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The particular appeal of this book lies in the clarity with which basic Buddhism and Jung's essential ideas on individuation, self-realisation and the ego-self axis are expounded. Both authors are analytical psychologists, and both were analysed by C. A. Meier. They have known each other for twenty-five years in professional, social and religious settings, the latter being particularly important because Miyuki is
a thirteenth generation Buddhist priest, with whom Spiegelman meditated for seven years. Much of their writing has an immediacy about its impact which, I think, comes from direct experience, and so this book avoids much of the turgid philosophising to which writers about Buddhism are prone.
Some of the momentum behind this collection of thirteen papers is the series of perspicacious essays written by Jung on Eastern religions in Volume 11 of the Collected Works. They contain ample admonitions against the unbridled assimilation or imitation of Eastern religious practices; he further warns both West and East against the consequences of abandoning their respective attitudes to the world, and encourages each to understand the other. The present authors have taken up this challenge with considerable success. The Zen Ox-Herding pictures act as a frame for the whole book. Four sets of these pictures are known to exist, two of which are reproduced in the volume under review. Of the two, I have a strong preference for that by a Zen master of the Sung dynasty known as Kaku-an Shi-en, who belonged to the Rinzai school, and who wrote the accompanying poem and the introduction to each picture. The intrinsic beauty and immense subtlety of the pictures are enhanced by the authors' expansive commentaries on the series, in which they stress ‘self-realisation’ and debunk the myth of ‘ego-dissolution’ or ‘ego-depotentiation’. But, paradoxically, the strength of their argument is also the weakness of the book, because they attempt to psychologise about mystery, specifically a