The historical and spiritual background of Jung’s encounter with
BuddhismIt is simply wrong to believe that Buddhism was only recently introduced to the West.
As Rick Fields (1986) impressively shows, the history of the relationship of the West
to Buddhism is much longer than we imagine. The Greeks who, led by Alexander
the Great, had come to India and remained there after his retreat and death (323 BC)
became the first Western Buddhists. Without them the school of Gandharan art
would not have come to its full flower in North India from the first to the fifth
century, and the practice of sculpting the Buddha’s statues would not have been finally
transmitted to Japan. King Ashoka in third-century BC India sent missionaries
westwards to preach the Buddha-Dharma. In his seminars, Jung himself mentions
that in the second century BC there were Buddhist monasteries in Persia, suggesting
that through Persia, Buddhist ideas crept into the foundation of Christianity
(McGuire 1984:606; Jarrett 1989:41).
Instead of recounting further evidence for the long history of the relationship
between the West and Buddhism, let us jump to the immediate historical and personal
context in which Jung came to know Buddhism. Most important for understanding
his relationship to Buddhism is that he, born as a son of a Protestant pastor, suffered
both alienation and isolation in the Christian community, represented by his father
and the Preiswerk family on his mother’s side. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jaffé
1965) Jung reports how as a child he was initiated into a mystery of a phallic god in
a fascinating, but tremendous dream and then secretly developed his own private
ritual and theology.
His first memory of his own encounter with the Eastern spiritual world is that of
his mother reading aloud to him out of an old illustrated book containing pictures
of Hindu gods, which offered him an inexhaustible source of interest (Jaffé 1965:17).
This memory suggests that the new Orientalist enthusiasm for the Indian spiritual
world, which had begun among German Romantics like Schlegel and Schelling in
the late eighteenth century, also reached a country pastor’s family in Switzerland.
Jung’s father disappointed him very much by failing to teach him the Christian
dogma of the Trinity. This disappointment, however, did not drive him to abandon
Christianity, but to quest for either a substitute for it or a perspective which seemed
to give him a more satisfactory interpretation of it. In this sense, Jung could not or
would not completely liberate himself from his religion. As Peter Homans (1979)
points out, Christianity was rather the matrix from which his psychological system
emerged.
Goethe’s FaustThe adolescent Jung who had been spiritually frustrated and hungry was greatly
relieved by Goethe’s Faust, which his mother had advised him to read. Though having
no direct connection with Buddhism, it certainly provided him with an alternative
spirituality. Later in the foreword to Daisetsu T. Suzuki’s book Introduction to Zen
120 JUNG AND BUDDHISM