Dvandva or opposites: from Indian thought to Chinese thoughtThe study of Gnosticism opened Jung’s eyes to the theoretical problem of opposites,
but Psychological Types reveals that his ideas further developed by way of Indian
thought. In a section titled ‘The Brahmanic conception of the problem of opposites’
he draws readers’ attention to the Sanskrit term dvandva for pairs of opposites in
strife, particularly man and woman, the creation of which, in Indian thought, is
believed to lead to the emergence of the world. Jung interprets that dvandva is brought
about through the splitting of psychic energy at the level of the unconscious.
When Jung visited India in 1938, he argued that nirdvandva, which means
overcoming pairs of opposites, is impossible in human life because perfect liberation
amounts to death. The same view is also expressed in his autobiography: ‘The Indian’s
goal is not moral perfection, but the condition of nirdvandva. He wishes to free
himself from nature; in keeping with this aim, he seeks in meditation the condition
of imagelessness and emptiness. I, on the other hand, wish to persist in the state of
lively contemplation of nature and of the psychic images. I want to be freed neither
from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the
greatest of miracle. Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded
—and what more could I wish for? To me the supreme meaning of Being can consist
only in the fact that it is, not that it is not or is no longer’ (Jaffé 1965:276).
Jung seems in this way to be attracted more to Chinese thought than to Indian
thought because the former, unlike the latter, is principally concerned with the
balance of opposites, not their abolition, and therefore sees in every disaster the loss
of balance. His therapeutic effort consisted in the restoration of the lost balance in
the mind. In Jung’s view, it is loss of balance that is happening in the West.
The self as the conjunction of oppositesPsychological Types raised the question of how opposites are reconciled. As Jung
himself says in his autobiography, this question immediately led him to the Chinese
concept of Tao. The encounter with Wilhelm and his German translation of The
Secret of the Golden Flower became decisive for the development of Jung’s later theory.
Recalling the publication of The Secret of the Golden Flower in his psychological
commentary in 1929, he says: ‘It was only after I had reached the central point in my
thinking and in my researches, namely the concept of the self, that I once more found
the way back to the world’ (Jaffé 1965:208). Jung does not see the self beyond
opposites, but sees the self as a conjunction or reconciliation of opposites and points
out that this is expressed in mandala symbols in both the East and the West.
Jung is not concerned with the reconciliation of human beings with God, but that
of opposites within the image of God, a very important point in Coward’s book
(1985:20). What Jung sought in Eastern thought was not another theology, but a
framework for reconciling opposing images of God. In the East, divine images seemed
to Jung to be basically understood as psychic images. Therefore, the encounter with
Eastern thought was for him the psychologization of theology. That is why he
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