spot. It is said that, following this, he went up to Mount Hiei, near Kyoto, and
became a disciple of the priest Kakucho.
(Yamada et al. 1951c:87–9)The most impressive aspect of the story for me is that the samurai believes ‘I must be
Kannon,’ on the basis of a stranger’s dream. Abandoning his forty-year life as a
warrior, he is convinced that ‘I am Kannon’ and becomes a priest. If I take Descartes’
maxim, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and express this situation, it becomes ‘Someone
dreamed of me, therefore I exist.’ One might well think that this is just nonsense, but
Jungians might remember the dream that Jung described from his later years:
I was on a hiking trip. I was walking along a little road through a hilly landscape;
the sun was shining and I had a wide view in all directions. Then I came to a
small wayside chapel. The door was ajar, and I went in. To my surprise there
was no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a
wonderful flower arrangement. But then I saw that on the floor in front of the
altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus position, in deep meditation. When I looked
at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I stared in profound fright,
and awoke with the thought: ‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He
has a dream, and I am it.’ I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.
(Jung 1963:323)Upon reading this, you see that Jung also used another dream to answer the question,
‘What am I?’ The yogi dreams, and Jung is supported by the yogi’s dreaming.
Therefore, the sentence, ‘Someone dreamed me, therefore I am,’ seems to fit.
There is, of course, a clear difference between Jung’s case and that of the samurai
in medieval Japan. In Jung’s case, the yogi is a character in his own dream, and, as
Jung related, ‘he had my face.’ In his comment, Jung states, ‘It is a parable.’ In contrast,
for the samurai in that era, the dream was someone else’s; and he, the character who
had been dreamed of, accepted the content as literal reality. Jung commented on his
own dream as follows:
The aim of [this dream] is to effect a reversal of the relationship between
ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and to represent the unconscious as
the generator of the empirical personality. This reversal suggests that, in the
opinion of the ‘other side,’ our unconscious existence is a real one and our
conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific
purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it. It is clear
that this state of affairs resembles very closely the oriental conception of Maya.
(Jung 1963:323)Here, Jung recognizes his own dream experience as being similar to ‘the Oriental’
view. Considering these aspects, I get the impression that Jung’s I existed astride both
Japan’s Middle Ages and the modern Occident. When you think about what I is, in
136 HAYAO KAWAI