Biography of Buddha Gautama as a symbolic path of individuation in the context of analytical psychology by Carl Jung

• Maria A. Okulova

  Maria A. Okulova. FSBI Land of the leopard Vladivostok. Russia

Abstract. One of the important tasks of the modern world is to find common ground between the Western and Eastern cultures. Psychology plays an important role there, since it comprehends significant cultural patterns from the point of view of mental processes that are common to all people. Analytical psychology, created by Carl Gustav Jung in the first half of the 20th century, presented its understanding of the myths of
various civilizations in the context of the main milestones in the development of the protagonist’s personality. According to Jung's followers, many of the mythological and historical heroes go through a special path of individuation, which can roughly be called the gradual unification of consciousness and the unconscious. During this path, the hero passes through key points of life growth, meeting archetypes, which rep-
resent matrices of universal images common to all humanity, innate programs that influence the perception and development of the individual. The final milestone on the path of individuation is the Self, the central archetype that marks the highest point of personal development. Followers of the analytical school of psychology quite fully analyzed the main milestones in the lives of the heroes of the Western world, while the biographies of the Eastern epic were studied less. At the same time, Jung himself noted that the path of individuation is also presented in the biography of Buddha Gautama. Using available sources, the author of this article has attempted to identify the key points in the life of the Buddha in order to clearly prove the assumption of the famous psychologist. The work contains a brief analysis of the main milestones in the life of Buddha Gautama using the method of analytical psychology, as a result of which a consistent chain of archetypes’ recognition on the path of formation of the Self was traced. The novelty of the study is represented in its uniqueness: a consistent analysis of the biography of Gautama Buddha in the context of analytical psychology has not previously been published in Russian scientific literature.
Keywords: Carl Jung, Buddha, Self, individuation, archetype, east, Buddhism, Jesus, myth.