Knox, Ronald Oliver; (2024) The Legacy of Jung’s Buddha: From Eranos to Esalen. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the history and reception of Carl Jung’s depth-psychological interpretations of Buddhism. In modern culture, psychology has become one of the most prevalent frameworks through which to interpret Buddhism. Buddhist meditative practices are, prima facie, considered to be psychological techniques and popular commentators and authors describe Buddhist doctrine as a form of noetic science. The psychologization of Buddhism, familiar to many today, does not have a homogenous history. Rather, Buddhism’s transmutation into a (supposedly) psychological tradition has taken many forms, from Buddhism as an ethical psychology to Buddhism as ‘mindfulness’. Many scholars of Buddhism have alluded to the significance of Carl Gustav Jung’s depth-psychological interpretations in the history of the reception of Buddhism in the west during the midtwentieth century and beyond. Yet there have been, to date, few studies detailing the context of Jung’s encounter with Buddhism and the legacy of his interpretation of it. The aim of the present thesis, briefly stated, is to make good this gap in both the historiography of Buddhism's reception in the West and in the historiography of Jung's psychology. Jung played a major role in the development of the notion, mainstream today, that Buddhism is, in essence, psychological. The argument in what follows develops in three stages. First, I shall layout Jung’s engagement with Indian religious and philosophical ideas and his generalised conception of ‘Eastern thought’ that developed out of his own reading and his contemporary historicocultural context. This section will also focus on how Indological ideas entered into his personal cosmology, which is recorded in his recently published Black Books. Second, I shall explore how Jung’s acquaintance with contemporary scholars of Indology, predominantly those who participated at the Eranos conferences in Ascona in the 1930s, began to deepen the association between depth psychology and ‘Eastern’ soteriology meditative practices, both for psychologists, including Jung, and for scholars of Indology and Buddhology themselves. Finally, I shall explore how this psychologized form of Buddhism was taken up and developed in the writings of prominent authors on Buddhism, who, using their understanding of Jung’s psychological model as their interpretive framework, promoted the version of Buddhism that is familiar today to many in the West. The concluding chapters discuss the legacy of Jung’s interpretations, demonstrating the formative impact they had on scholars and enthusiasts of Eastern religion, particularly in the American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, up until the end of the first decade of the Esalen conferences in 1975. This history has enduring implications both for students of Jung and for those interested in the historiography of Buddhism.

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