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In the introductory section of this collection of papers from the Kyoto 2006 Conference on ‘Self and No-Self in Psychotherapy and Buddhism’, Ando lays out the fundamental differences between the two bodies of thought in a clear and illuminating paper. Whereas psychotherapy stresses the importance of the development of a strong ego, Buddhism ‘maintains a fundamental standpoint of Anatman (no-self), and regards the ego as an illusion without any substantive reality’. In another introductory paper, Gunn discusses the assertion by his first Zen teacher that ‘psychology and Buddhism are ever at odds, because psychology is concerned with creating a self and Buddhism is concerned with getting rid of the self and attaining no-self’. This central point of debate continues throughout the book which is at its most interesting when the conflict is fully recognized and not dodged. Perhaps, paradoxically, the Jungian contributors have the hardest time of it because, unlike the more transparent limitations of the concept of the ego, the breadth and depth of that of the ‘Self’ can deceive us into thinking we have something that is the same as that of ‘no-self’ when we may yet be a world away.
It is this gap in understanding—or perhaps experience—which lies behind the tetchiness of the encounter between Jung and the Zen scholar Shin'ichi Hisamatsu in 1958, a version of which can be found in The Couch and the Tree (1998). Whilst Jung's interest in Eastern philosophies is well known, it is the Hindu concept of Atman, the ‘soul’ or ‘true self’ that he seems comfortable with. Whilst this term goes beyond identification with the phenomenal reality of worldly existence, it nevertheless retains a sense of substance. The Buddhist concept of anatman or anatta, roughly translated as ‘no-self’, is a quantum leap on from this position, it transcends subject-object duality entirely and takes us into a realm outside of what the rational mind can grasp through thought.
There is, thus, an asymmetry i