2
A BUDDHIST MODEL OF THE HUMAN
SELF
Working Through the Jung-Hisamatsu Discussion
Jeff Shore
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and
fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t
know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was,
solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was
Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming
he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must
be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
Chuang Tzu, chapter 2 (Watson 1968:49)IntroductionOn 16 May 1958, Shin’ichi Hisamatsu (1889–1980) met with C.G.Jung at Jung’s
home outside of Zurich. Hisamatsu, an outstanding Zen layman and professor of
Buddhism, was on his way back to Japan after lecturing on Zen Buddhism and Zen
culture at Harvard University the previous year. On his one and only trip abroad,
Hisamatsu was eager to meet and have discussions with leading figures in the fields
of religion, philosophy, and psychology. He had had a number of discussions in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. On 18 May,
two days after Hisamatsu’s meeting with Jung, the German thinker Martin Heidegger
led a colloquy with Hisamatsu at Freiburg University.
The conversation with Jung was held in Japanese and Swiss German with
interpretation. Communication problems arose, naturally enough, in the course of
their conversation, and Jung did not consent to its publication. After his passing in
1961, however, transcriptions of the discussion have been repeatedly revised,
translated, and published in English and in Japanese. This was due to the profound
and ground-breaking nature of the discussion, communication problems
notwithstanding. I can think of no better way to address, from the Zen perspective,
the fundamental issues raised in the present volume than in clarifying—in
‘unpacking,’ so to speak—what Hisamatsu was driving at in this discussion with Jung.
Toward the end of the conversation, Hisamatsu asks whether or not one can be
liberated even from the collective unconscious, and Jung replies affirmatively. Shoji
Muramoto suggests that this is ‘the gravitational center of the entire conversation,