This is a review published in The Journal of the Tibet Society, vol. 6 (1986), pp. 96-108. I recommend making reference to the original publication rather than the file that you see here (the lines are missing from the charts, but perhaps this can be remedied later on). Internet link to PDF is HERE (you will need to locate the beginning of the review on p.96).
There is a new edition of Moacanin's book that I haven't yet seen, with a slightly different title: The Essence of Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart.
Radmila Moacanin, Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism, Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart. Wisdom Publications, London, 1986. Pp. xi, 128, glossary, bibliography.
My first and most superficial reaction to this book was mixed. I glanced at the glossaries and saw that the word 'mandala' was listed as a Jungian, rather than a Buddhist term. There is something oddly correct in this; most first impressions of what a mandala is will have been filtered through Jung or his shadows, this reviewer not excepted.
At one time, I looked on Jung as a scientist of the mind, one who was able to make as his object the most personal and obdurately subjective aspects of the human being. His universalism was especially appealing. Since then, taking Blake's "every minute particular is holy" as a motto, I have preferred to dwell on distinctiveness, finding human unity not in an underground psychic unity such as Jung's collective unconscious, but in a sense of the essential interrelatedness and interdependence of human beings with all their identities forged and sustained by their differences. My current teleological hopes are less that people will settle their differences through discovery of a mental substrate which binds them to commonality; I only wish they would generous-mindedly communicate. If there is a mental substrate, it would be in their similar sense of embodiment and in the range of emotions and thoughts they might choose to share with others, not in that world of shadowy archetypes which Jung (in my opinion, quite) questionably tended to differentiate into distinct racial memories, giving it a basis in heredity, and hence, it would follow, genetics.
My first reaction told me it was wrong or irrelevant to compare the psychology of Jung with the Buddhism of Tibet as if they were on equal footing when, to some degree, the former both was inspired by and used the latter for its own ends. What sense in comparison, when the comparers, quite often as it seems also in the present case, set out to study Tibetan Buddhism after being inspired to do so by the Jungians? What could psychic integration and individuation process have to do with a Buddhism in which all that is integrated falls apart? ['du-byas thams-cad mi rtag-pa] Laying aside facile identifications with the 'store-house consciousness' (kun-gzhi'i rnam-shes, which is, after all conscious ), what meaning could a collective unconscious hold for a system of thought that rejects the validity of any constant substrate? Can unconscious collectivities reincarnate?
These initial judgements were partly laid to rest along the way. All these issues are raised and addressed in a way that is thought-provoking, even when not always entirely persuasive. I had expected the conclusion to be biased, as such 'comparisons' usually are, toward synthesis, but the synthesis is amply balanced by analysis; some differences are respected. A third factor is even made to play a mediating role--alchemy. Jung the enthusiastic student of alchemy was not the alter ego of Jung the psychic scientist. They were the same person, even when they were not the same persona. Unlike Buddhism, Jung followed alchemy according to his own understanding of its psychic dimensions; he felt consciously in debt to this tradition. Buddhism, on the other hand, supplied at best a useful confirmation of ideas already formulated through his alchemical studies as well as his psychiatric practice and personal introspection (his more general education as a proudly western and modern person doesn't go without saying).
The synthesis that emerges at the end of the book is a surprising one in that it is not really a synthesis. I don't wish to give away the conclusion entirely, but the creative insight of the polarity of Padma and Self is credited to inspiration from the collective unconscious to the author. It is a duality of near unity, each term of the symbolic dialectic standing for one of the two systems that were compared in the book. This gives an extremely touching and very Jungian ending to the enterprise, but the rough-skinned skeptic in me, as partly described in my above revealed predispositions, wants to think differently.
To my way of thinking, creative insights derive not from a concealed symbol stockpile, but from the tension formed when one carries two apparently incompatible sets of ideas around with one for some period of time. One has an emotional response to the emotional tensions between bodies of intellectual ideas which compels intellectual transformation. This emotional component in the intellectual equation is a mystery mainly to the intellectual, one who makes a life career out of denying emotions their power to change one's mind. Hence, according to me, the intellectual looks too far when looking to a deep and mysterious place for the roots of creativity. The intellectual may make the unconscious into a convenient foil for warding off unwanted intrusions of the emotions, as well as for denying those 'intrusions' when they do occur.
This discussion of the power of the emotions to motivate, transform and rearrange the intellectual aspects of the human mind is, I believe, extremely relevant to my contention that Jung used, and did not follow or even understand the basics of Tibetan Buddhism.1 In my opinion it is a pity, especially, that the scholarly approaches to understanding the mandala (including Moacanin's, pp. 69-71) have so far, with few exceptions, been filtered through Jung. Forgetting Jung would seem to be the best way to start afresh. Ideally, we should lay the 'universality' aside and look at the specifics of the mandala as something with both background and substance within Tibetan religion and thought, not within a Jungian nexus, and above all, not as an archetype dislodged from a collective unconscious, a concept for which Buddhism in itself has no special need. This is a program for the future, not for now.
My own peculiar non-Jungian view of the mandala has developed over several years and is based partly on my reading of Tibetan texts which integrate mandalas within a variety of disparate contexts, and partly on my own predispositions. I cannot hope to fully document or convey all the reasons for this alternative view in a short space. Here I can only cite some of my previous work, both published and unpublished,2 and limit myself to some of the results of this reassessment. First, a word of caution:
According to both Jung and Tibetan Buddhism, the mandala is a mysterious and inexplicable thing. To pretend to explain it outside its context is wrong. For both systems its context is within a therapeutic and/or transformative process, where it plays a definite and definitive role. The interpreter must have the humility to acknowledge that any interpretation outside that context will most probably be not only half-true or wrong, but what is perhaps more important, wrongly taken. Also, mandalas appear in so many different literary contexts that generalizations on their basis will be dangerous, while the primary context is initiatic, not literary. Should we stop here? Anyone who cannot conceive how myth and literary or artistic imagery could embody and convey a serious theory of knowledge should most definitely put this piece away.
Although an example appears on the cover, the mandala is hardly the focus of Moacanin's book (see pp. 69-71). Still, I would like to use the remainder of this review to demonstrate the relevance of some issues it raises for her comparative enterprise.
What is a mandala? First and most generally it is a home, a palace. The palace shows up in the Buddha's cynically reinterpreted Hindu story of the origins of things contained in the Brahma Jala and Aggañña Suttas (both from among the Long Discourses of the Pali Buddhist canon). At the new formation of the present great aeon, a palace appears in space, while into it a being of the Clear Light realm descends due to his karma. He is lonely and wishes others could join him there in his new home. When other beings do make their appearance, the first god Brahma believes (wrongly) that they were brought into being by his wish, when in actuality, he as well as they were brought there from a prior status due to karma. The other beings are convinced by Brahma's belief that they were brought into existence by his wish. All this wishful (emotive) thinking was a fundamental mistake.
The palace is rather explicitly identified with the objective realm of knowable objects in its most primitive condition, while Brahma and his subsequent cult members are the duped knowers of that objective-realm-as-palace. The palace is also an external web/trap (Sanskrit, jala) which arose in interdependence with the subjective web of wishful thinking ('false consciousness' to borrow and stretch a Marxist term). The remainder of the story, which explains the beginnings of society, shifts back and forth between external environmental developments (or devolution) and internal mental developments, showing their interdependence at every step of the way.
This interdependent origination , which would become the Realm of Dharmas of Mahayana dialectic, is a statement about origins (not the origin, since there is no first cause; there is at best a force-field of causations). There is no ontology as known to the Christian world, since there is no creator whose existence might need to be established through an ontological proof. There is no essentialism, since the existential emphasis here, if there were one, would be on relations between things, not in the substantiality or material existence of the things themselves, and not on what they might be 'at core'. This is not mysticism. If it is mystifying, it is because of the difficulties of a knowing subject such as ourselves in contemplating such a basic question as, 'What is the relationship between the set of my knowing faculties and the set of objects it knows?'
This is a foundational question of epistemology, a point of departure for a theory of knowledge. Epistemologies that assert a unified, noncontingent knower will likely assert a unified, noncontingent origin for knowable objects (ex.: God, matter), while epistemologies such as the Buddhist ones which assert a diversified, mutually contingent set of factors that make knowing a possible event for us will be liable to posit diversified and mutually contingent origins for knowables. In the first case, knower and knowables will exist in a fundamentally separated way; they will be given separate origins, and ontological problems of things-on-their-own will acquire a special necessity. In the second case, ontology is not such a necessity, because knower and knowables co-originate and co-operate even if we might temporarily consider them separately as two sets of also co-originating and co-operating principles, or consider them as a single system operating through time. In the first case, the existence of a homogenous knowing self such as Jung's makes sense; in the second, such an entity will scarcely endure, is not needed, and in fact is denied any existence to call its own.
Although I will obviously not be announcing visitations from anything like a collective unconsciousness, I would like to replace Moacanin's "Self and Padma" (although these could perhaps do as well) with alternative organizing symbols for these two systems of knowing--the tree and the circle (=circular array). I would prefer that the following dichotomy be taken along the lines of Yin-Yang, rather than absolutely opposed, oppositions.
The tree (stemma, dendrogram) is predominantly a timist vision, while the circular array will make better sense to the spacist. The tree form, I argue, is the ideal form for tracing differentiations through time from a single origin. Concepts of individuality and selfhood are given background and necessity, starting from the individuality of the first cause and persisting through time to find expression in the individuality of the tiniest twig in the temporal tree. This individuality is rather paradoxically given background through time, but given expression in space, since it is the distantiation of the twig from other twigs at any particular moment that defines its uniqueness. Yet spatial perspectives are denied, somehow, along the way; unities are found in the past, or through the reactivizing of the past. Evolutionism, creationism, historicism, romanticism, modernism, classical philology, genealogy (strange bedfellows all) and other such unilinear approaches to the knowing of particular things as they exist at a present moment are tree-type ways to knowledge, as well as ways to order knowledge.
The circular array is ideal for the spacist way to knowledge in a, mutatis mutandis, very similar way. The world of knowables is conceived as an arrangement, a field or sphere, of co-determining elements in space, which, paradoxically again, contains within its force-field the tensions which make temporal transformations possible. It is, for the spacist, both a classification system and an explanation for classifications (just as the tree is for the timist). The classifications are co-classifications; no single classification can exist in its own right. If a single classification could be isolated from the full range of classifications, it would cease to be a classification. My best examples for this approach to knowing are Buddhism, functionalism and structuralism, but also some aspects of physics as well as Jung's synchronicity. Linguistics, after a long Babylonian captivity among the trees, seems to be moving in the circle direction with the emergence of areal linguistics and 'typology'.
Although both these ways to and/or theories of knowledge result in classifications, they do not yield classifications of the same type. The tree produces nomothetic classifications on the basis of ancestry or lineage. Every difference, no matter how minor, may result in a new (sub-)classification. The circle yields polythetic classifications on the basis of overall family resemblances; similar clusters of traits or qualities, or a preponderance of particular qualities, take precedence over minor or superficial differences. Following the tree system, we could say that the screwdriver is like the knife, and they belong to the same class because the screwdriver evolved from the knife (let's say) and they both share a single origin with other single-pronged instruments (even though, in themselves, they would constitute two distinct subclasses within the class of single-pronged instruments). According to the circle system, the knife and the scissors are one class due to the deciding quality of sharpness, while the screwdriver belongs to a diametrically opposed category which we could call the class of dull objects. Dullness and sharpness constitute a single field of possibilities. Dull scissors and sharpened screwdriver? No problem for the circle--the screwdriver, being sharpened, belongs to the same class with knives, while the dull scissors belong to the opposing class of dull objects. No problem for the tree either--the sharpness or dullness of an object does not effect its ancestry, and hence its place in the framework of the tree (although a few new twigs may take the place of a single one). Wouldn't one of these types of classifications be more useful for certain purposes? It has been suggested, for instance, that the circle-type (polythetic) classification is a necessary one in human sciences.3
Unlike Durkheim & Mauss and one interpreter of the mandala who followed their lead,4 I do not believe that circular array classifications originated in the spatial organization of tribes, neither do I believe that there is anything especially 'primitive' (in terms of time or cultural 'evolution') about the circle mode. The circle mode is used by we (post-) moderns, and probably even more so than in the time of Durkheim, or even in the time of Jung for that matter. The basis would therefore seem to be prior to social classifications, perhaps embedded in the human mind. Lévi-Strauss thought so, although his structures are also pre-conscious (embedded in an unconscious) and therefore prior to knowledge, a conclusion which I do not believe to be necessary.
I also do not believe that the circle, any more than the tree, belongs to the unconscious. Rather it belongs to the conscious mind for which it has done and continues to do an admirable job of organizing the things we empirically know in the waking world. I think that these are models for ways in which the mind does organize knowledge, rather than being primarily models of how it should do this. I am aware, however, that this tree versus circle business is itself an expression of what I have been discussing. I have been building up a classificatory device here which corresponds closely to the circle type classification system. It works, if it works at all, by setting up two opposites in tension with each other, the beginnings of the circle. Couldn't I have shown that the tree and circle both originated in a single primordial act of knowing? In other words, couldn't I have approached the knowing of these two ways of knowing within the framework of the tree? My first impulse is to reply in the negative, but let us hold off on this question a bit longer and turn our attention for a minute to the mandala in Tibet.
I would not in any way suggest that the mandala is exclusively a classificatory device, only that it is, among other things, a circle classification system. The body as well as the universe of knowables are mediated by a single structure, the palace. Within the palace are, typically, five types (rigs) embodied in five Tathagatas, Buddhas seated on thrones, the central of which is the Type Lord (Rigs Bdag). [It may be interesting for future studies to speculate on the etymological similarities of the terms Type Lord and Archetype. At present I am not at all certain what to make of this.] I hope it will be understood that when I speak of the mandala structure, I do not say what a mandala is. Just as a house frame is not a house (and a house is not a home), the structure of the mandala is not a mandala, any more than the grammatical structure of a sentence is itself a sentence.
The structure of the mandala underlies also the traditional typologies of Indian & Greek medicines as well as physics. The four elements are arranged in a way that is determined by a matrix of independently varying qualities which I will call volatility and humidity.
volatility humidity
aridity fixedness
With a bit of reflection, one may already predict where each of the four (five) elements will be located in the 'field'. In the following chart, the elements water, earth, fire and air are labeled by their qualitative aspects, respectively, cohesion ('byar-ba), solidity (sra-ba), radiation (snang-ba) and motility (g.yo-ba, or, bskyod-pa). The fifth element, space, is of course in the middle, since this is a diagram laid out in space, rather than time, and it reflects synchronic interrelationships between the elements. There is no first element such as that for which the early Greek speculators sought.
MOTILITY
volatility humidity
RADIATION SPACE COHESION
aridity fixedness
SOLIDITY
It takes little imagination to see how this unified force-field of the phenomenal world (as it may be qualitatively understood) could correspond to a force-field of human emotion, as in the following chart, which may be superimposed on the preceding one:
greed/envy
attraction ignorance aversion
pride/slander
There are many other correspondences, including the transformations of these five passions (the five 'poisons') into Foundational Knowledges (Ye-shes): aversion into the Mirroring Foundational Knowledge, pride/slander into the Equality Foundational Knowledge, attraction into the Particularized Understanding Foundational Knowledge, greed/slander into the Accomplishment Foundational Knowledge, and ignorance into the Foundational Knowledge of the Realm of All Knowables. It is not the place here to go into the complexities of mandalas, but clearly such transformations take us far beyond ego-centered consciousness to an expansive, even a totalizing or universal sort of knowing consciousness, and not, as Jung or Freud would have it, to any unknowing or pre-ego-consciousness realm of instinct, rejected knowledges or unconsciousness.5 This points to an open, generous-minded attitude toward the realm of knowables (which includes human knowables), and definitely to neither infantile self-absorbtion nor mature introspection, even.
These mandalas may be understood as cross-sections of various cosmological, as well as personal psychological, transformations, which brings us back to a very basic question about our two classification systems. Are they really two separate systems, or only two 'typical' preferences (among even further possibilities, such as the laddar or spiral) for different human beings who may be utilizing them for different ends? The question is too large and problematic. Relativity theory has told us that time and space do impinge on each other's domains. The image of the tree cannot be understood as purely an image of time. The tree itself has dimensions; it occupies space. There are spatial tensions between each of the differentiated 'twigs'. The tree alone cannot account for the differentiations that it embodies. Likewise, the circle alone cannot embody the temporal developments and differentiations that the dynamic of its force-field presumes.6
Perhaps the tree and the circle are, after all, only partial versions of a tree cum circle that could in large part embody human knowledge in both time and space. If we were to climb aboard a mental airplane and fly above the tree, we might look down to see a circular array, while a side view of a set of circles might show us some stages of development in the tree. There were two trees in the midst of the realm of knowables named by Adam, the tree of life and the tree of knowing good from bad. My suspicion is that the second tree was no tree, but a circle, and that in fact both trees were the same tree.7 It was only the ones who ate from this one tree that made them different. As humans, we are, after all, responsible for these things we think we know, and I heartily recommend this book to anyone in a mood to wonder how this could be so. Others may well find themselves, as I did, put in that mood.
NOTES
1For a thoughtful discussion of some of Jung's misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism, see David R. Komito, 'Jungian Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism' in The Tibet Journal, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 36-49 [missing from Moacanin's bibliography].
2Dan Martin, Illusion Web--Locating the Guhyagarbha Tantra in Buddhist Intellectual History contained in Christopher I. Beckwith (ed.), Silver on Lapis (The Tibet Society, Bloomington 1987, pp. 175-220); 'Human Body Good Thought (Mi Lus Bsam Legs) and the Revelation of the Secret Bonpo Mother Tantras' (unpublished thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington 1985); The Rooting of our Uniquenesses--Passionate Cosmogony and Sociogenesis in Tibetan Literature with Reference to Giambattista Vico and Mary Douglas (unpublished, 1985); Anthropology on the Boundary and the Boundary in Anthropology (Human Studies 1990, forthcoming). These are listed in the order in which they were written.
3Rodney Needham, Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences (Man, n.s. vol. 10, 1975, pp. 349-69).
4Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (tr. & introduced by Rodney Needham, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago 1963). Alex Wayman, Totemic Beliefs in the Buddhist Tantras (History of Religions, vol. 1, 1961, no. 1, summer, pp. 81-94).
5This is the thesis of Komito's critique referred to in note 1, above.
6There is a danger in typological exercises of the sort we have been engaging in here, and that is that differences will be canonized as constitutive of absolute (truly existent) classifications which might then go on to 'determine' other things. This is a danger especially for the timist, who will be more likely to impute onto the knowledge of the circle the same background, necessity or substance as his tree-gained knowledge (and I think this goes far toward explaining Jung's misapprehension of the 'nature' of the mandala). The roots of the problem extend deeply into problems of human knowing, and one would need to go much deeper than the hows to get to the whys.
I suggest for the sake of argument that naively timist approaches to spacist ways of knowledge have given growth to such ideologically (and strategically) important contrasts such as that which asserts that the Buddhist (Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, etc.) east is passive and deindividualized while the Judaeo-Christian west is actively individualistic. My heuristic aim in enunciating this type of dialectic all over again with the tree-circle problem is not to sustain it, but to locate a point at which it either commences construction or collapses altogether. Self-congratulatory posturing of the knowing subject confident of being on the right side of the dialectic will never lead to any lasting peace or understanding. The timist is faced with the problem of spacial interdependence just as the spacist is confronted with (and does in fact deal with) the problem of temporal differentiation/individuation. I must stress again that I am not engaging in any 'the east is spacist and the west is timist' sort of equation, although it is explicit in my arguments that tree thinkers are bound to take it so.
To illustrate possible implications of this for understanding Tibetan Buddhist culture with a single example, one might consider the usual scholarly approach to the iconographic identity of the deities. These deities almost invariably have a 'position' in the mandala (i.e., they belong to a 'type'), and the classificational distinction between circle and tree knowledge has, I believe, a crucial importance when seeking to discover their identity, as well as the nature of that identity. The usual approach, exemplified in the classic works on Tibetan and Mahayana iconography by Antoinette K. Gordon and Alice Getty, presumes a tree approach, treating the deities like so many botanical specimens. I have found from my personal communications with some Tibetans, that they find this classificatory presumption by foreign scholars, and the errors resulting from it, either bewildering or amusing. All the multiple names and aspects of the same deity shading in and out of each other is perhaps just as confusing to the tree-ists who fail to recognize that the deities, as with as the classification system used for them, together constitute a forcefield of possibilities which can only with much violence be forced into the segmental modes of individuation and egoic identities growing on their mental trees.
7I am, of course, not the first to think that the two trees were one tree. See, for examples: Marco Pallis, 'Is There a Problem of Evil?' (Contained in Jacob Needleman, ed., The Sword of Gnosis, Penguin Books, Baltimore 1974), p. 238, and Ezra ben Solomon as cited in Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, NYC 1974), pp. 404-5, note 105.
It may also be interesting in this connection to look at some fifteenth century alchemical illustrations of the tree of Aristotle, since these often incorporate circles. Some of these alchemical trees are illustrated and discussed in Urszula Szulakowska, 'The Tree of Aristotle: Images of the Philosophers' Stone and their Transference in Alchemy from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century' (Ambix, vol. 33, pt. 2/3, November 1986, pp. 53-77).
----------
Update (June 19, 2013): More readings on the problematic of Jungian readings of Tibetan Buddhism...
Pamela D. Winfield, A Question of Balance: Jung's Misreading of Buddhist Symbolism. Schuylkill Graduate Magazine Online, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2000). HERE is the link.
John Myrdhin Reynolds, The Views on Dzogchen of W.Y. Evans-Wentz and C.G. Jung, contained as Appendix I in: Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, Station Hill Press (Barrytown 1989), pp. 71-115.