| Go, little book ... --Geoffrey Chaucer;Individuation is everybody's business in life. Ordinarily, individuation means to fulfill our potential. Psychologically, it means to become whole. To become whole we must know of its meaning, context and direction. Among those to offer guidance is Confucius of fifth century BCE China, whose influence is still palpable, but disregarded. To non-Chinese, he appears "ethnic" or academic; to the Chinese, passe and incompatible with modernity. Furthermore, gulfs in language, culture and worldview preclude us from receiving his true import. But just as contemporary cosmopolitanism relegates Confucius to bookshelves, so from the global village comes rescue to invite him to wider practice--in the discoveries of Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) and Indian sage Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950).;A comparison between the original texts of Confucius and their renditions reveals that much is inadvertently lost in translation and the conversion of cultures. To address the need to re-introduce Confucius as a psychology of individuation, this study attempts three angles: (1) to lay out Confucius' own blueprint of individuation from the Daxue (Ta Hsueh--The Great Learning), supported with passages from the Zhongyong (Chung Yung--The Doctrine of the Mean) and the Lunyu (Lunyu--The Analects); (2) to elaborate his psychological perspectives with the insights of Jung; (3) to present the teleology and significance of ordinary life through the integral psychology of Sri Aurobindo.;This three-way amplification not only brings Confucius into the twentieth century, but also corroborates for us a universally true picture of the nature of being human, individual and collective. Where the three differ, we encounter cultural and interpretative variations of the same ground from which they derive their systems. As a seminal effort to present a rounded rendition of Confucius' guide to individuation, this synthesis hopes to reveal the psychological value of his enduring system, with the intention to open a dialogue to benefit our contemporary quest for wholeness. |
