Carl Jung on Buddha and Karma.
Modern Psychology: C. G. Jung’s Lectures at the ETH Zürich, 1933-1941
Another correlative goal of yoga is to weaken the klesas, the instinctive urges.
These are: avidya (not knowing), egocentricity, sensuality, hatred and compulsive life, clinging to or fearing life.
I will read you some paragraphs:
“Avidya (not knowing) is misunderstanding the temp oral, impure, suffering and the non-s elf as eternal, pure, joy and as the Self.”
This sentence tells us that not knowing is the foundation of all the other klesas.
If we think temporal things are eternal we naturally desire them inordinately, and we have also falsified them in themselves.
These klesas must be overcome through Dhyana because they are the roots of Karma, that remnant of former existences which, according to the eastern belief, outlives our ego and is born again in a corresponding situation.
Curiously enough the Buddhists say that Karma is not personal.
I may pile up merit but my personal existence ceases and only my Karma persists and forms a new existence.
This is very puzzling and the monks asked Buddha about it but he did not reply.
He left the question open.
On the other hand, he spoke freely of his own previous existences, so we might say that he must have existed personally innumerable times before.
Yet it is also possible that he was speaking of Karmic, not of individual, existences.
The idea may be that the personal existence ceases entirely but that the Karma is left as a potential seed which will develop into a wholly separate existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 119-120.
