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The Ideas of Carl Jung in Relation to Other Traditions — Taoism, part 2
This is the latest in a series about the ideas of Carl Jung. I am currently discussing the parallels between his thinking and other religions. Having previously discussed Sufism, in the last article I gave a brief explanation of what Taoism is, and discussed the work of Richard Wilhelm, his friendship with Jung, and the Taoist book of wisdom and oracle the I Ching. Here I’ll discuss another Taoist text on which they collaborated, Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower¹. The edition I own also contains a translation of another text, the Hui Ming Ching or Book of Consciousness and Life, which they also refer to, and about which there is a foreword by Wilhelm’s wife Salome.
Wilhelm says that “the book comes from an esoteric circle in China. For a long time it was transmitted orally, and then in writing”, the first printing being in the 18th century. He obtained a copy of a later reprinting in 1920, which also contained the Hui Ming Ching. He explains it thus: “There have been formed a series of secret sects whose effort is to achieve, by the practice of secret traditions from ancient times, a state of the psyche lifting them above all the misery of life. The methods used are magical writing, prayer, sacrifice, etc., and, in addition to these, mediumistic séances, widely prevalent in China, by means of which direct connection with the gods and the dead is sought. Experiments are also made with the planchette, the flying spirit pencil as the Chinese call it. (It would therefore be a tool for what in the West we call automatic writing.)
“But side by side with these practices there exists an esoteric movement which has devoted itself with energy to the psychological method, that is meditation, or the practice of yoga. The followers of this method, in contradistinction to the European ‘yogis’ to whom these Eastern practices are only a form of sport, achieve, almost without exception, the central experience. Thus it can be said that, as far as the Chinese psyche is concerned, a completely assured method of attaining definite psychic experiences is available”.
There are therefore two aspects to such groups. On the one hand they are engaged in rituals, magical practices and spiritualism; on the other they are mystics devoted to the spiritual path.
Jung calls the book “this unique treasure”, and says that “Richard Wilhelm penetrated into the secret and mysterious vitality of Chinese wisdom too deeply to have allowed such a pearl of intuitive insight to disappear in the pigeonholes of the specialists”. It contains “the subtle psychic experiences of the greatest minds of the East”.
He further says that this text was “critical for my own work. I had been occupied with the investigation of 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 also overstepped the borders of medical, strictly personal, psychology. These findings had to do 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 possible 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”.
He had searched for relevant material among the Gnostics, but for various reasons explained in his foreword found this unsatisfactory. Then, “the text that Wilhelm sent me helped me out of this embarrassment. It contained exactly those pieces which I had sought for in vain among the Gnostics”. This was because it is “not only a Taoist text of Chinese yoga but also an alchemical tract”, and that “the alchemical nature of the text is of prime significance”.
As is well known, Jung made a deep study of Western alchemy, believing that it was a projection of unconscious psychic processes. It was also the foundation for much of his later work. (See especially Psychology and Alchemy, an erudite tract of almost 500 pages.) It is especially significant therefore that he says “that it was the text of The Golden Flower that first put me in the direction of the right track. For we have in medieval alchemy the long-sought connecting-link between Gnosis and the processes of the collective unconscious, observable to us today in modern man”.
On that theme he quotes the text: “If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand, and there hidden, let thy true self always dwell”. He interprets this as an alchemical instruction, “there must be an intensification of consciousness in order that the dwelling place of the spirit may be ‘illumined’. But not only consciousness, life itself must be intensified. The union of these two produces ‘conscious life’ ”.
He further says: “I did not have a knowledge, however inadequate, of a Chinese philosophy as a starting point. On the contrary, when I began my life-work in the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously led along that secret way which has been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East for centuries… Richard Wilhelm, that great interpreter of the soul of China, fully confirmed the parallel for me. This gave me the courage to write about a Chinese text which belongs entirely to the mysterious shadows of the Eastern mind. At the same time, and this is the extraordinary thing, in content it is a living parallel to what takes place in the psychic development of my patients, none of whom is Chinese”. What Jung calls the collective unconscious is presumably responsible for this.
Jung finds equivalents in the text for his understanding of animus and anima, for example: “Many years ago, before Wilhelm acquainted me with this text, I used the concept ‘anima’ in a way quite analogous to the Chinese definition of p’o, and of course entirely apart from any metaphysical premise”.
More importantly, he finds other parallels in the text’s extensive use of symbols, including the mandala which, as he says “is not only to be found all through the East but also among us”. (Jung believes that the mandala is the primary symbol of the self, the image of the divine in a human.) He points out that the Golden Flower of the title is itself a mandala, and says that “our text promises to ‘reveal the secret of the Golden Flower of the Great One’. The Golden Flower is the light, and the light of heaven is the Tao”.
“The beginning, in which everything is still one, and which therefore appears as the highest goal, lies at the bottom of the sea in the darkness of the unconscious. In the germinal vesicle, consciousness and life (‘human nature’ and ‘life’, hsing-ming) are still a ‘unity’, ‘inseparably mixed like the sparks in the refining furnace’. ‘Within the germinal vesicle is the fire of the ruler’. ‘…all the sages began their work at the germinal vesicle’. Note the fire analogies. I know a series of European mandala drawings in which something like a plant seed surrounded by its coverings is shown floating in water, and from the depths below, fire penetrating the seed makes it grow and causes the formation of a large golden flower from within the germinal vesicle. This symbolism refers to a sort of alchemical process of refining and ennobling; darkness gives birth to light; out of the ‘lead of the water-region’ grows the noble gold; what is unconscious becomes conscious in the form of a process of life and growth… In this way the union of consciousness and life takes place”.
The fifth German Edition of the text also contains a later Taoist text written in 1794, the Hui Ming Ching. The foreword is written by Wilhelm’s wife Salome. There she quotes Wilhelm: “The text combines Buddhist and Taoist directions for meditation. The basic view is that at birth the two spheres of the psyche, consciousness and the unconscious, become separated. Consciousness is the element marking what is separated off, individualized, in a person, and the unconscious is the element that unites him with the cosmos. The unification of the two elements via meditation is the principle upon which the work is based. The unconscious must be inseminated by consciousness being immersed in it. In this way the unconscious is activated and thus, together with an enriched consciousness enters upon a supra-personal mental level in the form of a spiritual rebirth. This rebirth then leads first to a progressing inner differentiation of the conscious state into autonomous thought structures. However, the conclusion of the meditation leads of necessity to the wiping out of all differences in the final integrated life, which is free of opposites”.
We can easily understand therefore why Jung was so impressed by the parallels between his own thinking and Taoism.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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Footnote:
- Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962, 7th reprinting 1979
