[Buddha-l] Jung and Dignaga

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

While I spent a good deal of my graduate work on the origins of  
psychoanalysis, including, importantly, the relationship between Freud  
and Jung, I'm not going to comment on it here. It is, as Jayarava  
pointed out, just a bit too far from Buddhism. I am sorely tempted,  
but I'm not going to succumb.

Really.

No, really.

I *will*, though, comment on one thing Dan just posted:

> Yes, many [Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s] were caught up in
> the righteous exuberance of the day, partially fueled by fears of  
> dangers
> real and imagined; the Cultural Revolution involved a similar  
> ecstatic élan,
> with similarly disasterous consequences. The better we understand  
> how this
> works, the more possibility we will have for not succumbing to similar
> disasterous exuberances in the future.

Now *that's* a fit subject for buddha-l, I think. Irrational  
exuberance and fear are two poles of ignorance, the sort of ignorance  
that Buddhism teaches is one of the three poisons. We humans seem to  
be prone to this not only as individuals but also as nations and  
cultures. I wonder why that is. I don't like the notion of "collective  
karma" or even "national identity."  It never made sense to me to turn  
around the Buddhist practice of breaking down and seeing through  
apparent persons and things and start building up things (like the  
pseudo-beings of national identities) that don't exist. Most  
unskillful, it seems to me. Better to expose the roots of these  
attachments and imaginary consciousnesses than glorify them.

But that gives away which side of the Freud/Jung chasm I cling to, eh?

Franz