropology, the Goat's miscalculation was not only that it actualized an affect that never led to the elimination of suffering on the behavioral plane. Koza did not know that greed as a basic affect cannot in principle be transformed into a good phenomenon of consciousness - "generosity". The goat changes the dialog position - "she decided to talk to him as an enemy", i.e. actualized the "hostility" affect. But this only made the projection situation easier for the Leopard, because the enemy must be destroyed. Thus, we find

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typological convergence of Buddhist and psychoanalytic interpretations of the conflict under consideration.

Meanwhile, in the jataka-and this emphasizes the psychotherapeutic meaning of the text - there are no didactic assessments of behavior. The narrative only presents a demonstration and confrontation with the conflict, but does not offer either "correct" solutions or advice. The choice of behavior is up to the participants in the discussion.

Interesting in the aspect of interpretation is the plot of the story, which sets out an amazing case - the Goat still escaped death when meeting with the Leopard, having decided to do what " people do in these cases." It should be noted that in Buddhist anthropology, only a person has the possibility of free creative behavior. If he is guided by affects, then creativity is lost, and the person becomes like an animal. In other words, authenticity and creativity are truly human qualities. On this point, the position of psychoanalysis typologically coincides with the views of Buddhist anthropology. The psychoanalytic interpretation emphasizes the independence of the Goat from its narcissistic object, the Leopard, and Buddhist anthropology interprets this independence as the ultimate weakening of attraction to objects of the sensory world, increasing freedom of choice.

Consider both works - the fable "The Wolf and the Lamb" and "Jataka of the Leopard" - in the aspect of symbolic interpretation. This is necessary to clearly identify the psychotherapeutic resource of the South Asian narrative. It is obvious that symbolic characters in different cultural contexts have different semantic content. The goat in the Buddhist text corresponds with the Krylov Lamb, and the Leopard-with the Wolf. It should be noted that the goat in the Russian ethno-cultural tradition is one of the symbols of fertility and fertility. For example, in the Russian fairy tale "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats", the goat embodies the maternal image. Accordingly, the plot of the considered jataka on a symbolic level can be perceived in the specified ethno-cultural context as a threat to the death of the mother. The character of Krylov's Lamb is "read" quite differently - the lamb, an innocent victim, and a victim, as mentioned above, extremely highly valued in Christian culture. The lamb is infantile, passive, weak, and doomed, as the victim should be. But at the same time, this position is sanctified by Christian axiomatic values, and therefore its alternative is not visible.

The wolf as a folklore character has many symbolic meanings, and each of them is realized in various folklore genres and mythopoetic contexts. One of the stable symbolic meanings of this character is the outlaw criminal. The mythopoetic story about the transformation of a person into a wolf, which simultaneously acts as a victim, outcast, hunted, and in the role of a monstrous predator, killer, and stalker, is contained in various narratives about werewolves. Such narratives are widely known and inevitably produce associative cliches that reduce the psychotherapeutic value of the narrative. The leopard as a symbolic character of the Buddhist jataka is free from such associative cliches. And in this, it seems to me, lies a very significant psychotherapeutic resource of the jataka as a text that can be presented as the basis for fairy-tale therapy.

The presentation of the symbolic meanings "Goat" and" Leopard " has a novelty and does not allow us to update the usual associative stereotypes. Their perception reveals the perspective of an individual associative series that is not rigidly based in an ethno-cultural context. And this makes it possible to identify subtle semantic meanings that are not visible in the perspective of a fairy tale that functions steadily in the culture of childhood, and therefore easily escape.

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list of literature

Arya Shura. Garland of jatak / Translated from Skt. by A. P. Barannikov and O. F. Volkova. Prev., and note by O. F. Volkova, Moscow, 2000.

Winnicott D. V. Using an object // Anthology of Modern Psychoanalysis. Moscow: Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2000.

Ermakova T. V., Ostrovskaya E. P. Classical Buddhist practices. St. Petersburg, 2001.

Kernberg O. F. Otnosheniya lyubov: norma i patologiya [Relations of love: norm and pathology]. Moscow, 2000.

Krylov A. I. Fables. L., 1983.

Lysenko V. G. Early Buddhism: Religion and Philosophy, Moscow, 2003.

Stories about true and Imaginary Wisdom / Comp. by A. Paribka and V. Ermana, pred. by V. Ermana, notes by A. Paribka, L., 1989.

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