A Question of Balance: Jung's Misreading of Buddhist Symbolism
Pamela D. Winfield

     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:

      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

Selected Bibliography

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.

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