Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

7

THE JUNG-HISAMATSU

CONVERSATION

Translated from Aniela Jaffé’s original German Protocol by

Shoji Muramoto in collaboration with

Polly Young-Eisendrath and Jan Middeldorf

Translator’s Introduction

Shin’ichi Hisamatsu (1889–1980), a member of the Kyoto School and disciple of
Kitaro Nishida, was a leading Zen philosopher of modern Japan. In 1958, as part of
his comparative research into Eastern and Western religion and philosophy, he
lectured extensively throughout the United States. On his way back to Japan, he
visited with a number of prominent European thinkers for a series of conversations
on Zen and Western thought. Among his interlocutors was C.G.Jung. Their
conversation took place at Jung’s home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on 16 May 1958.
Also present were interpreter Koichi Tsujimura, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, and
Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s private secretary, who later compiled his autobiography.
How the dialogue unfolded is basically unknown; as of this writing, only Tsujimura
is still alive. The only available documentation is Jaffé’s transcribed protocol, derived
from her shorthand notes of the meeting, and Tsujimura’s Japanese translation of
the German protocol. It is safe to assume that Jung and Hisamatsu spoke their own
languages, and that Tsujimura and Jaffé functioned as translator and transcriber,
respectively. Distortions resulting from mistranslation and errors in recording were
likely to have occurred throughout the dialogue, of which no tape recording is known
to exist. We do not know, furthermore, whether and to what extent both Jaffé,
originally, and Tsujimura, later, edited the transcribed German text. What we do
know, however, is that a copy of the German transcription was sent to Hisamatsu
and translated by Tsujimura. This Japanese translation was first published in July
1959 by FAS, the journal for the Zen-inspired FAS Society, founded by Hisamatsu
in 1944. (According to the Society’s newsletter, ‘the acronym refers to the three
inseparable dimensions of our existence: self, world and history.’) Ten years later, in
1969, with the publication of Eastern Nothingness, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of