Hubert Benoit

'Dr Suzuki has said that Zen "detests any form of intellectualism"...But my impression is that enlightenment for the Westerner does require some intellectual input, though kept within strict limits. The ultimate viewpoint, that of reality, is clearly inexpressible; and the teacher would harm the pupil if he let him forget that the whole problem is precisely one of leaping the gap which separates verbal truth from real knowledge. But rational explanation is needed to coax Westerners to the edge of this gap. Zen says, for example,: "There is nothing complicated to do: seeing directly into one's nature is enough." It took me years of reflection before I began to see how this advice could be given substance and put into practice in our inner life.' (Benoit 2008, pp.7,8 footnote)

Huxley promoted Benoit's pioneering attempt to integrate Zen and other Eastern teachings into a Western frame of reference, and others followed suit. According to Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in his Foreword to the 1995 re-issue of Terence Gray's translation, 'The Supreme Doctrine had a considerable impact on Western students of Zen in the two decades following its publication and was widely cited by such writers as Christmas Humphreys, Alan Watts, and Heinrich Dumoulin'.

In the 1970s papers by Joseph Hart and Margaret Jeffrey Rioch appeared in academic journals. Both summarised Benoit's ideas. Rioch, a clinical psychologist and early innovator of psychotherapy, was one of the first Western psychologists to be trained in Zen teaching under Benoit in Paris. Rioch's paper was an abbreviated version of a lecture she delivered as part of a course on philosophy at M.I.T. Hart, author of Modern Eclectic Psychotherapy (1983), presented Benoit's work as a contribution to the philosophy of science that humanistic and transpersonal psychologists were attempting to develop.

When Huxley's library was destroyed by fire in 1961, The Supreme Doctrine was among the books that he singled out for replacement

Four of Benoit's books were translated into English between 1955 and 1987, the first of these being The Supreme Doctrine. His last major work, Lâcher Prise(1954), was published in English in 1962. After an interval of 25 years, Benoit summarised his views in De La Réalisation Intérieure (1979), to which he added a fourth section in 1984. The first English version was published in 1987. Two of his books, La Doctrine Suprême and De la Réalisation intérieure, remain in print in English. Pierson precedes his account of Benoit's approach with the following comment: "...although his The Supreme Doctrine was widely read and appreciated in many countries, problems with the translation of his later, more comprehensive and conclusive work, Let Go!, must have cost him most of his English-speaking readers."

Benoit began his work in Paris as a psychotherapist in 1952. His Métaphysique et Psychanalyse had been published in 1949 and his best known book on Zen Buddhism, La Doctrine Suprême was published in two volumes in 1951 and 1952. In 1952 he also published Le Non-Mental Selon La Pensée Zen, his translation of The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind by D. T. Suzuki. (Suzuki had played a leading role in introducing Zen Buddhism to the anglophone world from the late 1920s, but was not well known in France ). Despite this association with Zen Buddhism, Benoit preferred to speak of Ch'an rather than Zen Buddhism, considering that the original Chinese version presented a purer form of the teaching. (Benoit 2008, p. 232, footnote).

Benoit was brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by Aldous Huxley, a leading exponent of the Perennial Philosophy in the middle decades of the 20th century. Huxley corresponded with Benoit and in 1950 published a translation of Notes in Regard to a Technique of Timeless Realization He had read Métaphysique et Psychanalyse and wrote to Benoit:

Hubert Benoit (1904–1992) was a 20th-century French psychotherapist whose work foreshadowed subsequent developments in integral psychology and integral spirituality. His special interest and contribution lay in developing a pioneering form of psychotherapy which integrated a psychoanalytic perspective with insights derived from Eastern spiritual disciplines, in particular from Ch'an and Zen Buddhism. He stressed the part played by the spiritual ignorance of Western culture in the emergence and persistence of much underlying distress. He used concepts derived from psychoanalysis to explain the defences against this fundamental unease, and emphasised the importance of an analytic, preparatory phase, while warning against what he regarded as the psychoanalytic overemphasis on specific causal precursors of symptomatology. He demonstrated parallels between aspects of Zen training and the experience of psychoanalysis. He constructed an account in contemporary psychological terms of the crucial Zen concept of satori and its emergence in the individual.

Hubert Benoit was born in Nancy on 21 March 1904 and died in Paris on 28 October 1992. He trained as a doctor in Paris, where he qualified in 1935 and subsequently specialised in surgery until 1944. In 1944 he sustained severe injuries during the Allied bombardment of Saint-Lô after the Normandy landings. He underwent several operations over the next four years, but was left with a partially paralysed right hand and could no longer work as a surgeon,