Buddhism, Jung counts Faust as one of the few counterparts to Zen in the West (Jung
1978d:155). And it is the work Jung quotes most in his writings. The adolescent Jung
was especially attracted to Faust’s words: ‘Oh, two souls live in my bosom,’ which
were later to be elaborated by him and his followers as the theory of the ego-self axis.
‘Faust and Buddhism’ is too big a theme to deal with here. Suffice it to point out
several affinities between them which are relevant to Jungian psychology as well. First,
both are concerned with the contradiction of limitlessness and limitedness of the
human ego’s desire. Second, both admit as little divine intervention as possible and,
on the contrary, trust human action as much as possible. Third, both see all things
as transient and symbolic.
SchopenhauerAs a late adolescent suffering from a split in his personality into No. 1 and No. 2,
Jung was absorbed in reading and felt healed to some degree by Schopenhauer’s book
The World as Will and Representation. We are nowadays struck by the similarities
between Schopenhauer and Jung in views of the unconscious, archetypes, and dreams
(Jarrett 1999). Schopenhauer, the admirer of Goethe, was the first Western
philosopher who intensively studied Buddhism and incorporated it into his
philosophical system. And Jung obtained through Schopenhauer some knowledge of
Buddhism, especially Mahayana Buddhism.
Jung especially felt confirmed by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic remark that there is
something fundamentally wrong with this world created by God. For him
Schopenhauer was the first philosopher who openly spoke of the inevitability of
suffering, confusions, desires, and evils in the world, the first Noble Truth in
Buddhism.
But Jung was not satisfied with Schopenhauer’s idea that the intellect offers the
blind will a mirror to lead it to its self-denial. He wondered how the will could see
its real state. Even if it could, how could its conversion take place? Does the will not
see only images it wants to see? What was the intellect? After all, Jung adopted Kantian
philosophy, which made him realize that Schopenhauer had failed to grasp the
Kantian concept of a thing-in-itself that cannot be empirically known. This
disappointment with Schopenhauer, however, remained a tension in Jung’s mind
and seems to have given him an impetus for the later development of his psychological
theory and technique of active imagination. Schopenhauer is a key figure in
understanding Jung’s relation to Buddhism.
Schopenhauer’s mirror is not a symbol for the modern Western form of knowledge
in which the subject and the object are divided. To explain the meaning of the mirror,
Schopenhauer quotes from the Upanishads tat twam asi, which means: ‘This is you’
(1987:499). So what the mirror reveals is nothing but the reflection of the will: the
mirror refers to the self-awareness of the will.
Jung’s disappointment in Schopenhauer suggests that he was caught in the Western
dichotomy of intellect versus will. By contrast, they are one and the same in
Buddhism. More psychologically and spiritually speaking, feeling amounts to healing.
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