Carl Jung on “Hinduism” – Anthology
Soma and fire are identical in Vedic literature. The ancient Hindus saw fire both as a symbol of Agni and as an emanation of the inner libido-fire, and for them the same psychic dynamism was at work in the intoxicating drink (“fire-water,” Soma-Agni as rain and fire). The Vedic definition of soma as “seminal fluid” confirms this view ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 246
Soma is also the “nourishing drink.” Its mythological characteristics coincide with those of fire, and so both are united in Agni. The drink of immortality, Amrita, was stirred by the Hindu gods like the fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 247
There is a similar idea in Hindu mythology, where Indra appears as the husband of Urvara. But Urvara means the “fertile land.” In the same way the seizure of a country by the king was regarded as his marriage with the land ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306
Similar ideas must also have existed in Europe. Princes at their accession had to guarantee a good harvest. The Swedish king Domaldi was actually killed as a result of failure of the crops. In the Hindu Ramayana, the hero Rama marries Sita, the furrow ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306
Of all the trees in India there is none more sacred to the Hindus than the peepul or aswatha (Ficus religiosa). It is known to them as Vriksha Raja (king of trees). Brahma, Vishnu, and Maheswar live in it, and the worship of it is the worship of the Triad. Almost every Indian village has an aswatha (Negelein, ed., Der Traumschlüssel des Jaggadeva, p. 256) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 545
The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was stranded by the introversion or regression of libido. Hence the Hindu fire-bringer is called Matarisvan, he who swells in the mother. The hero who clings to the mother is the dragon, and when the hero is reborn from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon (fig. 258.59a) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580
The size and invincibility of the “child” are bound up in Hindu speculation with the nature of the atman, which corresponds to the “smaller than small yet bigger than big” motif ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 289.
In India the symbol [dogma] developed far more organically and pursued a less disturbed course. Even the great Hindu Reformation, Buddhism, is grounded, in true Indian fashion, on yoga, and, in India at least, it was almost completely reassimilated by Hinduism in less than a millennium, so that today the Buddha himself is enthroned in the Hindu pantheon as the avatar of Vishnu, along with Christ, Matsya (the fish), Kurma (the tortoise), Vamana (the dwarf), and a host of others ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 272.
In Hindu literature you also find the terms padma (lotus) and chakra, meaning the flowerlike centres of different localizations of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1331
These peculiar localizations play a great role in so-called primitive psychology, which is by no means primitive. For instance if you study Tantric Yoga and Hindu psychology you will find the most elaborate system of psychic layers, of localizations of consciousness up from the region of the perineum to the top of the head. These “centres” are the so-called chakras, and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17
The other category, the minority, become hysterical when they try to be nice and normal. Those are the born criminals whom you cannot change. They are normal when they do wrong. We also do not feel quite right when we are behaving perfectly, we feel much better when we are doing a bit of wrong. That is because we are not perfect. The Hindus, when they build a temple, leave one corner unfinished; only the gods make something perfect, man never can. It is much better to know that one is not perfect, then one feels much better. So it is with these children, and so it is with our patients ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 209
While I stood before the bed of the Old Man, I thought and felt: “I am not worthy Lord.” I know Him very well: He was my “guru” more than 30 years ago a real ghostly guru-but that is a long and-I am afraid-exceedingly strange story. It has been since confirmed to me by an old Hindu. You see, something has taken me out of Europe and the Occident and has opened for me the gates of the East as well, so that I should understand something of the human mind. ~Carl Jung on his vision of Philemon, Letters Vol. 1, Page 491.
No Hindu pantheon lies behind us, instead we have a Judeo-Christian background and a Mediterranean culture, consequently different questions await an answer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 538.
I found something very similar in Hindus, namely an extension or extensibility of consciousness into the subconscious mind which is not to be found or is at least very rare with non-Jews. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 223
If you take the concept of prayer in its widest sense and if you include also Buddhist contemplation And Hindu meditation (as being equivalent to prayer), one can say that it is the most universal form of religious or philosophical concentration of the mind and thus not only one of the most original but also the most frequent means to change the condition of mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 558.
And with-it Christ becomes a formulable psychological experience: the self is a living person and has always been there. It is an insight upon which Hindu philosophy the equivalent of Western theology), Buddhism, Taoism, mystical Islamic sects, and Christianity are all agreed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 84
Our unconscious definitely prefers the Hindu interpretation of immortality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 146.
The concept of the five elements is a part of the Samkhya philosophy, which is pre-Buddhistic, belonging to the seventh century B.C. at the latest.
All subsequent Hindu philosophies, like the Upanishads, took their origin in the Samkhya philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 43
You know that the series of animals begins in muladhara with the elephant that supports the earth, meaning that tremendous urge which supports human consciousness, the power that forces us to build such a conscious world.
To the Hindu the elephant functions as the symbol of the domesticated libido, parallel to the image of the horse with us.
It means the force of consciousness, the power of will, the ability to do what one wants to do. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 51
Our Ajna is caught in this world.
It is a spark of light, imprisoned in the world, and when we think, we are merely
thinking in terms of this world.
But the Hindu thinks in terms of the great light.
His thinking starts not from a personal but from a cosmic Ajna. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Yoga Seminar, Page 67
In India it has given way to Hinduism, in which Buddha is merely the ninth, that is the last, incarnation or avatar of Vishnu. The Hindus believe that the time of Buddha has passed and that a tenth avatar of Vishnu in the form of a white horse will soon appear. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.
As Buddha and his teaching are still recognized within the frame of the Hindu religion, you find traces of him everywhere; but his achievement, amazing consciousness and highest integrity are no longer to be found in India today, though Rishis and Yogins still make private efforts to reach its illumination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 68.
India honored me with three doctorates, from Allahabad, Benares, and Calcutta representatives of Islam, of Hinduism, and of British-Indian medicine and science. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 280
For the ultimate task of life, according to Hindu teaching, is that you take up your karma, that you work it out; otherwise it accumulates and you have it in the next existence-a hell of a time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 58
Consciousness.
For it is at the same time the thing which happens in ourselves, a thing that is almost physiological.
Therefore Hindu philosophy holds that there is such a snake in the human body that creeps up the spinal cord and seeks to attain the light of wisdom, or consciousness.
That it wants to be recognized in the light, in consciousness, would be the psychological interpretation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 296
But the Hindu mind thinks of it in an absolutely different way.
To him the world is an ever-existing illusion, but always created from the central point of energy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 306
People sometimes assume that there really are such centers, but the Hindu himself says ‘Just as if” there were such centers; it is not to be taken literally. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420
The legend of the youth of Krishna, who was contemporary with Christ, is such a close parallel that Christians say it originated in Christian countries or was affected by Christian influences, while the Hindus assert just the opposite. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447
No scholar in our days will deny the Persian influence on the conceptions of early Christianity; the Christian idea of heaven and hell, for instance, is typically Persian.
The influence of Hindu philosophy is still questionable, however, though it is a fact that there were Buddhist monasteries in Persia about two hundred years before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447
We cannot conceive of matter as a spiritual entity, or even imagine that it could have a spiritual connotation or a spiritual value. It seems an absolute paradox.
But when one studies Hindu philosophy, one sees that matter, as the opposite of spirit, is really pretty much the same thing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 552
That center of the mandala is what Hindus would designate as “smaller than small yet greater than great.”
There is a text in the Upanishads: “Inside of the heart of the size of a thumb, outside covering the world on all sides two handbreadths high.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 555
The serpent has the meaning of the space-giving or the visibility-giving factor.
Naturally all pictures of mandalas have a certain extension, which is due to the fact that the god can only be represented in the Hindu or Tantric pictures when in the state of creation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 559
In the Hindu cosmogonic myth, for instance, part of the creation of the world consists of Indra pulling up the big serpent that is deep down in the sea, and with it he pulls up the seven great treasures, enumerated as seven gods, among whom is Mani, which means the jewel in Sanskrit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 590
Buddha was himself a great reformer: he preached against the background of a pantheon of about two million gods, the deities of the Hindu systems, and as everybody was already convinced of the existence of gods and their tremendous importance, Buddha stressed the importance of man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1338
He never took it as something obvious. It always remained a wonder to him and was sacred to him
. He had a way all his own of piling the wood and kindling the flame; indeed there was even something in it of the way in which fire was made with such trouble by primitives, who prepared it with endless patience, as if it were a matter of life of death and must never, once it was kindled, be allowed to die. Jung did this instinctively, as if he were carrying out a religious ritual, and then when the Hindu flame flickered up, in its light his face would take on an expression of godliness like that of an ancient priest. ~Laurens Van Der Post, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 227.
The Self is a collective idea, which the Hindus call ‘conglomerate soul,’ consisting of many souls – built out of many souls as it were, both masculine and feminine ones.” ~Carl Jung, Jung My Mother and I, Page 531
Jung pointed out that the para-aspect of Hindu philosophy was for us a purely theoretical abstraction, just as the highest chakras of Kundalini Yoga transcend our concrete understanding and would be explicable only in a distant future. ~Gerhard Adler, Dynamics of the Self, Page 71
The Hindus would seem to be saying the same thing when they say that it is better to be partially fulfilled within one’s own karma, than perfectly within a foreign karma. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page ~Carl Jung, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 91
Since the Unconscious really means the not-conscious, nobody can gain that state while he is alive, and be able to remember it afterwards, as the Hindus claim. In order to remember, one must have a conscious spectator, who is the Self or the conscious being. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 49
I have always thought,’ I said, ‘that the Hindu tries to get rid of the Ego in order to escape from the wheel of Samsara; eternity for him would be like a continuous state of insomnia, and he therefore wants to blend himself into the concept of the Whole. ~Miguel Serrano, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 50
Yes, India is an extraordinarily interesting country, and you should live that experience right, and you should live it intensely until the hour comes …. I also wanted to confront that universe and, as a product of the Christian West, to use it to test my own ways, and to give life to those zones within me which correspond to those of the Hindus, but which in the West for the most part remain dormant. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 51
According to Hillman’s recollection, Jung didn’t approve of Vasavada’s propounding “a completely Hindu religious point of view,” as a neophyte Jungian analyst. “As Jung saw it, ‘this guy didn’t learn anything.’ Meier [Vasavada’s analyst said, ‘Look, he’s from India and that’s the way he thinks.’ It was a tempest in a teacup, but Meier had resentments and I’m sure there were other things involved.” ~Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Page 241
He [Jung] equated the Hindu notion of Brahman/Atman with the self. At the same time, he provided a definition of the soul. He argued that the soul possessed qualities that were complementary to the persona, and in that sense had what the conscious attitude lacked. ~Editor, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 74-75
The immediate sources that Jung drew on for his concept of the self-appear to be the Atman/ Brahman conception in Hinduism, which he discussed in Psychological Types, and certain passages in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 66, fn 204
Kâlî, also Kâlikâ, Hindu goddess of time, change, and destruction. Kâlî is the violent and fierce aspect of Parvati, the gentle manifestation of Shakti, the consort of Shiva. She is said to have destroyed the demon Raktabija by sucking the blood from his body. Drunken from his blood, she danced over the bodies of the slain, thereby stepping on Shiva’s body. When she recognized her consort, her rage and blood thirst left her immediately.
The moment of the blood-drunken Kâlî standing on Shiva’s body is a well-known iconographic representation of the goddess. For her worshippers Kâlî is the highest reality of Brahman. As Kâlî is associated with death and cremation, her devotees cover their bodies with the white ash of the cremation grounds. When Jung was in India in 1937/38 the temples of Kâlî had an enormous emotional impact on him.
His travel companion Fowler McCormick (see n. 27) noted: “As we would go through temples of Kâlî, which were numerous at almost every Hindu city, we saw the evidences of animal sacrifice: the places were filthy dirty—dried blood on the floor and lots of remains of red betelnut all around, so that the colour red was associated with destructiveness. Concurrently in Calcutta Jung began to have a series of dreams in which the colour red was stressed.
It wasn’t long before dysentry overcame Dr. Jung and I had to take him to the English hospital at Calcutta.… A more lasting effect of this impression of the destructiveness of Kâlî was the emotional foundation it gave him for the conviction that evil was not a negative thing but a positive thing …,The influence of that experience in India, to my mind, was very great on Jung in his later years.” ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 13, fn 121
Europe. Here in Europe there are countless missionaries, some of whom have quite substantial followings. In America these followers have three temples. Hinduistic syncretism with Hindu-Buddhist religious services. You can read these things there also. One of these prophets, Vivekananda, says, among other things, that the practitioner would look beautiful, would find the right words, etc. There is always this shameless advertising for the splendid power of yoga.
I don’t want to say the same about this ancient text. For all these things that are naively said of the effect of yoga are simply symbolic statements, and people who are really familiar with yoga are completely aware of that. But they say to themselves: Let’s make allowance for these ways of expressing things. It’s good for people. Through this they will be enticed and thus live out their karma. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 20-21
Tibetan Buddhism. They have a particular yoga, described as Kundalini Yoga or Serpent Fire Yoga. But this is Hindu, not Buddhist. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 56
In Mahâyâna Buddhism Târâ is a female bodhisattva. She plays an important role in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, where she is understood as the bodhisattva of compassion and action representing the female aspect of Avalokiteśvara. She has been venerated as a Tantric goddess since the seventh century. As Hindu goddess she is worshipped in Shaktism. ~Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 64, Fn 230
But in India it has been wrapped in the mantle of Hinduism again. The Buddha is now the ninth recognized incarnation of Vishnu. The tenth is on the way, that is the white horse. But it comes only after the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112
Buddhism and its doctrine are now recognizable under the cloak of Hinduism. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112
The ancient stupa form is similar to the baroque church towers of the Jesuits. It emerges out of a lingam. The stupa building stands exactly at the place where the lingam stands in a Hindu temple. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 133
India has an incredible continuity. Its gods and the basic philosophy of yoga are maybe 6000 years old, and the Hindu religion as we know it today carries within itself the roots of a primeval, primitive religion. It has truly grown up out of its roots. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 255-256
I found my way to Dr. Jung neither as a doctor nor as a patient, but as did Richard Wilhelm, the eminent interpreter of Chinese wisdom: as an Oriental scholar interested in Hindu symbolism, mythology, and psychology of yoga. ~Heinrich Zimmer, The Impress of Dr. Jung in my Profession, Page 2
One has to use one’s intuition in deciphering these dreams of the collective genius of a great civilization. In fact, Hindu mythical tradition, instead of explaining its amazing features to the understanding, unfolds them to the pious intuition of the Hindu masses; it impresses their imagination and guides their souls by an immediate impact on the unconscious which is stirred to correspond to the dreamlike features and events of the mythological tales as they evolve in being told. ~Heinrich Zimmer, The Impress of Dr. Jung in my Profession, Page 3
I have been warned and rebuked over and again by friends and colleagues not to make so much of Dr. Jung’s teachings, not to overrate their importance. Looking, however, on these eminent colleagues who advised me, and watching the results of their dealings with the inspiring though bewildering messages of the Hindu genius, sometimes they gave me the impression of being cool hens hatching indefinitely golden eggs. ~Heinrich Zimmer, The Impress of Dr. Jung in my Profession, Page 4
