Direct and Expedient Approaches

    It's been said that Chan is a much more direct approach toward managing and dealing with one's vexations, in the sense that it does not try to analyze the objects that "bother" or "vex" a person, let alone attempt to uproot those objects from the mind. To reiterate, this latter approach tends to be what Western psychologists prefer. For example, if I am wanting to approach a particular phobia or fixation that I want to overcome, I will go to a psychologist who might suggest that I expose myself repeatedly to the object of my phobia to form new associations (perhaps more pleasant than before), or "couple" things that I am fixated to with "disgusting" images so that I start to cool off my emotional attachments to these things. To a certain extent, Buddhism has upheld these approaches; for example, in early sutras and Vinayas, the Buddha exhorts the monks to contemplate the impurity of the body in order to help them overcome their attachment to the body, which could be seen as an early form of "operant conditioning".
   The Chan approach, on the other hand, is not to categorize any kind of phenomena as either "good" or "bad" ---not even so-called "addictive" or "aversive" stimuli. Instead, its approach is to question the actual mind itself so that we start to loosen our belief that there is a solid, permanent "self" experiencing these conditions around us. The less convinced I am that there is a solid enduring self that "craves" or "avoids", the more likely these cravings and aversions will start to disappear on their own, because I am no longer believing that they "refer" to a self. This is a much more direct, albeit somewhat harder to experience or practice, approach, as opposed to one in which certain phenomena are being challenged or uprooted.
  It's a little bit like the difference between seeing one's mind as the character in a movie and seeing the entire experience of the movie (including the screen and background elements) as one's mind. In the former case, I attach to the idea that there is a single protagonist who sees the movie from a single view that it is enduring, and is not the objects that are around it. This idea gives rise to the fear of being annihilated by powerful and averse elements, as well as the craving for beautiful or appealing ones, as though they existed outside the self and were "buffeting" the self from all directions. If one is able to see that the entire movie and the background screen is the mind, one does not attach to a particular view or character as being "me" or "mine" and does not even root for one character or another.
  In Tea Words Volume II, Master Sheng Yen refers to differences between Chan and therapy when he remarks, "In general, psychotherapy is more analytical while Chan is more direct. It is also important to add that unless the Chan master is very expert, it will be difficult for him or her to effectively help people. By contrast some types of therapy can be learned in a reasonable amount of time, so that a therapist can provide his or her patients with some relief. But in the beginning it is not easy to combine the two approaches." (p.13). This is very important to know. Although I might think that Chan methods are more direct and therefore less time consuming than therapeutic ones, in fact the opposite might be the case as well. Someone with a very severe personal issue might not have the time to directly address that issue and reach a point of mental stability by going on long retreats or cultivating Chan practice and theories for extended periods of time. In those cases, it might not hurt to learn some therapeutic approaches as ways to allow a person to think along multiple lines of inquiry into their suffering. Again, my tendency and preference is to see these two approaches as complementary to one another.

Sheng Yen (2013). Tea Words Volume II. Elmhurst, NY: Dharma Drum Publications