Silencing the question of God: The ways of Jung and Suzuki

Abstract

The irreligion or, if you will, secularism of our time can be traced primarily to the collapse of the extraverted religious life in Western civilization. God as the central fact of the cosmos and, corresponding to this on the psychological plane, the image of God as the center of personality are no longer felt to be alive by most people. I do not intend to diagnose this condition. Suffice it to say that the death of the traditional image of God in the Western psyche opens the possibility of a richer understanding of what "God" and "religion" mean. If we read the omens aright, the most significant trend in the current re-evaluation of the phenomenon of religion is in the direction of a growing preoccupation with the events of man's inner life, with the depth, and, indeed, the magnitude of his psyche. More and more people are drawn into the center of themselves where "God" and "religion" are discovered beyond the worn-out cosmological symbolism of the past. I believe that instrumental in this arduous inward journey are two men: the renascent Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung and the Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism D. T. Suzuki. As a psychologist who is not averse to considering the religious import of a mental disease, Jung was particularly interested in the drawings of m?ndalas by his patients. M?ndala (Hindu term for a circle) is a visual representation?a figure or a design?of the struggle to achieve synthesis of diversity and unity culminating in a pristine, nontemporal "Center." In the traditional m?ndala designs the center is ordinarily occupied by some sort of deity. In the modern m?ndalas, however, we find a symbol of a very different meaning?a star, a sun, a flower, but never a deity. Jung therefore regards these m?ndalas as confessions of a particular mental condition that implies no submission or reconciliation to a deity. "The place of the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of man."1 M?ndalas that have been drawn by Jung's patients (without a deity in the center) would thus show that, being unable to project a divine image any longer, they are prepared to grope their own way toward unity and wholeness. If we now transport ourselves some twenty-five centuries back into the past we find that Gautama the Buddha constantly admonished his disciples to be lamps unto themselves, to strive needfully, to work out their own salvation. Whatever