Continuing the discussion of Jung and Suzuki begun in Part 3, here we concentrate more on D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), the man credited with bringing Zen to the West.

For a Buddhist point of view we are fortunate to have Suzuki’s 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).”

Jung’s method of balancing the four psychological faculties and the tendencies of extra- and introversion, bears a distinct fellow-feeling with the Buddhist technique of mindfulness as expressed by the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta:

A monk fares along contemplating the body in the body,
(sensation) ardent, clearly conscious of it, mindful of
it so as to control covertousness and rejection (the
opposites) in the world; he fares along contemplating
the feelings in the feelings, the mind in the mind
(intuition), and the mental objects in the mental
objects (thinking).

These are clearly the same four functions described by Jung in his psychological categories. The outer and inner tendencies are also balanced by the Buddha, thus:

…his mindfulness is established precisely to the
extent necessary just for knowledge, just for
remembrance, and he fares along independently of and
not grasping anything in the world.

Suzuki has a similar scheme, though couched in slightly different terms because of semantic variations. He 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.