Hisamatsu’s question whether one can be liberated from the collective unconscious
and Jung’s positive reply (Muramoto 1998:46). Given Jung’s usual views and his later
refusal of the publication of the conversation, I suspect that Jung’s ‘Yes’ needs to be
examined.
I would now ask Jung whether one could be liberated from the ego, rather than
the ‘collective unconscious.’ For, despite the hermeneutic function of the collective
unconscious, Hisamatsu seemed actually to mean by this Jungian term nothing but
the ego’s creations. I believe that Jung’s answer to my question would be ambiguous.
On the one hand, he would say that the ego is only one of the complexes, suggesting
that it is something formed and therefore able to be resolved. On the other hand, he
would point out that the establishment of the ego is the prerequisite for individuation,
either in analytic therapy or in real life. In the 1932 lecture ‘Psychotherapy or the
clergy’, he goes on to say: ‘I must even help the patient to prevail in his egoism’ and
even speaks of ‘sacred egoism’ (Jung 1984:209). Therefore, we can say that he would
not give a final answer.
Jung’s potential contribution to Buddhism seems to consist of what he was forced
to discard by Hisamatsu: the concept of the collective unconscious. To Hisamatsu’s
question I would say ‘No’ in defense of Jung. But I don’t mean one cannot be liberated
from egoism. I propose to mean by the collective unconscious a hermeneutic structure
of human existence, the fact that humans already and always find themselves in a
situation with a structure and history in which they understand or misunderstand
each other, and are understood or misunderstood by each other, searching for the
meaning of their own and their neighbors’ human existence.
Indeed, as Hisamatsu points out, even when one disease is cured, another disease
appears. This sequence of cure and disease, however, may mean a series of
modifications in our experiencing being-in-the-world. It is not necessarily a vicious
cycle but may be a creative hermeneutic circle when observed and treated seriously.
Otherwise we would not be able to realize how we are in this structured and
structuring world. One cannot get out of this structure itself so long as one lives. In
fact, Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Chinese Zen Buddhism, is reported to have
warned us in The Platform Sutra, ‘Don’t try to get rid of anything, without thinking
of hundreds of things. If the stream of thoughts stops at any moment, then you will
be born in another world, which means you will die. Don’t try to cut the connection
of beings and thoughts.’
The collective unconscious seems to be not so much something to be liberated
from, but something to be acknowledged. It always manifests itself in particular
concrete images, social relations, gender differentiation, and cosmology, which
Buddhism often tends to underestimate, erroneously appealing to the doctrine of
Emptiness, Absolute Nothingness or the Formless Self. The Jung-Hisamatsu
conversation may have revitalized a pivotal recurring tension inherent in Buddhist
metaphysics between unity and diversity in the tension between Zen and depth
psychology.
SHOJI MURAMOTO 129