Grison: “Golden FLower” misunderstood

In Europe the Golden Flower opened slightly some forty years ago when Richard Wilhelm, prefaced by C. G. Jung, revealed its “secret.”(1) It is not the least of the contradictions attaching to this work that it has become almost as well known thanks to Professor Jung’s commentary as by reason of its own text: there is nevertheless no common measure between the two. The object of this commentary, so wrote the celebrated psychiatrist, “is to try and build the bridge of an interior, spiritual understanding between East and West.” However, since the parallelism here was being established on a psychic level, not on a spiritual level, the said “bridge” he was building was that of a total confusing of values. The “action in non-acting” of Liu-tsu, the “fasting of the heart” (sin-chai) of Chuang-tse, the Taoist “spontaneity” (tso-jan) do not spell a “psychic laisser faire” opening a path for the suspect fantasies of the unconscious any more than does the “self-abandoning” of Meister Eckhart. In fact, every method of meditation, and the method of Liu-tsu in particular, presupposes a “stopping” of that imaginative function which Mr. Jung for his part had it in mind to “liberate.” A traditional mandala is not comparable to such and such a drawing by a mental patient, unless it be by inversion, that is to say in the very way that the forces of the lower regions parody the divine Powers. But after all, why discuss the subject of mandala, seeing that its symbolism in no wise enters into the unfolding of the Golden Flower?