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Pamela D. Winfield
A Question of Balance:
Jung's Misreading of Buddhist Symbolism
A one-time disciple of Sigmund
Freud's, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is credited with contributing
significantly to the burgeoning field of psychotherapy by formulating
some of the first ideas regarding dream analysis, psychological
complexes and archetypes (paradigmatic images or instinctive impulses
to action). As part of his search for universal keys to the human
psyche, Jung also studied and wrote numerous commentaries throughout
his career on Eastern religious texts and practices. His reading
of Buddhism however, is fundamentally faulted as evidenced by
his misunderstanding and misrepresentation of mandala symbolism.
Originally, Buddhist mandalas1 aide-mémoires that helped
meditators keep focussed during long elaborate visualizations.
They were two-dimensional circumscribed square floor plans that
represented three-dimensional palatial constructions. Each mandala
palace was equated in meditation with the psycho-spatial complex
of the meditator himself, so that any Buddha or2
depicted within his projected self-construction was understood
to be a personification of his own enlightenment potential. The
meditator would then mentally circumambulate his own palatial
self-projection and consciously identify himself with the palace's
(i.e. with his own) resident bodhisattvas. After effecting
this transformative deity yoga, the meditator would then dissolve
the entire edifice into emptiness. He thereby constructed, transformed
and dissolved his own psycho-physical complex into the empty nature
of Buddhahood.
According to Carl Jung however,
mandalas expressed the deep-seated universal archetype of the
completely whole Self which balanced and integrated its conscious
and unconscious contents. Mandalas "represent a compensation
of the psychic cleavage, or an anticipation that the cleavage
will be surmounted," he wrote, and "since this process
takes place in the collective unconscious,3
it manifests itself everywhere." (Memories 335)
For Jung therefore, all the world's religious, mythological or
dreamed 'magic circles' or circumscribed quaternary figures were
in fact symbolic cryptograms that expressed and therapeutically
effected one's unconscious desire for psychic wholeness.4
This singular wholeness of the Self, then, was both an empirical
certainty and a desirable end for Jung. He writes "[the mandala
is the] living conception of the self. The self, I thought, was
like the monad that I am, and which is my world. The mandala represents
this monad, and corresponds to the microcosmic nature of the psyche."
(196).
Buddhist mandala meditations
thus functioned to deconstruct self-centeredness, but Jungian
mandalas served to affirm, sustain and maintain the health and
integrity of the "monad" of the self. And while Buddhist
mandala visualizations culminated in the existential act of dissolving
elaborate self-constructions into emptiness, Jung's mandala therapy
ultimately culminated in "individuation" or the personal
and conscious realization of the universal Self that lies at the
unconscious center of our being. 5
In light of his universal psychologizing
of the mandala motif, one must ask just how or why Jung
hermeneutically superimposed his psychological balancing act of
conscious and unconscious elements over the mandala motif, when
in fact no such cognitive categories were ever envisioned in the
mandala's original Buddhist context. How could Jung have read
so much into the Buddhist mandala that wasn't there originally?
Granted, in a typical turn-of-the-century Orientalist6
impulse, Jung simply appropriated an exotic Sanskrit label to
package his ideas regarding universal psycho-symbols of balance
and centrality, but how, or rather where, did
Jung get such radically different ideas regarding mandala symbolism?
This paper proposes one such
explanation from a very unlikely source: not Freud, not Taoism
or alchemy (although these sources later reinforced and nuanced
his ideas) but rather from Immanuel Kant. Specifically, the bi-polar
principles of attraction and repulsion presented in Kant's Natural
History and Theory of the Heavens published in 1900 profoundly
influenced Jung in his 1902 doctoral dissertation entitled On
the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena: On
Hysterical Misreading. Jung unknowingly fed this Kantian
worldview to the inauthentic mediumistic subject of his dissertation,
his fifteen-year-old niece "S.W." She then lovingly
recast it and fed it back to him as an occult mandala-like cosmogony,
replete with neo-Manichean dualities and a colorful mythic ontogenesis.
Jung later discovered that S.W.'s paranormal abilities were fraudulent,
and that she fabricated her visions in response to his own ideas
to hold his interest. However, this psychologized Kantian cosmology
found continued expression in Jung's own 1916 pseudonymous work
Septem Sermones ad Mortuos after which he drew the first
of many mandalas. It is likely therefore, that Jung fed his own
ideas on Kantian cosmology to his fifteen year-old niece S.W.,
who then distilled it all back to him in the mythic forms of a
"medium's" visions, which he then later re-expressed
in his own pseudo-gnostic "Seven Sermons." It shall
be argued therefore, that this quasi-mystico-scientific Weltanshauung
was Jung's first "mandala" so to speak, and that it
stuck.
Buddhist Mandalas
The term mandala in its traditional
Buddhist context is a polyvalent term referring to several distinct
yet interrelated concepts. It can refer to one's microcosmic body,
to the macrocosmic universe as a whole, to a two-dimensional bird's-eye
view blueprint for a three-dimensional multi-storied palace, to
one's mind, or the path to Buddhahood itself. It can be danced,
chanted, visualized or painted in colored sand or ink, but all
of these mandala media function identically; that is, their purpose
is to lead the adept into a radical self-identification with the
empty nature of reality. In this vertiginous experience of non-differentiated
being, one's self, one's body, one's mind, the painted mandala
palace, and the apparent mandala world should all be considered
as parts or aspects of the same reality which Buddhists characterize
as being empty of any permanent reality. Given this scheme,
everything is mutually conditioned. No-thing, including the notion
of the self, can exist in and for itself.
Unlike Hinduism which maintains
the notion of a permanent, unchanging and divine self/soul (tman),
Buddhist doctrine proposes that we realize the truth of no-self
(an-tman). According to Buddhist doctrine, the self is
but a karmically compelled confluence of influences which ultimately
link back to all the other forms in the universe. It is a temporary
conglomeration of sensations, perceptions, feelings and cognitions
enveloped within a constantly changing form. The Buddhists therefore
claim that everything exists in dependence upon everything else
around it, and the whole is characterized as being impermanent
and subject to constant flux and transformation. In this scheme
of mutual dependence and impermanence of forms, the reified, permanent
notions of "I," "me," "mine," the
self," or "the ego" are considered to be dualistic
contrivances that actually constitute the cause and karmic fuel
for the suffering of conditioned existence (samsra).
One's task then, lies in eradicating the root cause of suffering
(i.e. one's own ego-driven desires) so that one can attain the
detached equipoise of nirvna.
Jungian Mandalas
In contradistinction to Buddhist
mandalas, mandalas as described by Jung do not seek to deconstruct
the self. They do not strive to eradicate false notions of self
in order to achieve the cessation of suffering. Rather, they seek
to end the dissociative suffering of split-off psychic elements
by integrating the conscious and unconscious planes of cognition
into a balanced wholeness of the self.
According to Jung, the self
is usually divided into its light and dark aspects: a deliberate,
rational, ego-driven and Logos-dominated consciousness on the
one hand, and an autonomously functioning, irrational, shadow-driven
and Eros-dominated unconscious on the other. In Jung's conceptual
scheme, the "personal unconscious" inherits from the
larger "collective unconscious" a rich reserve of archetypes
that can dominate, compel, inspire or terrify the individual through
dreams, visions, fantasies, daydreams, etc. Through the process
of "individuation," the analysand assimilates the shadows
of the unconscious into the light of consciousness, and it is
this psychic wholeness which, Jung maintains, the mandalas represent.
How this bi-polar construct (and all its themes of cleavage, integration
of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum, unia mystica
etc.) becomes a quadrilateral or circular mandala is never fully
explained by Jung, although others like Moacanin have attempted
to equate these themes in structurally superficial attempts at
Jungian / Buddhist hermeneutics.7
In short, instead of viewing
the Buddhist mandala in its original light as an expedient
means to deconstructing the artificially-constructed self and
experiencing its ultimate emptiness, Jung sees the mandala as
a means of expressing or recapturing the very health, integrity,
harmony and cohesion of this thing he called the self. Furthermore,
instead of waking up to the ultimate emptiness of all the constructs
of cognition, Jung believed that the more fully one integrates
the shadows of the unconscious into the light of the conscious
self, the closer one approaches his goal of individuation. Thus,
Jung's psychological vision of mandalas expressing the wholeness
of a reified self archetype fundamentally clashes with the most
basic doctrine of Buddhism, that of no-self (an-tman).
For Jung therefore, the self is an unquestioned empirical psychic
reality that is expressed in mandalas of all forms, while for
the Buddhists, the self is but an empty illusion to be transcended
though mandala yoga so as to realize the ultimate co-dependent
and inter-relatedness of being.
Why Jung Misread Mandala Symbolism
Since it has been shown that
Jung's ideas regarding the mandala motif fundamentally differ
from those of its original Buddhist context, one must next consider
the possible reasons for his heterodox reading. The first possibility
is that Jung had very little accurate knowledge of Buddhist doctrine
or mandala meditation techniques, for reliable studies
on "Lamaism" in general were extremely scarce in Europe
before Tibet was forced open in the middle of this century. A
second possibility is that he conveniently disregarded Buddhist
doctrinal inconsistencies to privilege his own hermeneutical interpretations
stemming from his introverted, intuitive personality type. In
between these two extreme stances (i.e. the innocuous innocent
vs. the deceptive, self-serving operative) lies a third and altogether
different possibility. Namely, Jung was predisposed to thinking
about mandala in a certain way, and these pre-existing
ideas colored his interpretation of mandala symbolism.
Unchecked by any expert and heedless of Buddhism's deeper goals
and ontological presuppositions, Jung could, in typical Orientalist
fashion, label his psychological scheme with an exotic Sanskrit
term and thereby universalize his ideas on the human psyche.
Jung's heterodox reading of
the mandala motif could be accounted for if he already
had a macro-cosmological template in mind to describe micro-cosmic
psychological phenomena. One of the first such possible mandala
templates could have been provided to Jung by Immanuel Kant's
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens published in
1900 which Jung included in his 1902 doctoral dissertation On
Hysterical Misreading. Significantly enough, this Kantian
template as interpreted by Jung and then reinterpreted by the
infatuated and fraudulent medium S.W. includes precisely those
light and dark bi-polar elements within the general quadrilateral
and circular schema which could not be explicitly identified in
the Buddhist mandalas. Could not Jung then, have been seeing all
the world's "mandalas" through the lens of a psychologized
Kantian cosmogony?
Although his own autobiography
begun at age 82 inaccurately dates his 'discovery' of the mandala
symbol to the year 1918-20,8 Jung's first
"mandala" actually appears as early as in his 1902 doctoral
dissertation. Influenced by fin de siècle Spiritism
and by the general occult Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth
century, Jung investigated the "feeling-toned complexes"
and the "psychic cosmology" of his fifteen year-old
niece S.W., who over a period of two years, channeled psychic
entities or "spirits" during their weekly séances.
His dissertation on the young medium reports that
...in the winter of 1899 / 1900,
we spoke several times in S.W.'s presence of attractive and repulsive
forces in connection with Kant's Natural History and Theory
of the Heavens (Glasgow, 1900), also of the law of the conservation
of energy, of the different forms of energy, and of whether the
force of gravity is also a form of motion. From the content of
these talks S.W. had evidently derived the foundations of her
mystic system (40).

Fig. 1. Jung's and S.W.'s neo-Kantian
cosmogony (Hysterical Misreading 40).
S.W.'s distillation of Jung's
Kant-inspired psycho-ontogenetic system consisted of seven concentric
circles of Light or Dark cosmic forces (Fig. 1). These seven rings
were extended around a central Primary Force, which was "the
original cause of creation and a spiritual force" (40)9 Later, Jung would indiscriminately equate
mandalas' central Christ or Buddha figures (or any perfected Self
archetype) with this Primary Force in the unconscious. The entire
series of seven rings was neatly divided into quadrants by horizontal
and vertical axes, which intersected at the central Primary Force.
This perfectly balanced cruciform circle of wholeness and balance
then constituted S.W.'s paradigmatic "psychic cosmology"
which Jung tended to superimpose over any of the world's "magic
circles."
Jung further explains that in
S.W.'s "mystical system," the Primary Force initially
combines with Matter, and the spiritual forces of Light and Dark
are created. On the left side of the vertical axis is the "Magnesor"
group of cosmic forces, which display the good Power of Light
as manifested in the life force of man, animals and plants, and
as manifested in heat, light, electricity, magnetism and motion.
By contrast, located on the right side of the axis mundi is
the "Conesor" group of bad, Dark Forces which manifest
in minerals (such as a rare stone that counteracts snake poison),10 the forces of resistance (gravity, capillarity,
adhesion and cohesion) and certain special powers (raising or
lowering the deceased to the Light or Dark side after death).11
S.W.'s (or rather Jung's) explanation
of the lower and upper quadrants of the "mandala" are
by no means as extensive, but it appears as if the lower "Hypos"
group represents those cosmic forces of animal magnetism and or
sexual chemistry. The opposite "mannus" group above
is not described at all, but its name most likely prefigures that
magical, all-knowing ego-inflation that Jung came to call the
"mana personality" (Two Essays, 227-241)12 which appears after one successfully
integrates unconscious elements into consciousness during the
process of individuation.
In short, Kant's basic forces
of compulsion and repulsion, as well as lower and higher levels
of being, all prefigure Jung's perennial preoccupation with countervailing,
almost mechanically balanced equi-forces within the psyche, for
"in every circle there are analogous forces of equal strength
working in opposite directions" (Hysterical Misreading,
41). In this way, one sees how Jung links the scientifically disclosed
mechanics of a balanced universe back into the realm of the psychically
whole vision of the self.
The Legacy of Jung's Misread Mandala
Significantly enough, the concentrically
ringed seven-part structure of Kant's and S.W.'s worlds is identically
reflected in the form and content of Jung's 1916 Septem Sermones
ad Mortuos, after which Jung drew his first mandala. He writes
"I had painted the first mandala in 1916 after writing the
Septem Sermones; naturally I had not, then, understood
it" (Memories, 195).13
In his psycho-ontogenetic collection of seven sermons, Jung pseudonymously
aligns himself with the early second century c.e. Gnostic mystic
Basilides and subtitles the work "The Seven Sermons to the
Dead Written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the
East toucheth the West" (38, italics mine).14
Although Jung never explicitly
connects the seven sermons to Kant's ( = his own = S.W.'s) cosmologies,
the content of each sermon directly parallels the content of each
Kantian "ring" as re-interpreted by S.W. in Jung's dissertation.
Compare, for example, the 1902 dissertation excerpts with their
1916 Seven Sermons equivalents:
- 1902 Dissertation: In the center stands the Primary Force;
this is the original cause of creation and is a spiritual force.
- 1916 SS: Harken, I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is
the same as fullness.... This nothingness or fullness we name
the Pleroma15
- 1902 Dissertation:Matter...is not a true force and does not
arise from this Primary Force.
- 1916 SS: ...Creatura is not in the Pleroma, but in itself
- 1902 Dissertation: On one side the Good or Light Powers (Magnesor),
on the other side the Dark Powers (Conesor). The Magnesor Power
contains the most Primary Force, and the Connesor Power the least,
since there the dark power of matter is greatest.
- 1916 SS: We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of
the Pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as -
The Effective and the Ineffective. Fullness and Emptiness. Living
and Dead. Difference and Sameness, Light and Darkness, The Hot
and the Cold. Force and Matter. Time and Space. Good and Evil.
Beauty and Ugliness. The one and the Many. etc. 16
Here then, one comes to understand
that Kant's mechanistic cosmology inspired Jung (and by extension
S.W. in his dissertation), and that Kant continued to capture
Jung's imagination fourteen years later in his Seven Sermons.
The suggestion / feedback dynamic between himself and S.W. regarding
these Kantian ideas however never occurred to him. Over thirty
years later, Jung still based the majority of his work on his
channeling sessions with SW. In his 1935 preface to the second
edition of his "Two Essays On Analytical Psychology,"
Jung explicitly cites his 1902 "psychic history or a young
girl somnambulist" as the material which inspired his "long-standing
endeavor to grasp and -- at least in its essential features --
to depict the strange character and course of that drame intérieur,
the transformation process of the unconscious psyche" (Two
Essays, 123). It could be argued, in fact, that this first
undeclared "mandala" of Jung's provided him with the
basic prototype or micro-macrocosmic template through which he
tended to view all other world-wide mandalas. This psychologized,
Kantian worldview -- this quasi-mystico-scientific Weltanshauung
-- was Jung's first "mandala" so to speak, and
it stuck. 17
Conclusion
In conclusion, Jung committed
two major errors in his wholesale appropriation of the Sanskrit
term mandala. Not only was he ignorant of the true ontological
basis for mandala meditations in Esoteric Buddhism (i.e.
emptiness), but he also grafted his own psychologized Kantian
metaphysics onto them so as to make them "universal"
and "archetypal." In fact, in true Orientalist fashion,
he appropriated an exotic, foreign term and made it palatable
to Western audiences under the guise of universality. As a result,
he offers perhaps the most famously deviant of readings of mandala
symbolism, in terms of ontology, psychology and teleology.
Furthermore, Jung himself did
not recognize his own hand in the ontogenesis of his so-called
mandala archetype. He dates his first mandalas to the year 1916
after writing the Seven Sermons, but does not realize or admit
that his first "mandala," so to speak, occurred as early
as his 1902 dissertation. This proto-mandala template, the lens
through which Jung tended to view all other "magic circles"
of the world, was in fact, modeled on his own understanding of
Kant's polarized cosmology, though he attributed it to his niece's
mythologized "visions." He unconsciously or inadvertently
fed this Weltanshauung to S.W., she literally channeled
it directly back to him, and it continued to inspire his perennial
balancing act between conscious and unconscious, light and dark
etc. throughout the rest of his career.
Although one often wishes that
Jung had been more attentive to the philosophical underpinnings
of the original Buddhist mandala that figures like Alexandra
David-Neel was introducing into Europe, he is not to be judged
too harshly for some of his grosser misunderstandings and misrepresentations
regarding mandala imagery and its attendant notions of
the self. He was neither a religious scholar nor an art historian.
His sphere of interest lay in the late nineteenth-century occult
sciences, the realms of mediums and mystical symbol systems, which
could arbitrarily confound Kantian metaphysics with Buddhist imagery.
He, like any one of us, was subject to his own previous influences.
He, like any one of us, saw what he wanted to see when a particular
interest captured the imagination and fueled the fire for learning.
After all, who can escape a lifetime of conditioning in the initial
encounter with the Other? Perhaps all one can really hope for
is simply a sort of psychic "city" of Gnostic understanding
where East meets West and where two world-mandalas can briefly
"touch."
Works Cited
- Burton, Naomi, Hart, Brother Patrick and Laughlin, James,
eds. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New
Directions, 1975.
- Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image. Princeton: Princeton
UP, Bollingen Series 100, 1974.
- Jaffe , Aniella. "The Symbol of the Circle." Man
and His Symbols. Carl Gustav Jung. New York: Doubleday,
1964. 240-243.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. On
the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena: On
Hysterical Misreading. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Psychiatric
Studies in Collected Works, Vol.1. London: Routledge, 1957.
- ---. Psychology and the East. Princeton: Princeton
UP, Bollingen Series, 1978.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
New York: Random House, 1961.
- ---. "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious"
(Part II "Individuation," section 4). Two Essays
on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works. Vol.
7. Princeton: Princeton UP, Bollingen Series 20, 1966-77.
- Leidy, Denise Patry and Thurman,
Robert A.F. Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment
(Exhibition Catalogue, Sept. 24, 1997-January 4, 1998), co-organized
by Asia Society Gallery and Tibet House, New York. Boston: Shambala,
1997.
- Moacanin, Radmila. Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism:
Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart. London: Wisdom,
1986.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
- Schumacher, Stephan and Woerner, Gert, eds. The Encyclopedia
of Eastern Philosophy and Religion. Boston: Shambala, 1994.
- Tucci, Giuseppe. The Theory and Practice of the Mandala.
London: Rider, 1969.
Selected Bibliography
- Albanese, Catherine L. "The Multi-Dimensional Mandala:
A Study in the Interiorization of Sacred Space." Numen:
International Review for the History of Religions. Vol.
24. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.
- Brauen, Martin, and Wilson, Martin, trans. The Mandala:
Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Shambala, 1997.
- Epstein, Mark. "The Deconstruction of the Self: Ego
and Egolessness in Buddhist Insight Meditation." The
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 20.1 (1988): 61-69.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious."
Collect gen Series,
1978. Originally published in 1935 as "Psychologischer Kommentar
zum Bardo Thodol." Das Tibetanische Totenbuch.
- Russel, Elbert W. "Consciousness and the Unconscious:
Eastern Meditative And Western Psychotherapeutic Approaches."
The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology18.1 (1986):
51-72.
- Waldron, William. "A Comparison of the Alayavijnana
with Freud's and Jung's Theories of the Unconscious." Annual
Memoirs of the Otani University Shin Buddhist Comprehensive Research
Institute 6 (1988): 109-150.
- Wayman, Alex. "Contributions on the Symbolism of the
Mandala Palace." Etudes Tibetaines, Dediées à
la Mémoire de Marcelle Lalou. Paris: Librairie d'Amerique
et d'Orient, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1971.
Notes
- 1. I have chosen to generally describe only Tibetan Buddhist
mandalas which in itself is problematic given the literal "pharmacopoeia"
(Thurman, 1998) of mandalas in esoteric Buddhism. I will therefore
not consider all mandala manifestations of all times and all
places as Jung did. My reasons for doing so are precisely to
highlight the differences in the theoretical underpinnings of
Jungian psychology vis à vis Buddhism. Furthermore, I
have chosen to exclude the original Sanskrit diacritical marks
since the term mandala has entered into common English usage
(in large part due to Jung's writings).
- 2. Bodhisattva: one who compassionately forestalls ultimate
enlightenment to help all sentient beings achieve enlightenment.
- 3. The collective unconscious (as opposed to the personal
unconscious) is the storehouse of all the universal archetypes.
- 4. See especially Aniella Jaffe in Jung, Man and His Symbols
240-243.
- 5. Jung's conceptual scheme actually indicates a radical
explosion of the personal self to accommodate the archetypal
Self, and of the personal consciousness to accommodate all the
archetypes of the collective unconscious. Nevertheless, Jung
shies away from completely deconstructing the essential unity
and psychic cohesion of the self.
- 6. Orientalism: a term coined in 1979 by Edward Said's seminal
work by the same name. The romanticizing, patronizing or demonizing
distortions of Eastern traditions fueled by nineteenth-century
European imperialism.
- 7. see especially Moacanin, Jung's Psychology and Tibetan
Buddhism 35.
- 8. He writes that at this time" I knew that in finding
the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what
was for me the ultimate." (Memories 196-197).
- 9. This mythologized bi-polar cosmology seems to have been
prevalent in nineteenth century occult spirituality. Freud's
famous Schreber analysis reveals a particularly delusional version
of this worldview.
- 10. No explanation is given for this Dark force. One can
only speculate that mention of this curio may have stimulated
Jung's interest in researching Kundalini serpent power and the
alchemical philosopher's stone.
- 11. In this case a striking similarity to the Taoist notions
of hun and p'o cannot be overlooked. The hun are those male yang
aspects of the soul that rise to heaven at death, whereas the
seven p'o are the feminine aspects of the soul that return to
the earth at death. (See Shambala's Encyclopedia of Eastern
Philosophy and Religion 273).
- 12. It is possible that the female medium S.W. used the masculine
Latin suffix (mannus) whereas Jung used his female anima-inspired
"mana."
- 13. He explains that it was only during 1918-19 while a Commandant
at the Chateau d'Oex that he began to understand the meaning
of his daily "cryptograms" of the self, i.e. his own
daily mandalas sketches.
- 14. Here too one notes the thematic symbolism of the Center
between polar opposites. Jung later regretted writing these sermons,
but finally consented to their publication in his memoirs "for
the sake of honesty." (378)
- 15. Pleroma: "fullness;" the Gnostic heaven.
- 16. Jung would later add the terms yin and yang to the list
of opposites that fit into his preconceived mandala scheme. Jung,
Memories 378- 390 and Jung, Hysterical Misreading
39-42.
- 17. The legacy of Jung's misreading is far-reaching. Giuseppe
Tucci's Jung-inspired interpretations informed Thomas Merton,
Joseph Campbell and countless other Western readers (see Tucci,
Theory and Practice of the Mandala,
Campbell, The Mythic Image and Burton et al., Asian
Journal of Thomas Merton). Tucci for example writes: "the
images represented in the mandala...have become symbols of phases
and forces of the individual and collective psyche...This complicated
juxtaposition of image, their symmetrical arrangement, this alternation
of calm and menacing figures, is the open book of the world and
of Man's own spirit. Where there was darkness now there is light."
(132-33, italics mine).
h
After graduating cum laude from Georgetown University in
1989, Pamela D. Winfield completed an internship
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Asian Art department.
She then moved to Japan to teach and to study Japanese language
and culture. After working at Sony in New York, Pam accepted
Temple's Russell Conwell Fellowship to pursue her doctorate in
Japanese Buddhism.
h
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