One of the great psychologists of the 20th century was Dr. D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966). He’s not generally known as a mind man because he introduced Zen to the West. But he was often accused by his Japanese countrymen of over-stressing the intellect in a distinctly western way.

As he was writing for the West he obviously found it easier to slip into Western ways. His dialogue with C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who was covering the same ground is highly informative.

Suzuki has this to say on the matter of the Buddhist Enlightenment, “The idea is to express the unconscious working of the mind, but this unconscious is not to be interpreted psychologically, but on the spiritual plane where all ‘traces’ of discursive or analytical understanding vanish.”

Jung’s view, was “One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

The difference here is no-difference. Suzuki uses “psychological” to describe objects of rational thinking — all else, by implication, is metaphysical. Jung, however, takes a western approach and calls anything capable of being experienced, psychological. Of course, anything which cannot be experienced is of no concern to man, since he could not possibly ever know of its existence. This is not the case with the Buddhist “unborn mind” which is clearly experienced from moment to moment by those attuned to it.

Jung uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental. Suzuki draws a line at the limits of the intellect, thus creating an enormous “spiritual” domain. Here the divisive nature of words manufactures an East/West chasm that does not really exist. Both are constantly aware of the non-dual totality of things — its “suchness”.

Suzuki’s gave us a graphic description of his own enlightenment. After a period of intense concentration and “samadhi”, Suzuki attains satori: “…this Samadhi alone is not enough. You must come out of that state, be awakened from it, and that awakening is Prajna. That moment of coming out of Samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is satori. When I came out of that state of Samadhi I said, ‘I see. This is it.’”

The next day, after the enlightenment was approved by his master, he walked home from the monastery and saw the trees in the moonlight. “They looked transparent, and I was transparent too.” From that moment he was able to answer the apparently nonsensical questions of his master out of a profound insight.

He later wrote that at that point he was not fully conscious of his experience. There was still an element of dream clinging to his consciousness. While working in America a greater depth of realization dawned when contemplating the Zen phrase “the elbow does not bend outwards.” He suddenly saw that the restriction itself was the true freedom.

Later still, and back in Japan working on the records of Bankei, he felt a huge mass of stones “that I had piled up through many years fall away in a moment. I found myself in the unconditionally restful state of mind of…as-it-is-ness (suchness).”

Suzuki compares man with a geometrical point where three dimensions intersect: physical-natural, intellectual-moral and spiritual. Very roughly, the outer world, the inner personal world, and the world where concepts like “outer” and “inner” have vanished.

We may be conscious of all these lines, but usually not to the same extent. Normally, the intellectual-moral is given emphasis over the spiritual. This results in an inability fully to grasp the spiritual side of life — “Doubting” Thomas arises here, as does the “God is dead” tendency of 19th Century materialism.

The intellectual-moral line delivers a dualistic view of life. It carves its way into the soft substance of existence, setting up categories and divisions in the way a sharp stone shatters a car windscreen — the whole view disappears and one is only aware of a spidery network of frosty fragments. However, despite this, there is a “persistent urge impelling the intellect to transcend itself.”

For the intellect to leave its own line and transfer to the spiritual is a kind of suicide, a “losing of life in order to gain it.” Suzuki stresses that there is no gradation here. It is a leap, a letting go as Jung discovered — for the moment one gives up the intellectual, one finds oneself on the spiritual.

This is the point at which one becomes aware that, “what is before you is it!” For western man, the jump has to be made from his intellect instantly to the spiritual; that is the moment of enlightenment. From then on the spiritual world lights up the physical-natural with a numinous glow that transforms everything, as Jung himself found when he let himself go on the 12th of December 1913. However, there is only one world, and when the faculties lose their distinctiveness they are seen to be illusory.

The work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is still revered by many who refuse to subscribe to a mechanistic view of the universe and human life. But who was he?

The Himalayan ice-roof of the world has produced many of the great sages of the East. Numbered among them are the Indian rishis of the Upanishads, the lama-savants of Tibet, and even Gautama Buddha, in nearby Nepal. By a curious symmetry, the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps were the setting for the life of arguably the West’s most enlightened man of the 20th Century — a claim, it has to be said, much disputed recently by some in the psychotherapy establishment..

C. G. Jung is often described as a psychiatrist and physician. In fact his work matured into an all-embracing vision of human life and its relations with all there is (the Absolute). His phenomenal intuition constantly came up against the numinous in everyday affairs and, being the man he was, he courageously based his post-Freudian work on the god in Man and the man in God. Born of Swiss Protestant stock, he became a bridge between western and eastern psychologies that will surely prove seminal for the future.

In his long and fruitful life, Jung trod a careful path between the crusty scientific establishment of his day and the more adventurous thinkers on the fringes of eastern mysticism and religion. He went to enormous lengths to avoid being classed as a Theosophist, a group he regarded as having swung irremediably towards psychological extremism. His published works are always models of empirical analysis, drawing living structures from a mass of precise medical observations. And yet he is never statistically arid like many scientists today. There is a life in his work that can only be described as religious, in the best sense of the word. His main “problem” was that the inevitable conclusions arising from these tireless investigations applied just as much to so-called normal people as to his pathologically disturbed patients.

The basis of Jung’s work was the process he called individuation, a naturally occurring progression in everyone, leading to psychological integration. Individuation, as expounded by Jung, is clearly related to Buddhist enlightenment, in that though his ostensible concern was with empirical psychology, Jung went beyond Freud’s shallow personal subconscious (a repository of repressed mental contents), to what he called the “collective unconscious”, which took in the whole of the psyche, a term he used in the same sense as Buddhists use “Buddha-mind”.

Jung believed that nothing in the cosmos is incapable of psychological inclusion given the necessary insight and balanced vision. Thus he sometimes seemed to scorn the notion of the metaphysical with its transcendental exclusivity, a notable characteristic of many in the psychotherapy movement of his day.

The balance then between what is psychological and what is metaphysical is dangerously subject to all the vagaries of definition, making comparisons between viewpoints all the more perilous.

“One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

How would it reveal itself? Is the viewpoint arising from the non-working of the senses (which includes “thinking” in Buddhism) in the state called “nirvana” to be called psychological?

Jung always uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental.