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The central thesis of this excellently printed book is an ancient Chinese manuscript on the Yoga or mystical philosophy of the East. It was discovered by the great German sinologist, Richard Wilhelm, who, impressed by its possibilities as a practical outline for personality development, made a painstaking translation of its contents. Professor Jung, finding in it a connecting link between the mystical psychology of the East and the findings of his own school in their practical studies on patients, has undertaken to explain the resemblances, and has, therefore, thrown much light on what otherwise might be obscure.
Wilhelm in his introduction to the text states concerning its origin, “The book comes from an esoteric circle in China. For a long time it was transmitted orally, and then in writing; the first printing is from the Ch'ien-Lung period (eighteenth century). Finally, a thousand copies of it were reprinted in Pekin in 1920, together with the Hui Ming Ching, and were divided among a small group of people who, in the opinion of the editor, understood the questions discussed. In this way I was able to get a copy.”
The trend of thought in this philosophy is to the effect that the Cosmos and man in the last analysis obey common laws, that man is not divided from the cosmos by any fixed limits; that man participates by nature in all cosmic events with which he is inwardly and outwardly interwoven. “Tao” (meaning) is the beginning, the meaning of the world, the original thing out of which develop the principles of reality with its two poles, light and darkness. From the “meaning of light and darkness “the principle was expanded to all polar opposites, including the sexual. It is interesting to observe that it has taken our Western physicists and mathematicians many years to definitely determine the fundamental nature of light, while the Chinese utilizing their principle which Jung calls “synchronistic “were able to begin with light as the fundamental element. The body i