better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well you might say ye say
anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white it is, or black, or again, it is not,
or it is, A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.
The nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA’ (Jaffé 1965:379).
In fact, Moacanin (1992:279) notes that Septum Sermones ad Mortuos echoes the
words of the Heart Sutra, ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ and the Lankavatara
Sutra, that ‘space is form, and...as space penetrates into form, form is space.’ Jung’s
statement that in Pleroma both thinking and being cease because the eternal and
infinite possess no qualities corresponds to fukashigi or hishiryotei in Buddhism, which
means the ‘unthinkable.’ So Jung’s Pleroma seems to be very close to sunyata.
Like the Heart Sutra, Septum Sermones ad Mortuos abounds in paradoxes. Moacanin
emphasizes that polarity and its integration link Vajïayana in Tibetan Buddhism with
Jung’s concept of the transcendent function. His argument is, however, not beyond
dispute. For, even if Pleroma seems akin to sunyata, Jung does not regard it as the
ultimate principle of human existence. The dissolution into Pleroma is for him the
denial of Creatura which consists of distinctiveness. Jung firmly stands on the side of
Creatura, not of Pleroma.
Jung names the natural tendency of Creatura to distinctiveness as principium
individuationis which is to be later elaborated as a goal of Jungian psychotherapy.
Now this term is originally a concept in scholastic philosophy that denotes the
principle of matter, and Jung knew it through Schopenhauer’s main work. Unlike
Jung, however, Schopenhauer uses it to mean something to be overcome and resolved.
Individuation is nothing but the self-affirmation of the blind will, attachment to the
self which must be given up through the self-denial of the will. Schopenhauer is clearly
closer to understanding Buddhism and Gnosticism than is Jung in this regard.
For Jung, the individuality of Creatura should not be resolved into Pleroma. On
the contrary, it is the very principle of human development. By contrast,
Schopenhauer sees in the principle of individuation the philosophical foundation of
egoism. It is far from being the goal of human life. It was only the process and the
result of becoming bound by time and space, driven by the blind will.
Jung, however, had no intention of openly advocating egoism, and so he had to
demonstrate how he and Schopenhauer differ on the principle of individuation. This
may be the reason why Jung later developed the idea of the self in distinction from
the ego and this is hinted at in the concept of self-sacrifice of the libido in
Transformations and Symbols of Libido.
Gnosis in Psychological TypesJung was attracted to the religion of Gnosis because it seemed to compensate the
one-sidedness of Christianity. While Christianity seemed to Jung to demand the
sacrifice of one’s intellect in preference to the practical requirement of faith, Gnosis
satisfied both intellect and faith. Its three types of humans—pneumatikoi, psychikoi,
and hylikoi—respectively corresponded to thinking, feeling, and sensation in Jung’s
theory of four functions of the mind set out in Psychological Types (Jung 1976:11).
124 JUNG AND BUDDHISM