Yoga
The Secret of the Golden Flower. - Translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with a European Commentary by C. :G. Jung ; the whole translated into English by Cary F. Baynes. (Kogan Paul, Trench Trubncr. 12s. tkl.) IN the relations between the East and West of to-day there are signs of an intimate transfusion and interpenetration between the two cultures which may herald a Renaissance. This entails danger, though it should also arouse hope. The West is sick of a thousand neuroses which the insight of the East might first make clear and then cure ; but only at the price of humility and hard work.
" Spiritual Europe is not helped by *hat is merely a new sensation or a new titillation to the nerves," says Jung, utter- ing a warning which I also have tried to express —" what it has taken China thousands of years to build cannot be stolen by us. Of what use to us is the wisdom of the Upanishads, or the insight of Chinese Yoga, if we desert the foundations of our eden culture as though they were outlived errors, and, like homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores ? " We English and Dutch have gained rich territories in Asia, but We are in danger of losing our own more precious souls : like Rorie in its decline, so is modern London full of sinister cults. Yet Satanism, the Black Mass, and such puerilities are no more than a resurgence of the primordial Unconscious. Those Who practise such silly or disgusting rites should be taken to the consulting room rather than to the police court : . repression merely drives the trouble deeper : few of us in the Went, however sane in outward seeming, can afford to throw stones from the glass house of our subliminal racial memory. Seven- eighths of ourselves are submerged : we float likeieebergs on the • sea of existence, with only a small part of the real personality exposed. What goes on below the surface has only lately been guessed at in Europe : in Asia it was considered a thousand years ago : we may still learn much from the kindly, enigmatic, -smiling sages of Tibet, India and China.
In Tibet, especially, land locked, high and dry above the tides of conquest which have swept over smoother and more fruitful lands, certain avenues of mysticism have been exploied for long centuries in pure air, peace, and amid scenes of natural grandeur which no other part of the world can rival. It is small wonder, therefore, that those of us who believe that the East has much to teach the West in philosophy and psychology should be drawn to that country; and that we should look to it for further enlightenment. Some years ago I reviewed in these columns Mr. Evans-Wentz's Tibetan Book of the Dead, claiming for it an importance which I see Jung endorses, Lately I have been reading the works of another student. of Yoga, Madame Alexandra David Neel, who has spent ten years in the Himalayas working under eminent lamas. In her „Tourney to Lhassa and With Mystics and Magicians she proved :her competence to speak of matters with which few of us are acquainted : Initiations and Initiates in Tibet carries still further her studies in esoteric doctrines.
Madame David-Ned is a Frenchwoman, with the intellectual integrity of her race, but she possesses also an un-Gallic adapta- bility to foreign customs, and a passion for exploration. She has travelled widely throughout all the East : she reads Tibetan as well as Sanskrit : she has learned the oral as well as the written teachings of the Tantriks, and has-subjected herself to their physical as well as to their mental discipline. Her book is of absorbing interest to those who, already knowing something of Yoga, 'wish for an exposition of the methods of the inaccessible initiates of Tibet.
It must not be supposed that Madame David-Neel (or anyone else) will ever be able to give directions for the practice of Yoga in the Western home. She knows that her description of the preparation for the angkur (a " power- conferring " ceremony) " may seem strange and even absurd." " Nevertheless," she adds, " scientific investigation into the processes might possibly lead to interesting discoveries." What do we know of breathing ? In Tibet various methhels to induce various contemplative states have been used for centuries. Spiritual training, according to the Lamas, is a clearing or a weeding process. There is nothing to " do r ; t here is only to "-undo"- the webs . of illusion that ensnare the mind of man, in order that he may realize in himself the One in the Many. This is the union, yoke, Yoga, which under many names and forms is experienced in both. East and .West : the concern alike of Christian, Buddhist mod Verlantist.- In Dr. Jung's commentary on Wilhelm's translation of The Secret:of the Golden Flower the seeker of, an " East-West " psychological synthesis will find the richest pasturage. "The gods have become diseases," he says, " —not Zeus, but the solar plexus now rules Olympus and causes the oddities of the professional office hour, or disturbs tha brain of the politician and journalist, who then unwittingly release mental epidemics." How far is national fate bound up with the Collective Unconscious ? What fears and phobias would a psycho-analysis of our leading politicians reveal ? How far woold our own ideals stand the test of Dr. Jung's scrutiny? We only become free to know the world of the mind when the laws of the earth have been obeyed ; and few of us have fully obeyed those laws, or faced our own deepest and darkest selves in the light of the illumined consciousness. It is note- worthy that Dr. Jung turns to Christianity for support :
" All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul," he writes. But " it is for us to build up our own Western culture. A 'beggar is not helped by our giving lum outright more or less generous alms, although he may desire it. He is much better helped if we can show him the way to free himself permanently of his need by Work. Unfortunately, the spiritual beggars of our time are all too inclined to accept the alms of the East m specie, that is. to appropriate unthinkingly the spiritual possessions of the East and to imitate its way blindly."
Assuredly no one will think that Chinese. Yoga makes easy reading, or will pluck the petals of the' Golden Flower in an idle moment. Like Patanjali, the authbr of the Tai 4 Chin lbw Tsuny Chili, has wrapped his ineanffig in the winding-sheets of symbolism and metaphor until it seems a corpse rather than a living philosophy :
" Only after a hundred days," he writes, "will the Light be real, then only will it become spirit-fare. After a hundred -days, there develops by itself in the middle of the Light, a point of the true Light-pole (the masculine element). Suddenly there develops the seed pearl. It is as if a man and a woman embraced-and a concep- tion took place. Then one must be quits still in order to await it. The circulation of the Light is the epoch of fire. In the midst of primal becoming, the radiance of the Light is the determining thing. In the physical world it is in the sun, in man the eye. The emanation and dissemination of spiritual consciousness is chiefly brought about by this power when it is directed outward (flosis downward). Therefore the meaning of the Golden Flower depends wholly on the
backward-flowing method." • Strange gibberish this may seem : yet the words could
not be made simpler if they are to carry the purpose with -which they are charged : it is impossible to condense still further a teaching that is already quintessential. The book will not have a great public, but those that can read and mark it will profit by the discourses of the Master Lii Tiii, tracing his teaching both back to the Ganges and forward to Palestine ; while Dr. Jung's conunentary will long remain a landmark of sanity and scholarship.
F. YEArs-Bnows,
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