Sheldon B Kopp - If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

Review by Ro Bennett on show 1st July
The sub title to this book is The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients and the book was written by a psychotherapist. It was published in 1972.
The summary on the back of the book is: The most important things that each man must learn no one can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru, who turns out to be just another struggling human being.

Using the myths of Gilgamesh, Siddhartha, the Wife of Bath, Don Quixote...and the works of Buber, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Kafka, Nin, Dante and Jung ...a brilliant psychotherapist, guru and pilgrim shares the epic tales and intimate revelations that help to shape Everyman’s journey through life.

The book is divided into 4 parts. Many chapters start with a quote from I Ching, the Book of Changes, which is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts, dating probably from around the mid 4th Century BC.

Part One of the book is entitled Take From No Man His Song and the chapter headings are Pilgrims and Disciples, The Healing Metaphors of the Guru and Disclosing the Self. In this part the author looks into different aspects of the role of the patient and the therapist. By using quotations and stories from different cultures, traditions and religions, he likens them to pilgrims, disciples and gurus searching for enlightenment and solutions to life’s mysteries and challenges.


Part Two, called Telling of the Tales, also draws from a variety of fiction but in this case, each chapter is a specific story which the author uses to illustrate aspects of psychotherapy. The first of the eleven stories he uses is The Epic of Gilgamesh which is the oldest surviving work of fiction. He draws from a wide range including Macbeth, The Garden of Eden, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, all of which he links to various theories, treatments, behaviours and attitudes to mental health, reinforced with some interesting and challenging case histories.

In Part Three called Fragments of the Education of a Fool, the author describes his own development as a psychotherapist. He writes, Half a lifetime ago, as a very young man and as a largely unseasoned psychotherapist, I came in arrogance as a patronizing visitor to a building for the Criminally Insane. My patients were to be those shamefully uncontrolled pariahs known as Sex Offenders. I came to teach them how to live, and stayed long enough to learn from them. This section deals with stories from that time in his life - quite harrowing and thought provoking.

Part Four is entitled: If you meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, in which he talks more about his life and the hypotheses and theories he has developed because of his experiences.

The book closes with an Epilogue which includes The Three Dreams and the Laundry List which the author refers to as Epiphanies which have manifested themselves to me along the way of my own pilgrimage. The Laundry List comprises 43 ‘Sayings’, such as:

This is it!
There are no hidden meanings
The last one in the list is: Learn to forgive yourself again and again and again and again...

I found it an interesting book - though I don’t agree with some of his conclusions and at times I found it a bit deep and got bogged down with his ideas or reasoning which I found somewhat obscure in places.

Some bits I found humorous although it’s probably my warped sense of humour. The author introduces the incident: I once witnessed an ironically enlightening instance of the cultural definition of insanity and of the power politics of social control.

Using the story of Don Quixote where the community of the wise and sane burnt his books because they were considered a bad influence on him, the author tells about a man who was admitted to a psychiatric unit in New Jersey after being arrested whilst wandering around wearing a long white sheet and quietly muttering gibberish. His efforts to explain his odd behaviour were offered in vain since it was clear that he was a loony and he was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, Chronic, Undifferentiated Type.
Luckily however during the hospital visiting day, twenty other people wearing white sheets turned up at the unit and pointed out that they were in fact a religious sect which wore white for purity and the man was divinely inspired and ‘speaking in tongues’.

The author writes:
The psychiatrist in this case, being a practising Catholic (who weekly ate and drank the body and blood of Jesus Christ) thought they were a very queer bunch indeed.... The patient was released that afternoon. One such man is a lunatic, twenty constitute an acceptable and sane community.

A more worrying disclosure about psychiatric practice in the USA in the 70‘s was this, Foreign trained physicians are not allowed to practise medicine in this country until they have demonstrated competence both in English and in medicine. However, in the absence of such proven competence, they are permitted to work as resident psychiatrists in state mental institutions. I have seen irascible (but otherwise normal) citizens diagnosed as confused psychotics, adjudged incompetent and denied their civil rights and their freedom on the basis of their inability to understand the incompetent mouthings of ill-trained resident psychiatrists whose own command of English was so limited that I could not understand them either.

Hopefully that situation has improved in the last 40 years!

The thrust of the book is 'The secret is that there is no secret'. We must all face our problems, there are no real gurus with all the answers. Life is complex, difficult, unpredictable, confusing - fun sometimes - harrowing and depressing at others. We have to find temporary solutions in ourselves. Stories, maxims and metaphors help us do this. It all ends with Kopp's Laundry List - a number of short phrases which sum up his theses. A super book.
review by Ro