Psychology and the East

C.G. Jung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317528814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'These writings of his are strongly alive; in most instances Jung does not present us with final solutions and last words about any of the great East-West problems, but rather with suggestions for a deeper kind of approach, thus opening up new planes of investigation.' - Journal of Analytical Psychology

"My own world of European consciousness had become peculiarly thin… it is quite possible that India is the real world and that the white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions." C.G. Jung was inspired to write these words after his very first visit to India. Long concerned with the hold that myth and archetype had on the human psyche, it was inevitable that the legendary psychoanalyst would turn his attention to Eastern modes of thought. Psychology and the East collects together many of Jung's most memorable writings on the subject, including his Psychological commentaries on the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, his thoughts on Buddhism and Islam and a full travelogue of that fateful first encounter with India in 1936.

COMMENTARY ON THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER

[In late 1929, in Munich, Jung and the sinologist Richard Wilhelm published Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte: Ein chinesisches Lebensbuch, consisting of Wilhelm’s translation of an ancient Chinese text, T’ai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih (Secret of the Golden Flower), with his notes and discussion of the text, and a “European commentary” by Jung. Earlier the same year, the two authors had published in the Europäische Revue (Berlin), V: 2/8 (Nov.), 530–42, a much abbreviated version entitled “Tschang Scheng Schu; Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern” (i.e., “Ch’ang Sheng Shu; The Art of Prolonging Life”), an alternative title of the “Golden Flower.”

[In 1931, Jung’s and Wilhelm’s joint work appeared in English as The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, translated by Cary F. Baynes (London and New York), containing as an appendix Jung’s memorial address for Wilhelm, who had died in 1930. (For “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm,” see Vol. 15 of the Collected Works.)

[A second, revised edition of the German original was published in 1938 (Zurich), with a special foreword by Jung and his Wilhelm memorial address. Two more (essentially unaltered) editions followed, and in 1957 appeared a fifth, entirely reset edition (Zurich), which added a related text, the Hui Ming Ching, and a new foreword by Salome Wilhelm, the translator’s widow.

[Mrs. Baynes prepared a revision of her translation, and this appeared in 1962 (New York and London), including Jung’s foreword and the additional Wilhelm material. (Her revised translation of Jung’s commentary alone had appeared in an anthology, Psyche and Symbol, edited by Violet S. de Laszlo, Anchor Books, New York, 1958.)

[The following translation of Jung’s commentary and his foreword is based closely on Mrs. Baynes’ version, from which some of the editorial notes have also been taken over. Four pictures of the stages of meditation, from the Hui Ming Ching, which accompanied the “Golden Flower” text, have been reproduced because of their pertinence to Jung’s commentary; the examples of European mandalas have not been retained, since most of them were published, in a different context, in “Concerning Mandala Symbolism,” Vol. 9, part i, of the Collected Works, and in the paperback Mandala Symbolism.

—EDITORS.]

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION

My deceased friend, Richard Wilhelm, co-author of this book, sent me the text of The Secret of the Golden Flower at a time that was crucial for my own work. This was in 1928. I had been investigating the processes of the collective unconscious since the year 1913, and had obtained results that seemed to me questionable in more than one respect. They not only lay far beyond everything known to “academic” psychology, but they also over-stepped the bounds of any medical, purely personal, psychology. They confronted me with an extensive phenomenology to which hitherto known categories and methods could no longer be applied. My results, based on fifteen years of effort, seemed inconclusive, because no possibility of comparison offered itself. I knew of no realm of human experience with which I might have backed up my findings with some degree of assurance. The only analogies—and these, I must say, were far removed in time—I found scattered among the reports of the heresiologists. This connection did not in any way ease my task; on the contrary, it made it more difficult, because the Gnostic systems consist only in small part of immediate psychic experiences, the greater part being speculative and systematizing recensions. Since we possess only very few complete texts, and since most of what is known comes from the reports of Christian opponents, we have, to say the least, an inadequate knowledge of the history as well as the content of this strange and confused literature, which is so difficult to evaluate. Moreover, considering the fact that a period of not less than seventeen to eighteen hundred years separates us from that age, support from that quarter seemed to me extraordinarily risky. Again, the connections were for the most part of a subsidiary nature and left gaps at just the most important points, so that I found it impossible to make use of the Gnostic material.

The text that Wilhelm sent me helped me out of this difficulty. It contained exactly those items I had long sought for in vain among the Gnostics. Thus the text afforded me a welcome opportunity to publish, at least in provisional form, some of the essential results of my investigations.

At that time it seemed to me a matter of no importance that The Secret of the Golden Flower is not only a Taoist text concerned with Chinese yoga, but is also an alchemical treatise. A deeper study of the Latin treatises has taught me better and has shown me that the alchemical character of the text is of prime significance, though I shall not go into this point more closely here. I would only like to emphasize that it was the text of the Golden Flower that first put me on the right track. For in medieval alchemy we have the long-sought connecting link between Gnosis and the processes of the collective unconscious that can be observed in modern man.¹

I would like to take this opportunity to draw attention to certain misunderstandings to which even well-informed readers of this book have succumbed. Not infrequently people thought that my purpose in publishing it was to put into the hands of the public a recipe for achieving happiness. In total misapprehension of all that I say in my commentary, these readers tried to imitate the “method” described in the Chinese text. Let us hope these representatives of spiritual profundity were few in number!

Another misunderstanding gave rise to the opinion that, in my commentary, I was to some extent describing my own therapeutic method, which, it was said, consisted in my instilling Eastern ideas into my patients for therapeutic purposes. I do not believe there is anything in my commentary that lends itself to that sort of superstition. In any case such an opinion is altogether erroneous, and is based on the widespread view that psychology was invented for a specific purpose and is not an empirical science. To this category belongs the superficial as well as unintelligent opinion that the idea of the collective unconscious is “metaphysical.” On the contrary, it is an empirical concept to be put alongside the concept of instinct, as is obvious to anyone who will read with some attention.

C. G. J.

Küsnacht/Zurich, 1938

1. DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY A EUROPEAN IN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE EAST

A thorough Westerner in feeling, I cannot but be profoundly impressed by the strangeness of this Chinese text. It is true that some knowledge of Eastern religions and philosophies helps my intellect and my intuition to understand these things up to a point, just as I can understand the paradoxes of primitive beliefs in terms of “ethnology” or “comparative religion.” This is of course the Western way of hiding one’s heart under the cloak of so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because the misérable vanité des savants fears and rejects with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly because sympathetic understanding might transform contact with an alien spirit into an experience that has to be taken seriously. Our so-called scientific objectivity would have reserved this text for the philological acumen of sinologists, and would have guarded it jealously from any other interpretation. But Richard Wilhelm penetrated too deeply into the secret and mysterious vitality of Chinese wisdom to allow such a pearl of intuitive insight to disappear into the pigeon-holes of specialists. I am greatly honoured that his choice of a psychological commentator has fallen upon me.

This, however, involves the risk that this precious example of more-than-specialist insight will be swallowed by still another specialism. Nevertheless, anyone who belittles the merits of Western science is undermining the foundations of the Western mind. Science is not indeed a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an end in itself. Science must serve; it errs when it usurps the throne. It must be ready to serve all its branches, for each, because of its insufficiency, has need of support from the others. Science is the tool of the Western mind, and with it one can open more doors than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our understanding, and it obscures our insight only when it claims that the understanding it conveys is the only kind there is. The East teaches us another, broader, more profound, and higher understanding—understanding through life. We know this only by hearsay, as a shadowy sentiment expressing a vague religiosity, and we are fond of putting “Oriental wisdom” in quotation marks and banishing it to the dim region of faith and superstition. But that is wholly to misunderstand the realism of the East. Texts of this kind do not consist of the sentimental, overwrought mystical intuitions of pathological cranks and recluses, but are based on the practical insights of highly evolved Chinese minds, which we have not the slightest justification for undervaluing.

This assertion may seem bold, perhaps, and is likely to cause a good deal of head-shaking. Nor is that surprising, considering how little people know about the material. Its strangeness is indeed so arresting that our puzzlement as to how and where the Chinese world of thought might be joined to ours is quite understandable. The usual mistake of Western man when faced with this problem of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust. Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away by Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes a pitiable imitator. (Theosophy is our best example of this.) Thus he abandons the one sure foundation of the Western mind and loses himself in a mist of words and ideas that could never have originated in European brains and can never be profitably grafted upon them.

An ancient adept has said: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”² This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the “right” method irrespective of the man who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method. The method is merely the path, the direction taken by a man; the way he acts is the true expression of his nature. If it ceases to be this, the method is nothing more than an affectation, something artificially pieced on, rootless and sapless, serving only the illegitimate goal of self-deception. It becomes a means of fooling oneself and of evading what may perhaps be the implacable law of one’s being. This is far removed from the earthiness and self-reliance of Chinese thought. It is a denial of one’s own nature, a self-betrayal to strange and unclean gods, a cowardly trick for the purpose of feigning mental superiority, everything in fact that is profoundly contrary to the spirit of the Chinese “method.” For these insights spring from a way of life that is complete, genuine, and true to itself; from that ancient, cultural life of China which grew logically and organically from the deepest instincts, and which, for us, is forever inaccessible and impossible to imitate.

Western imitation is a tragic misunderstanding of the psychology of the East, every bit as sterile as the modern escapades to New Mexico, the blissful South Sea islands, and central Africa, where “the primitive life” is played at in deadly earnest while Western man secretly evades his menacing duties, his Hic Rhodus hic salta. It is not for us to imitate what is foreign to our organism or to play the missionary; our task is to build up our Western civilization, which sickens with a thousand ills. This has to be done on the spot, and by the European just as he is, with all his Western ordinariness, his marriage problems, his neuroses, his social and political delusions, and his whole philosophical disorientation.

We should do well to confess at once that, fundamentally, we do not understand the utter unworldliness of a text like this—that actually we do not want to understand it. Have we, perhaps, a dim suspicion that a mental attitude which can direct the glance inward to that extent is detached from the world only because these people have so completely fulfilled the instinctive demands of their natures that there is nothing to prevent them from glimpsing the invisible essence of things? Can it be that the precondition for such a vision is liberation from the ambitions and passions that bind us to the visible world, and does not this liberation come from the sensible fulfilment of instinctive demands rather than from the premature and fear-ridden repression of them? Are our eyes opened to the spirit only when the laws of the earth are obeyed? Anyone who knows the history of Chinese culture and has carefully studied the I Ching, that book of wisdom which for thousands of years has permeated all Chinese thought, will not lightly wave these doubts aside. He will be aware that the views set forth in our text are nothing extraordinary to the Chinese, but are actually inescapable psychological conclusions.

For a long time the spirit, and the sufferings of the spirit, were positive values and the things most worth striving for in our peculiar Christian culture. Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism, and this led to the unpardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit and blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former. The intellect does indeed do harm to the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, for spirit is something higher than intellect since it embraces the latter and includes the feelings as well. It is a guiding principle of life that strives towards superhuman, shining heights. Opposed to this yang principle is the dark, feminine, earthbound yin, whose emotionality and instinctuality reach back into the depths of time and down into the labyrinth of the physiological continuum. No doubt these are purely intuitive ideas, but one can hardly dispense with them if one is trying to understand the nature of the human psyche. The Chinese could not do without them because, as the history of Chinese philosophy shows, they never strayed so far from the central psychic facts as to lose themselves in a one-sided over-development and over-valuation of a single psychic function. They never failed to acknowledge the paradoxicality and polarity of all life. The opposites always balanced one another—a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. The reaction that is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, seems to me a sign of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of a tyrannical intellect.

I have no wish to depreciate the tremendous differentiation of the Western intellect; compared with it the Eastern intellect must be described as childish. (Naturally this has nothing to do with intelligence.) If we should succeed in elevating another, and possibly even a third psychic function to the dignified position accorded to the intellect, then the West might expect to surpass the East by a very great margin. Therefore it is sad indeed when the European departs from his own nature and imitates the East or “affects” it in any way. The possibilities open to him would be so much greater if he would remain true to himself and evolve out of his own nature all that the East has brought forth in the course of the millennia.

In general, and looked at from the incurably externalistic standpoint of the intellect, it would seem as if the things the East values so highly were not worth striving for. Certainly the intellect alone cannot comprehend the practical importance Eastern ideas might have for us, and that is why it can classify them as philosophical and ethnological curiosities and nothing more. The lack of comprehension goes so far that even learned sinologists have not understood the practical use of the I Ching, and consider the book to be no more than a collection of abstruse magic spells.

2. MODERN PSYCHOLOGY OFFERS A POSSIBILITY OF UNDERSTANDIN...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• EDITORIAL NOTE
• Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower
• Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
• Yoga and the West
• The Dreamlike World of India
• What India Can Teach Us
• Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation
• Foreword to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism
• The Psychology of Eastern Meditation
• The Holy Men of India
• Foreword to Abegg, Ostasien denkt anders
• Foreword to the I Ching
• On the Discourses of the Buddha