You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a further volume in the series on Jung and spirituality and provides ‘a forum for the critical interaction between Jungian psychology and living spiritual traditions’.
Other titles in this series include Carl Jung and Christian Spirituality edited by Robert L. Moore, and Web of the Universe, Jung, The New Physics, and Human Spirituality, edited by John Hitchcock.
This volume is in three parts. The first, Jung on Buddhism, consists of the foreword to Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism, ‘The psychology of Eastern meditation’, ‘The psychological commentary on “The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation”’ and ‘The psychological commentary on “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”’.
The central part of the book consists of a conversation that took place between Jung and Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, professor of Buddhism at Kyoto University and a leading Zen philosopher of Japan at the time of their meeting in May 1958. Jung was not happy about the conversation being translated and printed because he felt that an understanding had not been reached and because of the problems of what Eastern terms meant and what their Western counterparts were. This is a new translation from the original transcript by Tsujimura, Hisamatsu's interpreter, and Aniela Jaffé, by Professor Isshi Yamada and Daniel Meckel. There follows Jung's ‘commentary’ on the conversation, a letter to the original translator, in which Jung is entirely negative about its usefulness (‘The indispensable groundwork has not been done’), Jung having not done any Zen training, and Hisamatsu being equally unfamiliar with Jung's work.
Hisamatsu's commentary that follows, interesting as it is, tells us more about Hisamatsu's preoccupations and concerns than it does about solving any of the questions which he set out to resolve. These are:
the identities and the differences between the ‘Unconscious’ in psychoanalysis and ‘No Mind’ in Zen;
the identities and differences, between the ‘Self’ of psychoanalysis and the ‘self’ in Zen;
the i