Carl Jung's Letter To Charles Luk.

[Shi Da Dao]

Interestingly, Richard Hunn - Charles Luk's student - was involved in a research product regarding the unpublished work of Carl Jung. This required Richard meeting Jung's grand daughter (in Zurich), and the providing of previously unknown material kept within the family. This included Jung's writing on re-birth and his apparent belief in it. The short extract below shows how far Jung's understanding of Buddhism had progressed from his early idea that Buddhism merely denied the imagination - to the understanding of emptiness.

'The book C.G. Jung was reading on his deathbed was Charles Luk's Ch'an and Zen Teaching: First Series, and he expressly asked his secretary to write to tell the author that 'He was enthusiastic....When he read what Hsu Yun said, he sometimes felt as if he himself could have said exactly this! It was just it!'

Unpublished letter from Dr. Marie-Louis von Franz to Charles Luk dated September 12, 1961.

Extracted from back-cover of Ch'an and Zen Teaching: First Series - By Charles Luk.

[Shi Da Dao]

I have recently read a very interesting 'Illustrated Biography' of Carl Jung, and near to the last pages of this wonderful book I found the following quote which corroborates the fact that Jung was reading about Chinese Ch'an (i.e. 'Chinese Zen') during his last days. It appears that at this time of great transition, Carl Jung met with Miguel Serrano, and it is from Miguel Serrano's memory of their conversation that the following is derived:

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On May 6, 1961, too frail for his daily walk, Jung was driven around some of his favourite roads, saying goodbye to the countryside. Three separate wedding processions stopped the car’s progress. Synchronicity, decided Jung, announcing his impending marriage to death. Four days later, Miguel Serrano was one of his last visitors. Jung received him in his study dressed in a “Japanese ceremonial gown, his Gnostic ring on his left hand, Telhard de Chardin’s book The Human Phenomenon, a great book, by his side.”

Serrano reports being “once again struck by the magnificent rigor of Jung’s mind” in that conversion. Jung said;

“Today no one pays attention to what lies behind words…to the basic ideas that are there. Yet the idea is the only thing that is truly there. What I have done in my work, is simply to give new names to those ideas, to those realities. Consider, for example, the word ‘Unconscious.’ I have just finished reading a book by a Chinese Zen Buddhist. And it seemed to me that we were talking about the same thing, and that the only difference between us was that we gave different words to the same reality. Thus use of the word Unconscious doesn’t matter; what counts is the idea that lies behind the word.”

…At 4pm, on June 6, 1961, Jung died very peacefully, surrounded by his family.

(Carl Jung Wounded Healer of the Soul: By Claire Dunne – Pages 244-245)