The American Jungian analyst, James Hillman, posited, ‘There is only one core issue for all psychology. Where is the “me”? Where does the “me” begin? Where does the “me” stop? Where does the “other” begin?’ The Japanese Jungian analyst, Hayao Kawai, pondered on the question, ‘What is I?’ Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies view the reality of phenomena as different from our everyday world, just as the quantum world differs from tangible experience. According to Mahayana Buddhism, the true nature of things, including ‘I’, is no-thing or emptiness. The existence of every phenomenon is determined by its relation to all others. All things continuously and simultaneously manifest themselves together as a whole out of the nothingness. The consciousness of the subject which views this reality must become empty itself. So does consciousness exist, or not?

Yuriko Sato is a Japanese Jungian analyst and psychotherapist, and a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich. She studied medicine and worked as a psychiatrist in Osaka and Kyoto. She has private psychotherapy practices in Zürich and Bern, and is a training/supervising analyst at ISAPZURICH (International School of Analytical Psychology Zürich), where she teaches on topics such as the Eastern (Japanese) psyche, narcissism, and psychiatry.