Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study 9783110837247, 9783110083057

Table of contents :
Introduction
I The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism
II The analysis of personality and universe
III The experiment with truth and reason
IV On suffering
V The ethics of the Eternal Recurrence
VI The transfiguration of suffering and nirvana
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung

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Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung Herausgegeben von

Ernst Behler · Mazzino Montinari Wolf gang Müller-Lauter · Heinz Wenzel

Band 6

1981 Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Nietzsche and Buddhism Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study by

Freny Mistry

1981

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Gedruckt mit Hilfe der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bonn

Anschriften der Herausgeber: Prof. Dr. Ernst Hehler Comparative Literature GN-32 University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195, U.S.A. Prof. Dr. Mazzino Montinari via d'Annunzio 237, 1-501 35 Florenz Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter Klopstockstraße 27, D-1000 Berlin 37 Prof. Dr. Heinz Wenzel Harnackstraße 16, D-1000 Berlin 33

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Mistry, Freny: Nietzsche and Buddhism : prolegomenon to a comparative study / by Freny Mistry. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1981. (Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung ; Bd. 6) ISBN 3-11-008305-1 NE:GT

Copyright 1981 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., vormals G. J. Göschen "sehe Verlagshandlung J. Guttentag, Verlagsbuchhandlung - Georg Reimer - Karl J. Trübner - Veit & Comp. — Printed in Germany - Alle Rechte des Nachdrucks, einschließlich des Rechtes der Herstellung von Photokopien und Mikrofilmen, vorbehalten. Satz und Druck: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin Bindearbeiten: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin

For Siegfried und Ruth Mühlhausen

Prefatory Note I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Alexander von HumboldtStiftung for supporting this project and to Professors Gerhard Kaiser and Jörg Salaquarda from whose encouragement I have greatly profited. My thanks is also due to the editors of the Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung for the publication of this study in their series. Freiburg i. Br., September 1978

Freny Mistry

Contents Introduction I The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism II The analysis of personality and universe III The experiment with truth and reason IV On suffering V The ethics of the Eternal Recurrence VI The transfiguration of suffering and nirvana Bibliography Index

1 19 51 80 109 139 166 198 203

Introduction "Of all the Europeans who are living and have lived I have the most universal (umfänglichste) of souls: Plato Voltaire — — — this depends upon conditions which are not fully in my power but rather in the 'nature of things' — I could be the Buddha of Europe: though admittedly an antipode to the Indian Buddha" (KGW VII, I; 4 (2), 111)1. Despite Nietzsche's personal reassurances to the contrary, his philosophical enquiry complements that of Buddhism, notably in its original form (Hinayana, Theravada). To trust his polemical utterances on Buddhism would be to arrive at the premature conclusion that for the most part he viewed its gospel with strong aversion — an interpretation which might well dissuade us from attempting a comparison of the two philosophies altogether. A study of both, however, autonomously and in conjunction, leads us to conclude that the minds behind the two seemingly divergent attitudes to reality are more often in consonance than not. It enables us, moreover, to demonstrate in a significant European connection, that Buddhism is not an equivalent of the retreat from the temporal world, or of what Niebuhr even more erroneously deems to be the "state of quasi-existence in which life and consciousness have been stripped of everything finite, but also of all that is dynamic and meaningful." 2 Nietzsche's declaration of becoming "Europe's Buddha", or the antipode to the historical figure, was probably unknown to Bertrand Russell. It is, however, blatantly underscored by the concluding paragraphs of Russell's essay on Nietzsche, which enforce an unresolvable antinomy in the ethical philosophies of the Buddha and Nietzsche: An ethic such as that of Christianity or Buddhism has its emotional basis in universal sympathy. Nietzsche's, in a complete absence of sympathy. (He frequently preaches against sympathy, and in this respect one feels that he has no difficulty in obeying his own precepts.) The question is: If Buddha and Nietzsche

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2

Citations to Nietzsche's Nachlass in the text are from the Collected Works (Großoktav edition) Leipzig, 1901-13, Vols IX-XVI, abb. GA, and to the Critical Edition of Nietzsche's works (Berlin, 1967f.) edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari, abb. KGW. Quotations from Nietzsche's writings through the text are followed by the abbreviated title (as given in the bibliography) and the number of paragraph or aphorism. The translations are my own. R. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (London and New York, 1935), p. 71.

Introduction were confronted, could either produce any argument that ought to appeal to the impartial listener? . . . We can imagine them appearing before the Almighty, as in the first chapter of the Book of Job, and offering advice as to the sort of world He should create. What could either say? Buddha would open the argument by speaking of the lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment; the wounded in battle, dying in slow agony; the orphans, illtreated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, he would say, a way of salvation must be found, and salvation can only come through love. Nietzsche, whom only Omnipotence could restrain from interrupting, would burst out when his turn came: 'Good heavens, you must learn to be of tougher fibre. Why go about snivelling because trivial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Trivial people suffer trivially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted, because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by non-existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while. I appeal to You, Lord, as the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed by the degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath.' Buddha, who in the counts of Heaven has learnt all history since his death, and has mastered science with delight in the knowledge and sorrow at the use to which men have put it, replies with calm urbanity: 'You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quite as much that is positive as is to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for Alcibiades and Napoleon, I, too, have my heroes: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the forces of nature and secure food with less labour; the medical men who have shown how to diminish disease; the poets and artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the greatest men that have ever lived.' 'All the same,' Nietzsche replies, 'your world would be insipid. You should study Heraclitus, whose works survive complete in the celestial library. Your love is compassion, which is elicited by pain; your truth, if you are honest, is unpleasant, and only to be known through suffering; and as to beauty, what is more beautiful than the tiger, who owes his splendour to his fierceness? No, if the Lord should decide for your world, I fear we should all die of boredom.' 'You might,' Buddha replies, 'because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those who really love life would be happy in the world as it is.' For my part, I agree with Buddha as I have imagined him. But I do-not know how to prove that he is right by any arguments such as can be used in a mathematical or a scientific question. I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-consistent ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the

Introduction

3

world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.3

The antagonism here between Nietzsche and Buddhist ethics invites remonstrance, expressive as it is — essentially in Nietzsche's case — of a popular political image and prejudice for which the present study finds little support. Nietzsche to be sure polemically scrutinises moral shortcomings that often take the guise of universal compassion. No considerate scrutiny of his ethics, however, reveals his despisal of this form of sympathy; nor does it support the megalomania attributed to him or betray his contribution to successive political violence in Germany. On grounds other than those given by Russell, scholarly opinion, moreover, will be found to reinforce Nietzsche's professed antipathy to Buddhism.4 The argument here, on the other hand, is focused upon the conviction that Nietzsche would probably have admitted astonishment at the relevance and appeal of his personal ethic to the practising Buddhist. Zarathustra fancies that he is repudiating Buddhist tenets; more essentially, however, he speaks in Buddhist tones. The Buddhist on his part would not hesitate to sanction Zarathustra's faith that "Creation . . . is the great redemption from suffering and life's becoming-light", that in order "that the creator may be, suffering is needed and much transformation," that "there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators. Thus are you advocates and vindicators of all impermanence" (Z II, Upon the Blessed Islands). The perspective of the Übermensch, moreover, personified by Apollo in The Birth of Tragedy and exalted as "Dionysian" in Nietzsche's subsequent writings is an affirmation, if qualified, of the essence — "If a man were to conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, and another conquer one, himself, he indeed is the greatest of conquerors (Dh. VIII, 4 3 4

History of Weitern Philosophy (London, 1946), pp. 737-739. M. Ladner concludes that Nietzsche did not understand Buddhism at all (cf. Nietzsche und der Buddhismus, Zürich, 1933; see my introduction pp. 5—6); W. Kaufmann opposes Nietzsche's perspective of creativity with Buddhist nirvana (cf. Nietzsche. Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton, 1968, pp. 276-279; see also chapter 6 of my text, pp. 186-188); J. Sumbaugh concludes that there is no resemblance whatever between the "European form of Buddhism" (i.e. eternal recurrence) professed by Nietzsche and Indian Buddhism (cf. Untersuchungen zum Problem der Zeit bei Nietzsche, Den Haag, 1959, p. 181; also Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return, The John Hopkins University Press, 1972, pp. 17-19). The affinities between Nietzsche and Buddhism indicated by Stambaugh are given in Note 10 to my introduction; see also note 4 to Chapter 5); R. Okochi, in contrast, observes that it is not Nietzsche's direct utterances on and considerations of Buddhism that would agree with the religious outlook of a Japanese Buddhist, but rather the last phase of his thought in which he as it were forcefully expands the horizon of previous Occidental thinking and makes possible the overcoming of nihilism through nihilism itself. This overcoming, he notes, has alone been the painstaking task of 2500 years of Buddhism. ("Nietzsches amorfati im Lichte von Karma des Buddhismus", in Nietzsche-Studien, I (1972), p. 42).

4

Introduction

(103))5 — of Buddhism. Accordingly, the intention of this study is to investigate the proximity of spiritual outlook in Nietzsche and the Buddha, both of whom, despite marked differences in expression and perspective, showed complementary ways to self-redemption. Several reasons suggest themselves for the previous absence of a full-length study committed to the present theme. Buddhism as a religion is still more widely known as an otherworldly monastic discipline then it is as an everyday living concern. As contrasted with the dissemination of Christianity the immediate application of Buddhist tenets to the lay and everyday world has only recently been discussed and accentuated in scholarly literature. Buddhism ist still by and large considered to be the practice of monks who have left society and whose activities are concentrated upon a life to come; alternatively, in Nietzschean terms, as an abstraction clearly antagonistic to the fidelity to and exaltation of the present reality. Eschewing this consideration, what Nietzsche himself has to say whenever he mentions the Buddha or Buddhism by name creates, as suggested earlier, the impression that his life-affirming credo is the very reverse of the ostensibly "life-refuting" doctrine of the Buddha. It is a fact, moreover, that Nietzsche does not overtly acknowledge a debt to Buddhism anywhere; he continues to reinforce, instead, the impression that Buddhist precepts were of use to him only as a counter-prop and denial of his own Weltanschauung. Consequently, he does not hesitate to proclaim or even underscore his personal evaluation of Buddhism as "nihilistic", "spiritually enervating" or as a religion for the "weak and the debauched". As a perspicacious critic of his Zeitgeist, on the other hand, it is plausible that he should have rejected the popular and pseudoscholastic reception of an imported thought that had served to comfort and accomodate those whom he labelled "decadent". The rejection, no doubt, is even stronger when he invokes Buddhism conjunctly with the once-admired Schopenhauer and Wagner, in his view, the "arch representatives" of modern decadence (CW, 4) who had taken fondly to Indian philosophy. It is a consideration, furthermore, that since Schopenhauer had established for himself the reputation of being an authority on the Vedanta and Buddhism among nineteenth century European scholarly and belletristic circles, Nietzsche's Indian affiliations — characterised as they are by a strong ambivalence, and quite unlike the ostensibly positive assessments of Schopenhauer as also those of Wagner — may understandably have been deemed superfluous or second-rate. Methodologically, the present investigation examines affinities and divergences in the philosophies of Nietzsche and the Buddha from a thematic per5

Citations to The Dhammapada are in the translation adopted in A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, ed S. Radhakrishnan and C. A. Moore, (Princeton, 1957).

Introduction

5

spective. In so far, it militates against the approach adopted in the only existing book on the subject: Max Ladner's Nietzsche und der Buddhismus (Zürich, 1933). Ladner concentrates almost exclusively upon Nietzsche's misrepresentations of Buddhism. His intention as stated in the preface to his book is: "I have not made it my task to analyse Nietzsche as a total phenomenon; where this is concerned I can show neither joy nor interest. Wherever he takes a stand on Buddhism, or refers to it, if only with a single word, I have tried to evaluate his opinions from the vantage point of Buddhism. Where error and misunderstanding are rampant I have allowed the facts to speak for themselves, whenever possible."6 In accordance, Ladner provides a chronological list of miscellaneous remarks from writings in which Nietzsche mentions Buddhism by name and then proceeds to demonstrate the bigotry and falsity of Nietzsche's interpretations. Ladner's reliance on isolated texts, considered quite out of context, amounts ultimately to a hopeless distortion of individual passages.7 To be sure, Nietzsche's knowledge of Buddhism is to be culled from random notations scattered through his writings. But since no progression or notable change in his attitude to Buddhism is verifiable, the chronological approach here is meaningless. The conjectural nature of Ladner's method is endorsed, moreover, by the fact that 6 7

Ladner, op.cit., pp. 6—7. To provide some examples: cf. the comment to Aph. 364 from Nietzsche's Nachlaß of 1875/76 where he expresses Wagner's freedom of interpretation concerning the religious significance of the various myths he employed: "Nietzsche ultimately had to separate from Wagner, because a lasting bond could not have been possible between his (Nietzsche's) totally irreligious nature and the most profoundly religious man, Wagner. An unbridgeable abyss gaped between the basic principles of their world-views. Here, the glorification of life and all its appearances so as to increase the intensity of these; there, the overcoming of life to find peace and freedom." (p. 23); Regarding Aph 469 of Dawn (see my introd. p. 12), Ladner overlooks Nietzsche's appeal to lightness and humour as also his argument in favour of the affirmation of oppositions in characterising reality and nonsensically remarks: "Nietzsche wishes to say here that even the leader must at times reveal himself as weak for this or that reason. It is interesting and at the same time touching to see that even here he is thinking of a Buddhist song." (p. 30); With reference to Aph. 27 of The Genealogy of Morals Ladner cannot appreciate Nietzsche's psychological scrutiny of the possible reasons why the phenomenon of truth has become a problem or why man accepts suffering or even wants it; he therefore contends with incredible naivity in defence of Buddhism: "That which Nietzsche represents as the sense of Our* existence, namely, that 'in us" the will to truth presents itself as a problem to our consciousness, is, to use an expression of Schopenhauer's, philosophic humbug. What is one to say to this, that man wants suffering as long as he can give it a meaning, a thereto? Is there anywhere in the world a human being who wants and who, when he suffers, does not wish to get away from the suffering?" (p. 58); On Aph. 6 in Ecce homo where Nietzsche likens the Buddha to a profound physiologist, Ladner comments: "Here Nietzsche reaches the limits! Where the highest and purest religion prevails, he perceives mere physiology. Where there is truth, he sees merely hygiene. The dark veil of life-affirmation which beclouds his spirit, robs him of the light. Total insanity steadily approaches. What an infinitely sorrowful fate!" (p. 140). Needless to say, Ladner's book is replete with commentary of this kind.

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Introduction

Nietzsche himself does not acknowledge anywhere, either explicitly or cryptically, the inadequacy of interpretations or notations on Buddhism made by him at specific points of time. His assessment of Buddhism might seem less offensive in conjunction with his criticism of Christianity, particularly as found in The Antichrist. It would, however, be misleading to believe that he adopts in this late work a more positive view of Buddhism than elsewhere. Nietzsche's representation of Buddhism here is in fact vitiated by his maddening reproaches against Christianity. Ladner, moreover, ignores the proof that Nietzsche did make notations concerning Buddhism which bear testimony to a strong sense of perspectivism in his assessment of it, which reveal a sympathetic curiosity and appreciation, and which substantiate that he found in this branch of Indian philosophy an invaluable intellectual framework for the spiritual culture of man. The obvious and major objection to Ladner's approach is that it distracts the reader from obtaining an overall impression of Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of Buddhism and vice versa. His book leaves us with the impression that Nietzsche failed miserably in his intellectual grasp of Buddhism and that his denigration of this way of life speaks of nothing other than an incorrigibly prejudiced mind and perverse interpretation of it. This may seem partially to hold, but it is verifiably undemonstrable as the ultimate statement on Nietzsche and Buddhism. It is a marked ambivalence that characterises Nietzsche's explicit citations to Buddhism. The latter, he avers misguidedly, is passively and destructively pessimistic, nihilistic and decadent. It represents a denial of the natural desires of man and thrives among the inert, weak and exhausted individuals. It is absented of vigour and exuberance and opposed to what is strong, wellconstituted, healthy and exceptional. It is unattractive to "active" and "youthful" men. It represents a fear of and oversensitivity to pain and corruption. It encourages the emotions of guilt and responsibility lodged in the "bad" conscience. It detests evil because evil paves the way to such painful conditions as unrest, work, care, complications and dependence. Its lack of resentment owes to a basic debility that views all emotional impulses with horror. It advocates the "pity" that persuades man to "nothingness". It demonstrates a "malady of the will", upholding as it does, the will to nonentity, against the will to "power". It is a religion for "late" men who have reached the end of life. Its "docility" resembles that of the "perfect cow." Conversely, Nietzsche informs that the "self-deception of moral concepts" lies far behind Buddhism. It is "beyond good and evil" and a hundred times more realistic than Christianity. It encounters problems objectively, coolly and truthfully. It is the only genuinely "positivistic" religion in history, strictly "phenomenalistic" and pragmatic in its outlook. It bears a deference for reality and so rules out the paralysing threat of sin. It prescribes hygienic

Introduction

7

measures to overcome depressing physiological conditions and is intended to preserve mental health. It counteracts dejection, counsels moderation, the wanness of all intoxicants as also of all emotions that activate the gall-bladder and heat the blood. It is opposed to worry. It develops ideas which are soothing and encouraging. The Buddha is a "physiologist" par excellence and his religion a "system of hygiene". He understands goodness and graciousness as health-promoting. He rules out prayer and extreme asceticism and does not advocate subscription to imperatives or compulsions of any sort. He bans hostility and strife with those who think otherwise. He insists upon the overcoming of revenge, antipathy, ill-will. In opposition to outer action, Buddhism stresses inner strenuousness and vigilance. It professes a healthy "egoism" in the Socratic sense and fights with a rigorous attempt to lead the most spiritual interests back to the person. Buddhism is a movement which had to originate among the higher and even the scholarly classes. It is cheerful, calm, and advocates a "freedom from desire", a goal which is attainable and attained. "Perfection", for Buddhism, is a constant reality, unaffected by vague hopes and longings impossible to fulfill. It is the expression of a fine evening, sweet and mild. It possesses lofty intellectual love. It has overcome the subtleties of philosophic contradiction, a victory which makes for its "spiritual glory" and "sunset-glow". In opposition to Christian superstition, manifest in the notions of immortality, cults, sacraments, miracles, irrationalism, Buddhism represents the "simple and loving practical life — a happiness attainable on earth." Correspondent to this ambivalence, Nietzsche now adulates the Buddhist denial of substance or soul (anatta) and its attendant culture of a spiritual self-sufficiency, now criticises what he errantly conceives to be the Buddhist aim: the "escape" from suffering, alternatively, the desire for non-existence (nirvana). The Buddhist ostensibly rescues himself from spiritual exhaustion caused by blind faith in the substantial reality, only to succumb to another form of enervating nihilism represented by the will to "non-existence". The spiritual move in Buddhism is not, Nietzsche mistakenly intimates, away from a static metaphysical bias to a dynamic ethic; its climax reveals the vicious circle of nothingness (WP, 580). The present study intentionally avoids exclusive concentration on the errors involved in Nietzsche's apprehension of Buddhism though it recaptures these for several reasons. Nietzsche's misconceptions of Buddhism in the foregoing ambivalent assertions are significantly representative of the reception of Indian thought among nineteenth century poets and scholars. Perhaps no contemporary of his was so relentlessly alive to the dangerous interpretation of empirical reality that had accrued from the exhilarating encounter, on the philosophical level, between Orient and Occident in the Europe of his day: "The need to dissemble and to conceal himself seems more urgent than the

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Introduction

protection from freezing cold in modern man. Modern scholars and philosophers do not employ Greek and Indian wisdom in order to grow wise and peaceful: the mere purpose of their work is to provide modernism with a fictitious reputation of wisdom." (UM, IV, 6). Once again: "It seems to me now and then that modern men are totally bored with each other and that they finally find it necessary to make themselves interesting with the help of all the arts . . . they allow themselves to be served up as prickling and curried dishes, they pour themselves over with the spices of the entire Orient and Occident and for sure! they smell very interesting now, of the whole Orient and Occident. They spare themselves no pains to satisfy each taste; and everyone will be served, whether he desires what smells good or bad, what is sublimated or boorishly coarse, what is Greek or Chinese, tragedy or dramatised obscenities" (UM, III, 6). The nineteenth-century European, in Nietzsche's assessment, was impatiently and curiously snatching at ideas which were in the air instead of arriving at these independently; or he professed to feel emotions that were remote from his own. His life-style, on the other hand, evinced a drastic contradiction of his professed enthusiasm for the contemplative spirit of Asia. Wherever an intellectual symbiosis of ideas was experimented with, with the possible hope of re-instating lost faith in a supramundane entity, Nietzsche saw evidence only of a strong dichotomy in the practical life of the European. The Asian, he argues, in varying contexts, attests to "longer and profounder repose" (JS, 42, 350), "calmness, contemplativeness and perseverance" (D, 206), greater "humanity, forbearance, happiness and settlement" (KGW VII, 2; 25 (163), 52; cf. KGW VII, 3; 36 (57), 297). Life in Europe, on the other hand, manifests a fear of the present and daily activity is characterised by agnosticism: " . . . one is now ashamed of repose: long reflection almost makes the conscience prick. Thinking is done with a watch in hand, as lunch is eaten with eyes directed upon the financial newspaper; — we live like men who are in constant fear of 'missing something'. 'Better do something than nothing' — even this principle is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be finished . . . nowadays the real virtue is to do something in a shorter time than another person . . . Indeed it might go so far that one could not yield to the inclination for the vita contemplativa (i.e. walks with thoughts and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience" (JS, 329).8 8

Reversing the popular conception of Buddhism as devoted to other-wordly contemplation, a contemporary Buddhist expresses the following criticism regarding man's fear of the present: "Sometimes you see a man in a restaurant reading while eating — a very common sight. He gives you the impression of being a very busy man, with no time even for eating. You wonder whether he eats or reads. One may say that he does both. In fact he does neither, he enjoys neither. He is strained, disturbed in mind, and he does not enjoy what he does at the moment,

Introduction

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For Nietzsche, Buddhism as understood in nineteenth-century Europe was also, paradoxically, synonymous with "decadence." To disregard his criticisms of Buddhism, then, would be to ignore what he was trying to fight against, namely, the "escapism" that characterises a literature and an era in which the Buddha is ambivalently represented as a prophet denying the worth of empirical reality in pursuit of spiritual deliverance.9 Notwithstanding the superficiality of this representation, Nietzsche had felt its impact in intensifying the agnosticism and materialism of his day. In this context, moreover, it would be well to remember that Nietzsche's interpretations of Buddhism are based on translations and secondary sources then available, the unreliability of which owes not least to the paucity of first-hand material on Buddhism accessible to nineteenth-century Europe. The ambivalence in his reception of Buddhism then is at least in part traceable to the questionable representations of it that were at his disposal. To put the entire weight on Nietzsche's erroneous evaluations of Buddhism, as Ladner does, seems fruitless, because more often than not the philosophy is not condemned per se but the word itself variously and whimsically used as a paradigm for "escapism", the "denial of the will to live", "nihilism" or "pessimism" — all of which Nietzsche identified more explicitly with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and of Wagner from which he experienced deep estrangement. Curiously, though Ladner concentrates exclusively upon Nietzsche's misrepresentations of Buddhism he has nothing to say about nineteenth-century decadence in this connection. The conclusion arrived at in this study is the reverse of Ladner's: Nietzsche and the Buddha spoke differently, but their message is recognisably affiliated and attests to the proximity of their ethical philosophy. Apart from the ambivalence of Nietzsche's reactions of Buddhism, his personal stance on metaphysics as represented by his denial of an extra-terrestrial god-head,

9

does not live his life in the present moment, but unconsciously and foolishly tries to escape from life" (W. Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, New York, 1962, pp. 71-72. Citations to this book have been made with the kind permission of Grove Press. Inc.) In his Fragments d'un journal intime (1882) Amiel attributes his failures and difficulties to his ostensible "Indian" affinities. "The Buddhist tendency" in him, he states, gathering force with the years, "blunts the faculty of self-government and weakens the power of action", reducing him progressively to scepticism and into a "perpetual self-detractor"; his instinct is in "harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and Schopenhauer"; he is "encompassed and overshadowed" by the "black melancholy of Buddhism" which though logical in its arguments on suffering and illuminating in its counsels of charity and deliverance, aims at the "radical extirpation of hope and desire", the very "causes of life and resurrection." Or again, "like Buddha" he feels "the great wheel turning - the wheel of universal illusion," which experience leaves him consequently "full of anguish" (Amiel's Journal, trl. H. Ward, New York, 1928, pp. 34, 216, 218, 385). See also Paul Bourget, Nouveaux Essais de psychologic co'ntemporaine (Paris, 1889), pp. 212f; 299f.

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Introduction

antipathy for dogma and absolutism, experimentation with truth and reason, analysis of personality, advocacy of "perspectivism" and his implementation and presentation of dialectic, is proximate if not occasionally interchangeable with that of original Buddhism.10 His recurrent allusions to the Buddhist perspective of anatta as relevant to his own rejection of metaphysical idealism intimate his personal awareness of an affiliated intellectual response to phenomenal experience. In view of his interpretation of nirvana, however, it is not surprising that he did not affirm the affinities conclusively. It is a unique aspect of the Buddhist and the Nietzschean Weltanschauung, moreover, that their philosophy and ethics are interchangeable. Nietzsche is, in so far, an exception to the predominantly speculative philosophical systems in the West: his philosophy is indissociable from the spiritual discipline which remains the object of his focus. Early Buddhism, likewise, is not speculative but represents a practical ethics of s elf-redemption. Both Nietzsche and the Buddha saw an unbridgeable gulf between the intellectual grasp and the practical application of prevalent metaphysical beliefs; both viewed themselves correspondingly as innovative iconoclasts. Nietzsche deemed spiritual regeneration possible even in the face of so annihilating a situation as the "death of God" in his times; this very situation, however, provided to his mind the best foundation for the transformation of human personality. Nihilism, engendered and protracted by the murder of God as man had conceived and worshipped him, alternatively, by the waning faith in corresponding metaphysical postulates, could be activated to transform the worst of all possible situations into a delight in earthly existence. A sorrow-filled reality of experience was trans10

It is predominantly the Buddhism of the Nikayas (Theravada, Hinayana) that Nietzsche approximates in his position on metaphysics. Okochi, who investigated the parallels between Nietzsche's view of the amor fati and Mahayana Buddhism, concludes accordingly: "As far a one can establish from his utterances, Nietzsche's knowledge of Buddhism is confined to early Indian Buddhism . . . Buddhism, however, developed variously and through 2500 years and in different cultural settings, not only in India but also in Tibet, China, Korea and Japan into its Mahayana form. Envisioned from the present Mahayana standpoint, Nietzsche's knowledge of Buddhism is very one-sided. It appears occasionally as misunderstanding and folly or as mere exoticism, although it is not thoroughly spoilt through sheer ignorance and prejudice as is Hegel's knowledge of it. In a word, then, Nietzsche's knowledge of Buddhism and his interest in it, does not suffice to awaken high expectations in a Japanese Buddhist" (Okochi, op.cit., pp. 39—40). In the context of the affinities indicated note J. Stambaugh: "The denial of substance, of the soul, of the universal, and of duration; and emphasis on suffering in the sense of ontological restlessness, on the absolute order of the world, 'causality': not in the sense of efficient cause or even of the other Aristotelian causes, but in the sense of dependent origination, of things arising together, of the absolute momentariness of the Will to Power — all are present in Nietzsche and in Buddhism. Other elements too, which cannot be formulated as 'doctrines' - for example, the rejection of theoretical knowledge as its own end, or the matter of communication together with the question of what can be communicated bring Nietzsche very close to Buddhism. But here the affinity stops." (Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return, op.cit., pp. 17-18).

Introduction

11

figurable by the will to endurance, a will to the Übermensch. The Buddha sought to clear the philosophical confusion of his times by steering a middle course between the extremes of the idealistic and materialistic systems of his day. In place of metaphysical dogmatism, which for the sake of deliverance emphasised the gaining of intellectual knowledge, he claimed ethical practice as the essential way of overcoming egoism. Nietzsche no doubt claims his Eternal Recurrence, the climax of his personal ethic, to run contrary to the Buddhist nirvana. There is, however, an irrevocable spiritual nexus between the two perspectives11, despite the distinction that Buddhism does not postulate man's recurrence in the same form. The difference, which consists in the Buddhist postulate that there is an alteration and finally an end even to the heroism of creative endurance, is essential theoretical. What is decisive is the "action" relevant and crucial to both perspectives: creative endurance and continual self-surmounting within the present reality. The Buddhist discipline, as also Nietzsche's, finds its roots in a fidelity to empirical reality and in the vision of things as they are in this reality. The "change" both disciplines inculcate does not involve an alteration of the state of this reality but the transformation of human outlook. Transformation, uninformed and unaided supernaturally, is the parole of both philosophies; it signifies the nirvana of Buddhism as also the endurance of Nietzsche's Recurrence. It is the mutual insistence on this "power" which brings both thinkers together. Nietzsche, then, can be interpreted to unwittingly acclaim the Buddhist ethic-dialectic while expressing its opposite in his unique phraseology of affirmation. As a self-styled contestant of Buddhist morality his position seems justifiable essentially as he describes it in Ecce Homo: as an aggressor in search of obstacles and oppositions against which he has to summon up all the strength and skill at his command; a warrior at heart, attacking only that which he does not despise. (EH, I, 7)12 The essence of Nietzschean and Buddhist ethics and psychology is clouded by the elusive terminology which they used. Such terms as "life-affirmation", "life-denial", "escape", "overcoming", "redemption", "action", "suffering", "pity" are understood differently and often contrarily in the Orient and the Occident. In fact, specific terms in Indian philosophy such as "dharma", 11

12

R. Okochi has written an article (as in note 4, pp. 36-95) demonstrating the affinity between the two perspectives. His examination of Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence almost exclusively from the Mahayana Buddhism leads to a conclusion other than the one arrived at in the present study (see Chapter 5 of my text, pp. 154-156). The name of Buddha, it seems to me, is missing in Kaufmann's observation: "Quite generally, Nietzsche distinguishes between (a) men whom he admires, (b) the ideas for which they stand, and (c) their followers. Only in terms of some such categories can one understand Nietzsche's complex attitude toward Jesus, Christianity, and Christendom. Similarly, Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer; but criticised Schopenhauer's philosophy; and despised the followers who made his 'debauches and vices . . . a matter of faith" (Nietzsche, op.cit., p. 398).

12

Introduction

"sankhara", and the decidedly controversial "nirvana", as Indologists have repeatedly stressed, have no suitable equivalent in Western languages. In view of this, it is challenging as it is also reassuring that the alienation of minds from areas separated geographically is reducible more often to the impossibility of giving a precise meaning to key expressions of the terminology used and not necessarily to divergence in temperament or personality. Since this is usually the case with Nietzsche and the Buddha, a major aim of this study is to clarify the terminology used in preference to adducing from its usage an antagonism of mind in the two thinkers. There is an immediately notable divergence in the Buddhist and the Nietzschean representation of experience and mode of communication. The Buddha's solemnity carries with it the hope that he will be taken seriously not only because he did not insist upon his way as being everybody's but because of his singlemindedness and conviction regarding the perspective of dukkha (suffering) and its overcoming. The value and attraction of Nietzsche's ethics lies inter alia in the deliberate inconsistencies originating in his overwhelming affirmation of opposites and contradictions in the universe as in the individual (cf. TI, V, 3; JS, Wit, Cunning and Revenge, 11; WP, 259). He affirms these inconsistencies on the grounds that "a serpent which is unable to strip off the skin will perish as will those minds that are prevented from changing their opinions" (BGE, 31 and TI, 573), no less by his vision of reality within the perspective of lightness and humour, the "joyful kind of earnestness" and the "wisdom full of rogueries" which he felt distinguished Socrates from Christ (HA, The Wanderer and bis Shadow, 86). It is typical, moreover, that he should admit that "The heavy all-crushing course of the sage who, according to the Buddhist song, 'wanders lonely like the rhinoceros' - is now and then in need of signs of a conciliatory and modified humanity: and indeed not only of those quicker steps, those polite and sociable tours d'esprit, not only of wit and a certain self-derision, but also of contradictions, of occasional relapses into predominant inconsistencies" (D, 469). Accordingly, he could ironically aver that the existence of his immediate relatives posed the greatest obstacle to his personal faith in the efficacy of the Recurrence. And he was happier to declare affinity with the satyr than with the saint. EH, Preface, 2)

The question: "Did Nietzsche really know something about Buddhism?" is answerable in the affirmative. His sources of information on Buddhism, moreover, were more extensive than is commonly supposed13. Although the 13

Contending that Nietzsche's Eternal Return is certainly different from the Buddhist notion of it, Stambaugh notes: "One could object that Nietzsche had only a superficial idea of

Introduction

13

names of Schopenhauer and Wagner, the young Nietzsche's mentors, are frequently — if often indiscriminately — associated with Buddhism, it would be hasty to conclude that the bulk of Nietzsche's information on India was derived from either of these thinkers, both of whom appear to be his most obvious sources on the subject. It is almost certain that Nietzsche did not take Schopenhauer to be an authority on Buddhism, notwithstanding his unfailing acknowledgement of Schopenhauer's great contribution to the spread of Indian philosophy (HA, I, 42).14 In considering Nietzsche's response to the Buddhist criticism of metaphysics in particular, it is a mistake to overrate Schopenhauer's ceuvre as a main or exclusive channel of Nietzsche's information upon the subject. That he often brings the Buddha and Schopenhauer together in name suggests or proves as the case may be that he often confused one system of thought with the other — as is apparent, for example, when he labels Schopenhauer's "Mitleid" as consistently "Buddhistic". Yet, on the other hand, there is sufficient evidence indicating that Nietzsche saw the dichotomy between Schopenhauer's pre-eminent advocacy of metaphysical absolutism through the Will in his own system and the antagonistic Buddhist perspective that all phenomena are devoid of Self (Will), cosmic and individual. Schopenhauer's personal identification of the Upanishadic tat tvam asi ("thou art that") as the ethical basis of his system and his erratic affiliations of the Will as thing-in-itself with the Highest Reality of the Upanishads (Brahman) need no accentuation.15 His awareness of the Buddhist antagonism to the Upanishadic Truth (Atman = Brahman) is evidenced by snatching remarks indicating a familiarity with the Buddha's non-theistic position.16 Curiously,

14

15

16

Buddhism, perhaps only indirectly through Schopenhauer and his friend Deussen. In the Nachlaß, however, a whole chapter is found which bears the title "On the criticism of the Law Book of Manu'. The exact particulars with which Nietzsche debates there are doubtless the result of his own preoccupation therewith." (Untersuchungen . . ., op.cit., p. 180). Though Buddhism, in fact, has nothing to do with the Manu Law-Book, the suggestion here is that Nietzsche may have known more about Indian philosophy than is commonly supposed. "It is doubtless one of the greatest and most invaluable advantages to be gained from Schopenhauer that he on occasion forces our sensations back into older and more powerful ways of contemplating the world and man to which no other paths could lead us so easily. The profit to history and justice is enormous — I don't think that any one could so easily succeed nowadays without Schopenhauer's assistance in doing Christianity and its Asiatic relations justice — which is particularly impossible from the foundations of Christianity hitherto" (HA, I, 42). Cf. also P. Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1901), p. 88. Cf. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, § 44, 53, 66, 68. Vol H, Chapters XXV, XXXIX, XLI, XLVII, XLVIII, XLIX. Also Deussen: "When one looks away from the errors in what is incidental, the Brahman of the Indians, the Ideas of Plato, the world-creator and the worldredeemer of Christendom, the thing-in-itself of Kant, the forces in the sciences and the Will of Schopenhauer are harmonised in the unrupturable whole of metaphysics". (Elemente der Metaphysik, Aachen, 1877, § 184. fn p. 87). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, Chapters 10, 38.

14

Introduction

however, these remarks are not made in a context which would refute Vedantic teaching. Schopenhauer, moreover, simply touches upon the Buddhist view of karma, which substantiates the Buddha's repudiation of Vedantic Truth in denying the transmigration of a "soul". Regarding transmigration, Schopenhauer noted the difference between Brahmanism and Buddhism. He remarks, for instance, that Buddhism propounds this perspective in its "subtlest form", "coming closest to the truth" in teaching not a metempsychosis but a "peculiar palingenesis resting on a moral basis . . ,"17 Schopenhauer, however, does not elucidate, as would be expected, upon the perspective as based on the Buddhist view of anatta; he simply refers the reader to the existing literature on Buddhism in which this doctrine is explained. Given the contradictory nature of the metaphysical Will as a lack in itself and responsible for the evil in phenomenal existence, it is understandable that Schopenhauer should have claimed affinity with Buddhism: "If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth", he intimates, "I should have to grant Buddhism preeminence over the others. In any event it is a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold, for Buddhism numbers far more followers than any other religion. The agreement, moreover, is even more pleasing to me, insofar as in my philosophizing I have assuredly not been under its influence."18 Vitiating this professed philosophic affinity, however, Schopenhauer avoids any exposition of the perspective of anatta upon which the Buddhism of the Nikayas is founded. In fact, we are led to believe on occasion that he was not familiar with it at all. This is certainly the case when he brings Buddhism and Brahmanism together as advancing the same metaphysical credo: "Brahmanism and Buddhism, which teach man to regard himself as Brahman, as the primordial Being himself, who knows no arising and passing away, will achieve much more in this regard than those religions that represent man as originating in nothing and as really beginning with his birth the existence he has received from another."19 That Schopenhauer's sympathies were obviously with the metaphysics of the substance view, as found for example in Vedanta, is a fact that was endorsed by his interpreter Deussen, who criticised the Buddhist denial of a substantial reality as the greatest weakness of Buddhism.20 Grimm admits Schopenhauer's agreement with the Vedanta and consequently his opposition to Buddhist nirvana when he places genius and genial knowledge above human understanding and power and deems these accessible only in a 17 18 19 20

Ibid., Chapter 41. Ibid., Chapter 17. Ibid., Chapter 41. P. Deussen, Culture and Wisdom of the Ancient Indians, til. E. Payne (Karachi, 1943), p. 82.

Introduction

15

mystical "Feierstunde".21 In Buddhism, on the contrary, genial conception implies the understanding acquired and fostered by ethical and meditational discipline. Schopenhauer's mistake in professing affinity with Buddhism, as Babbitt insightfully confirms, is that he founds his ethics on a "distinctly subrational sympathy and then proceeds to associate this type of sympathy with the Buddha . . ."; moreover, that Schopenhauer's error "is so fundamental that it is doubtful whether he would have corrected it even if he had been more adequately informed."22 The information on "Buddhist" metaphysics that Nietzsche gathered from Schopenhauer had, to be sure, provoked an ambivalent and admonitory response, beginning with his references to it in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche was subsequently to pit himself whole-heartedly against this metaphysical Truth — which Schopenhauer mistook to be also Buddhist — in order to assert the empirical truth of the bermensch. Following his first work, Nietzsche in fact applauded the Buddhist rejection of the metaphysical Reality. In thus bringing to focus the perspective of anatta as a principle tenet of Buddhism Nietzsche's contribution to rectifying the false impression of Buddhism disseminated by Schopenhauer is unmistakable. Assuredly, Nietzsche's paradoxical identification of the "negation" of the Buddha and Schopenhauer involve him in the nineteenth-century intellectual malaise for which he showed no sympathy. Yet if he does not directly attack Schopenhauer for interpreting a philosophy that was scarcely accessible to anybody at the time, he is certainly ironical about Schopenhauer's immunity to the pseudo form in which this philosophy was imported to the West in his day: "Indian antiquity is opening its gates and its experts scarcely have for the immortal works of the Indians and their philosophies a relation different from that of the animal to the lyre: although Schopenhauer held the acquaintance with Indian philosophy to be one of the greatest advantages which our century has over others" (UM III, 8).23 Nietzsche appears to have been indebted more immediately for his information on India to a circle of close personal friends who were involved with Sanskrit studies as also to scholarly research then written on the subject. Explicit evidence of his positive concern with Vedantic studies is provided by 21 22 23

G. Grimm, The Doctrine of the Buddha (Delhi, Varanasi, Patna, 1973), pp. 17-18. Appendix to Irving Babbitt's translation of The Dhammapada (New York, 1972), p. 101. Cf. "You will not imagine the indignation with which I was filled when a Sanskrit professor showed me some philosophical manuscripts and observed: 'Strange, these Indians philosophized incessantly "and always cross-wise" ('in die Quere'). The 'cross-wise' seems typical of the understanding which the Sanskrit professors demonstrate for their subject. I had to think Ονος πεδς λνεαν. But indeed without Kant and Schopenhauer, deeper penetration is impossible here." (Nietzsche to Deussen in Erinnerungen, op.cit., p. 88).

16

Introduction

his correspondence with Paul Deussen whom he befriended since his schooldays and who became the leading authority on Upanishadic philosophy in the Germany of his time. It was Nietzsche, in fact, who introduced Deussen to Schopenhauer's writings, a circumstance, which eventually culminated in Deussen's intensive preoccupation with the Upanishads24. The NietzscheDeussen correspondence reveals in addition to Nietzsche's active participation in and encouragement of Deussen's Sanskrit studies, a singularly positive response to a philosophy which professed the reverse of his own. He applauds Deussen for demonstrating so finely through his studies a gratitude to Kant and Schopenhauer, without whose contributions a deeper penetration into the Vedanta would scarce have been possible.25 On receiving Deussen's Das System des Vedanta in 1883 Nietzsche intimated to the author his great pleasure in the acquaintance with the classical expression of a trend of mind utterly foreign to him, adding, that all he suspected about this mind was confirmed in its most naive form in Deussen's book. Three years later he acclaimed the book again as providing him with ever-increasing interest and instruction26 and expressed the wish that something similarly distinct and dialectically scrutinised were available on the Sankhya. No less encouraging is the response be showed to Deussen's Elemente der Metaphysik (1877), in which he singled out "much that is Indian" and declared to be a happy synopsis of all that he had no longer held to be true; concurrently, he regretted not having had access to the book earlier.27 Nietzsche possibly also drew information on Buddhism from his friend Ernst Windisch, the Buddhologist, to whose Sanskrit studies he refers in his correspondence.28 At the present time only a handful of books dealing with Indian philosophy are available in Nietzsche's library: Otto Böhtlingk's Indische Sprüche, 2nd ed. 3 vols (St. Petersburg, 1870/73); Paul Deussen's Die Elemente der Metaphysik (Aachen, 1877); Das System des Vedanta (Leipzig, 1883), (with marginalia); Die Sutras des Vedanta aus dem Sanskrit übersetzt (Leipzig, 1887); Max Müller's Essays, II. Beiträge zur vergleichenden Mythologie und Ethnologie (Leipzig, 1869); Jakob Wackernagel's Über den Ursprung des Brahmanismus (Basel, 1877), (with the personal dedication of the author); Hermann Oldenberg's Buddha. Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (Berlin, 1881);

24 25 26

27 28

cf. ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 88. The considerable impact of this book upon Nietzsche is claimed by Lou Andreas Salome, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Wien, 1911), p. 242. See note 16 to Chapter 1. Deussen, Erinnerungen, p. 80. Cf. Nietzsche's letters of 2 June 1868 and 25 August 1869 to Deussen (Erinnerungen, p. 67); of 15 February 1870 to Rohde.

Introduction

17

Louis Jacolliot's Les legislateurs religieux. M anon-M oise-Mahomet (Paris, 1876).29 Obviously, however, Nietzsche had read more about Indian philosophy than what is suggested by the orientalia in his present library. He is enlisted as having borrowed from the university library in Basel Martin Haug's Brahma und die Brahmanen twice in the summer and winter semesters of 1873 and 1879, as also Carl. F. Koeppen's Die Religion des Buddha (2 vols) in the winter semester (October) of 1870—71. A notation from the Nachlass makes up a list in which "The Buddhism of Kern" is included (KGW VII, I; 15 (60), 518).30 We have Nietzsche extolling in his letter of 13 December 1875 to Gersdorff the Buddhist scripture Sutta Nipata. The Antichrist, as also Nietzsche's correspondence with Deussen, makes allusion to "Sankhya" concepts (A, 32). It is worth noting moreover, that Nietzsche made notations from Oldenberg's book on Buddhism31 and he obviously liked to use quotations from Indian and Buddhist literature and philosophy (e.g. D, 469, 558 and Epigram; GM, III, 7, 17; HA, I, 607; Epigram to "We Philologists"). Zarathustra's favourite town, "The Motley Cow", is a literal translation of the name of the town Kalmasadalmya (Pali: Kammasuddamam) visited by the Buddha on his wanderings. As overt evidence of Nietzsche's sympathetic curiosity and appreciation of Buddhism an excerpt from his letter to Gersdorff, mentioned above, is worth quoting particularly because Nietzsche's reading of the Sutta Nipata affirms his familiarity with Buddhism in nuce; "Honestly, I admire the beautiful instinct of your friendship — hopefully the expression does not sound too bestial to you — that right now you had to hit upon these Indian sayings, while in the past two months I looked around at India with a kind of growing thirst. I borrowed from Mr. Widemann, a friend of Schmeitzner's, the English translation of the Sutta Nipata, something from the Buddhist scriptures, and have already made domestic use of one of the refrains of a Sutta'. 'Thus I wander, lonely as the rhinoceros'. The rendering of the unworthiness of life and of the deception of all goals often impresses itself upon me so strongly, particularly when I am lying ill in bed, that I long to hear something more of it, unadulterated, however, by Jewish-Christian idioms . . . The will to cognition may remain as the last domain of the will to life, as a kind of interim realm between willing and willing-no-more, a kind of purgatory in so far as we look back upon life with dissatisfaction and contempt, and a piece of nirvana in so far as the soul approaches therewith the state of pure vision."

29 30 31

See Max Oehler, Nietzsches Bibliothek (Weimar, 1942). Probably H. Kern's Der Buddhismus und seine Geschichte in Indien (Leipzig, 1884). See note 9 to Chapter 5.

18

Introduction

In view of his readings on Buddhism, the possibility of Indian, or more specifically, Buddhist influence on Nietzsche's thought cannot be ruled out. The establishment of influence, however, is not the purpose of the comparison to follow. The proximity of Buddhist and Nietzschean dialectics and ethical discipline, highlighted as it is by stark differences in verbiage and temperament, is assured, independent of what Nietzsche may have said or read about Buddhism.

I

The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism Perhaps Nietzsche's strongest affiliation with Buddhism as an empirical discipline is found in his scrutiny of metaphysical absolutism as a presumption militating against the exertion and reality of human spiritual autonomy and "power". His rejection of the mystical concentration of the Vedanta as of apostolic Christianity invites comparison with the Buddha's uncompromising negation of the supposed reality of an individual soul and its transcendental counterpart, as also with his injunctions against the spiritual reduction of man through the compulsory obedience to conventional norms. Nietzsche's personal commendation of Buddhism as a plausible antidote to metaphysical thought-constructs as also his opposition of its rational dialectic with Pauline Christianity is endorsed by the Theravada ethic, in which the uniqueness and independence of human achievement is defended to the last. The "theologizing" philosophies of Vedanta, Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer are castigated through Nietzsche's ceuvre for their representation of the metaphysical postulates of Thinghood, Being and Identity as "Truths". His criticism of the suprarational orientation of Vedanta can be singled out here as illuminating his essentially appreciative response to the Buddhist denial of Truth in its metaphysical sense. Correspondent to Nietzsche's ambivalent reception of Schopenhauerian idealism in The Birth of Tragedy, his first work presents both a critique and laudatio of the Vedantic unto mystica. The treatise, influenced by Schopenhauer, draws erroneously upon Buddhism by name within the contexts of the metaphysical communion of the individual with the All-Soul, and of the will to life-denial: The metaphysical consolation - with which . . . each genuine tragedy releases us that life at bottom and despite all change in appearance is indestructibly mighty and joyful . . . appears in incarnate clarity as the satyr-chorus . . . With this chorus, the Hellene, who is thoughtful and alone capable of enduring the most tender and most severe suffering, who has penetratingly scrutinised the annihilatory process in so-called world history as also the cruelty of nature and who faces the danger of yearning for a Buddhistic negation of the will, consoles himself. (7) It is an eternal phenomenon: the greedy Will always contrives to hold fast its creatures in life and compel them to live on by means of an illusion encompassing

20

The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism

all things. The one individual is captivated by the Socratic joy of cognition and the delusion of being able to heal the eternal wound of existence therewith; the other is ensnared by the seductive beauteous veil of art that flutters before his eyes, the other once again by the metaphysical consolation that under the vortex of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly. These three stages of illusion exist after all only for the nobly endowed natures who feel the burden and gravity of existence with deeper aversion and who are to be enticed away from this aversion by exquisite stimulants. All that we call culture consists of these stimulants; according to the proportion of the combinations we have a pre-eminently Socratic or artistic or tragic culture; or if one wants historical exemplifications: there is either an Alexandrian, or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture. *( 18)

The expression "Buddhistic" is misapplied in both paragraphs: in the first it more readily represents "Schopenhauerian"; in the second, inter alia, "vedantic". The perspective of tragedy as unitive consciousness in the second paragraph provides a parallel, not to nirvana as it is understood in Buddhism, but to the Vedantic merger of Atman and Brahman. The juxtaposition and interaction, moreover, of Dionysus and Apollo, twin aspects of suffering in its primordial and phenomenal forms, reinforces the idealistic metaphysical symbiosis denied by Buddhism. Alternatively, it represents the Vedantic postulate of tat tvam asi signifying the esoteric truth that the deepest part of our being is one with the essence of the universe.2 A Buddhist view of the subject, on the contrary, would entail the conception of Apollo (the Greek man of culture) as independent of the god Dionysus, and transforming, unaided, i.e. without the need of a metaphysical consolation, his suffering through the discipline of moderation into art. In view of the fact, however, that Apollo's nirvanic consciousness and experience is not an independent achievement but incumbent upon Dionysian intervention, the predominant contention in Nietzsche's treatise is that the absence of a metaphysical reality renders the human will "powerless". Empirical reality is accordingly subservient to the metaphysical Absolute without the spiritual direction of which its very reality seems fractional and perfunctory. In attributing this knowledge 1

2

The Bäumler edition of Nietzsche's works quotes "brahmanisch" in place of "buddhaistisch". If this is correct then Nietzsche's opposition of the metaphysical consolation to the Buddhist denial of existence would give the work an essentially idealistic interpretation. Nietzsche, however, obviously did not intend to represent divine ecstasy, the reality of the Absolute or of God as a curative to nihilism. Nor was he enticed by Schopenhauer's exhortation to nirvana through a slow but positive denial of the will to life. His perspective is that the aesthetic merger of Apollo and Dionysus can be viewed in terms of the denial of the will to live. Nietzsche very probably had this in mind when referring — if erroneously — to tragic culture as also to the negation of existence as "Buddhist". See my article, "An aspect of Nietzsche's perspectivism in 'Die Geburt der Tragödie' in Nietzsche-Studien 8 (1979), pp. 245-269. Chandogya Upanishad, II, 12.3; III. 14.1-4. Cf. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, § 44, 63, 66.

The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism

21

to the "tragic" culture of "Buddhism", Nietzsche obviously recaptured the convoluted synthesis of Vedanta and Buddhism present in Schopenhauer's philosophy of Will. Nietzsche's debate with Buddhism, then, begins with his association of it with Vedantic metaphysics as he found this expounded in Schopenhauer's ceuvre. Schopenhauer had enthusiastically attributed the intellectual ancestry of his Will to both Vedanta and Buddhism, unmindful of their mutual exclusiveness on the metaphysical level, and so also of the conflict between the empirical Buddhist perspective of suffering and its extinction, and the esoteric Vedantic cognition of the All-Soul.3 Schopenhauer's Will, in fact, reveals an impossible concatenation of the Vedantic conception of Cosmic Reality and the ostensible Buddhist negation of phenomenal existence. The sovereignty of the Cosmic Will, Schopenhauer states, is affirmed only by the negation of its phenomenal form, the will to live.4 Contrary to Buddhism then, which does not trace phenomenal suffering to an alienation between the individual and Cosmic Will, there being no such will to start with, and which in fact even imputes human suffering to man's thought-construct of extra-terrestrial divinity, Schopenhauer interprets human suffering not only as wrought by the Cosmic Will, but also as a result of the human estrangement from it through the "affirmation" of phenomenal reality. He envisions, accordingly, the overcoming of suffering in the denial of this reality — nirvana, tantamount to the "highest knowledge" of the Upanishads, he insists, follows upon the "negation" of the apparent world or is effected by the piercing of the veil of maya. 5 Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche represents individual suffering as inseparable from the cosmic, but no less as wrought by the difficulties of "interpreting" the nature of primordial Reality. In inducing man's affirmation of this Reality, however, he does not, like Schopenhauer, advocate the negation in toto of human pain. He hails, on the contrary, its recurrence — for Dionysian consciousness (nirvana), or infinite joy, is paradoxically infinite pain itself. This emphasis upon the indissociability of pain and joy and the hope for their continual recurrence forms the ethical-aesthetic substrat of the drama of Apollo and Dionysus that is revealed under the guise of its various historical forms. 6 3

4 5 6

Cf. Schopenhauer: "Brahmanism and Buddhism which teach man to consider himself as the primordial Being, the Brahman himself, to whom all origination and disintegration are essentially alien, will perform much more in this respect than will those religions which claim that he was born of Nothing or which begin with his birth the existence he has received from another." (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, Chapter 41. Cf. also I, §63.) Cf. Schopenhauer, ibid., II, Chapter 48. Ibid., I, § 56-58, 68 (especially); II, Chapter 48. This point is discussed in Chapter VI.

22

The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism

As artistic forces, distinct but interdependent, Dionysus and Apollo correspond with the transcendent and immanent realities of the Upanishads, the unity of which is said to connote Truth itself. Dionysus, manifestly ineffable (I), accessible in states of intense exhilaration (I), spontaneously creating out of the fulness of his Being and bringing eternal life midst the play of creation and destruction to expression (4, 17, 20, 24, 25), parallels the Upanishadic Brahman, characterised as Being (sat), consciousness (α'ί) and bliss (ananda)7 and revealing his nature as the primordial essence of the universe. Selfsufficient, fecund, devoid of desire and aim, Brahman makes the world his sport (lila), creating it from the overflow of his joy and spirit.8 The experience of Dionysian magic or the consciousness of "totality" is represented in The Birth of Tragedy as the moment of purest genius, as unlimited "power", and as the climax of tragic art: "Spontaneously" the earth offers her gifts and the beasts of the rocks and of the desert approach peacefully. The carriage of Dionysus is showered with flowers and garlands: under its yoke panther and tiger stride . . . Now with the gospel of world-harmony each one feels not only united, reconciled and merged with his neighbour but is one with him, as if the veil of maya were torn and fluttered only in rags in front of the mysterious primordial One"(I)9. The experience of cosmic totality is expressed here in association with the Upanishadic simile of maya — reiterant in Schopenhauer's books — which signifies that man's return to his original nature (atman) can 7 8

9

Chandogya Upanishad 5.10. 4-5. Cf. Nietzsche's notation: "In that the world is divine sport and beyond good and evil - I have the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus as predecessors" (KGW, VII2; 26 (193), 199). Nietzsche may well have found this idea in Deussen's Das System des Vedanta, Chapter XVI where it is stated: "We must then take it for granted that, as a prince or some great man who has all that he requires, undertakes something without a motive, purely for sport and pastime, or as outbreathing and inbreathing go on by themselves, without external motive, so too God created the world of himself and without a motive, purely for sport . . . for a further motive is not to be found by reflection or revelation of the scriptures and it is impossible to ask God himself about it. Moreover, it is only to us that the arrangement of this terrestrial disk appears such a difficult thing, for God, on the contrary, through the power of his immeasurable omnipotence, it is mere sport. And if in life a slight motive must be present, even for sport, for God we need assume nothing of the sort, for the scripture forbids us to attribute any desire to him. That he could not for this reason proceed to act, is contrary to the teaching of the scripture concerning creation; that he acted without thought, and by chance, is contrary to the teaching concerning his omniscience." (pp. 222—3) Of the Hindu deities the closest approximation to Dionysus is found in the Nataraja (King of Dance), a symbolic representation of Siva. Among the ceaseless activities in which Nataraja releases his energy is that of tirobhava, directly associated with maya, the concealing of transcendental reality behind appearance. The tranquillity of expression contrasted by the movement of the limbs in the Nataraja image signifies the "paradox of time and eternity, of mortal existence and indestructible being" (cf. S. Radhakrishnan, The Brahma Sutra, London, 1960, p. 130). Cf. also M. L. Baeumer's reference to Siva in "Nietzsche and the tradition of the Dionysian", in Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition (Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 178-181).

The overcoming of metaphysics and nihilism

23

be actualised by penetrating the "illusion" created by the limited human intellect. The redemptive knowledge, expressed by the Upanishads in the esoteric equation "Atman = Brahman", is covered by a veil (maya) but accessible through ethical discipline and in the ultimate analysis through intuitional knowledge. Apollo, in contradistinction to Dionysus, represents the "genius" of the veil of maya (principium individuationis) — upholding the joy, wisdom and beauty of the world of appearances (I, 4, 16, 21). Correspondingly, Apollo and Dionysus incorporate two differentiated aesthetic values. In Dionysian art, the most subliminal of which is music, the joy of existence is sought behind the world of appearances and in the ultimate renunciation of individuality for the sake of a communion with the Cosmic Soul (17). This art presupposes the consciousness of cosmic destructiveness, the horrors of individual existence, the unity of pain and joy, and the reality of transience (3, 4, 10, 17, 21, 24). Apollinian or plastic art, on the other hand, signifies the affirmation and perpetuation of the illusory world of appearances. It seeks redemption within the empirical framework of suffering through the creation of beauty and the assertion of individuality. It moves away from Dionysian universality and destructiveness towards the individual creation of sublime and great forms and effort to ethical training (3, 4, 16, 21, 22, 25). On the metaphysical level, tragic art ist envisioned as the ineffable identification of these two distinct and alienated drives: 'Only in so far as genius merges with the primordial artist of the world does it know something about the eternal essence of art; for in that condition it resembles in a wondrous way the uncanny picture of the fairy-tale that can turn the eyes and look at itself; it is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and spectator" (5). Again, the highest objective of tragedy is realised when Apollo and Dionysus, in unselfish co-operation, express the same truth: "The difficult relationship of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy is to be symbolised by a fraternal bond between both divinities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, finally Apollo also the language of Dionysus: whereby the highest aim of tragedy and of art is ultimately reached" (21). The non-dual idealism represented here as the consummation of tragic art, however, is not, in the final event, Apollo's objective. Nietzsche makes it explicit that an irrevocable merger of man (atman) and cosmos (Brahman) means the death of life and art and that this cannot be the culmination of Apollo's artistry. Apollo's realisation of the sovereignty and ubiquity of Dionysian magic is a "saving" knowledge; yet he is aware that there is a danger in the overpowering sensations of absolute beauty, correspondingly, in the condition of spiritual petrification, which it can inspire. This point is made in the allusion to Raphael's portrait "The Transfiguration," the lower half of which is represented as a perceptive delineation of Dionysian

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pain in human physiognomy and character. To Apollo's discerning eye this emanation of creative energy reveals the divine within the material frame and effectualises a moment of subliminal glory. He is transfigured with a beatific presence that is unutterable yet apprehensible and imbued with an unearthly atmosphere. He becomes "identical" with the universe in his momentary reduction to nothing. Under the spell of Dionysian beauty, however, Apollo stands the danger of eliminating the personal suffering that has born beauty: "Here we have in the highest art symbolism his Apollinian world of beauty and its background, the terrible wisdom of Silen, before our eyes and (we) comprehend, intuitively, their reciprocal necessity" (4, cf. 10 and 22). Apollo distances himself from the world only momentarily in the experience of nirvanic joy which has halted time. In the long run, however, he can only respond to Dionysian self-expression as a non-ethical force by developing an ethical consciousness and fidelity to the world of circumscribed activity. This art consists in "acquired" knowledge, which is in an ethical sense opposed to the "unveiled" knowledge or ecstasy of Dionysian consciousness. In coming to grips with the problem of individuation, Apollo then remains aware of the dangers that Dionysian art involves; as an exclusive and life-long concentration, Dionysian rapture amounts to a negation of the will, a resistance to action in the Here and Now. Dionysian ecstasy, carrying with it the endless past, can be spiritually paralysing. It is attended, more often than not, by a lethargy of the will, empty longing, distraction, speculation and boredom and calls into effect an ascetic world-negating disposition (7). Like Hamlet, the Dionysian Greek experiences "knowledge" and becomes as a consequence disgusted with action in the conviction that his personal endeavours cannot affect his redemption (7). These admissions confirm Nietzsche's unmistakable ambivalence towards Schopenhauerian idealism, an ambivalence which prompted him in the same work to express a counter-philosophical spirit which was his own and vociferously directed against the abuse and denial of empirical reality. Schopenhauer reiterantly draws attention to the Vedantic revelation, "Finditur modus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt, viso supremo illo,"10 in order to enforce the perspective that the experience of redemptive knowledge is ultimately independent of human action. Personally, he viewed redemptive knowledge as favourably hostile to the individual will-to-live, as is professed by his injunction: ". . .he will least fear extinction in death, who has recognised that he is already extinct in the 10

Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, Chapter 48: "Of him who sees that which is the highest and the lowest - the knot of the heart breaks - all his doubts are resolved — and his works become nothing" (Mundaka Upanishad: II. 2. 8).

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25

present and who therefore no longer takes a share in his individual appearance because cognition has as it were burned and consumed the will in him, so that no Will, consequently, no mania for individual existence remains over in him."11 Nietzsche, on the contrary, never tired of proclaiming that "knowledge", transcendental concentration, and access to redemptive Truth are destructively harmful to human action; that, moreover, action is necessarily dependent upon illusion, which in turn is in need of "interpretation," not elimination. The longing for an unio mystica at the expense and depreciation of the illusion represented to him the hidden will to death.12 The danger of the glorious Plotinian insight — "one that shall know this vision . . . with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with this, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for it as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair"13 — is perhaps most cogently brought to focus in the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator" published some three years after The Birth of Tragedy. Dionysian and Apollinian perspectives are placed here in a context which underscores their estrangement. Nietzsche's wonderment that Schopenhauer's nature should have been so invincibly stable as not to be petrified by the longing for the "other shore" of which the Indians speak", namely, non-existence, reveals his irony concerning the antagonism which Schopenhauer overlooked between the yearning for sainthood and human productivity on earth: " . . . the individual tears the bond which bound him to his ideal; he stops being fertile in this or that area, stops propagating; culturally speaking, he becomes infirm or useless. The uniqueness of his being has become an indivisible atom, a petrified rock" (UM, III, 3). Contrarily, the Apollinian or Goethean perspective of man — man born to recognise limits and set himself simple, close and clearly defined aims and make use of what is given in order to arrive at these — appears a preferable alternative to the more remotely accessible ideal coveted by Schopenhauer (5). The individual enticed by the Dionysian joy of oneness poses a threat to human culture in so far as he despises ordinary human activity; exclusive concentration on the vita contemplativa brings him to place himself above the community of active men; he becomes incapable of participating in 11 12

13

Schopenhauer, ibid., Chapter 48. Cf. Nietzsche: " 'Will to Truth' - that could be a hidden will to death. There is no doubt, the truthful man . . . as belief and science presupposes him, affirms a world other than that of this life, of nature and of history; and in so far as he affirms this Other world" what? Must he therewith not deny its antipode, this world, our world?" (JS, 344; cf. BGE, 34; GM, 27, i.a.) Plotinus, The Enneads, tr. E. Mackenna, I (London 1917), p. 86.

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the fulfillment of duty (UM III, 5). Nietzsche may possibly have had in mind a similar criticism when calling attention in section 17 of The Genealogy of Morals (III) to the redemptive knowledge which in Upanishadic revelation involves no action and is acquired in the condition of "deep sleep". That the condition of sainthood, implying a total refunding into Being — postulated by Schopenhauer — appeared to Nietzsche in terms of an offensive suicidal knowledge, expressive of the yearning for the cessation of suffering, is nowhere concealed in his work. Nor does he make a secret of the type of man he would choose to emulate while claiming the relevance of both the saint and the artist for the progress of human culture (UM III, 5). The final statement of The Birth of Tragedy is a call to worship not in the temple of the one god Dionysus-Apollo but of two individual deities: "But follow me to tragedy now and offer a sacrifice with me in the temple of both divinities" (25). Nietzsche surpasses here the objective of "perfection" common to the idealistic systems. The unitive reality as Apollo experiences it is a supreme event in the temporal creative-destructive process of empirical existence, not its extinction. The manifestation of the world does not disappear for him when the ultimate Reality is known; both concur. Apollo assumes the stature of the Vedantin in the ability to discriminate between what is eternal and illusory, to restore tranquillity, to develop self-restraint and the art of renunciation; he is, however, free from the desire for release or liberation from suffering on earth. As against "identification," Nietzsche found the Apollinian capacity to endurance, heroic. Metaphysical idealism is admitted only as far as it can enhance the empirically oriented ethics of Apollo. It helps to avert him from the illusion of concentrating solely upon temporal reality or mistaking it for self-dependent or self-existent. The interaction of Dionysus and Apollo becomes a preventive to the exclusiveness or egoism of either perspective. Nietzsche could later claim with impunity that in his first work he had surpassed Schopenhauerian pessimism to formulate and assert a counter-philosophy of life-affirmation (e. g. BGE, 56)14. Coming back to Nietzsche's assessment of Buddhism, the Birth of Tragedy reveals a mistake that Nietzsche no doubt realised on discovering that Buddhism dispenses with the concept of deity altogether. Eschewing, however, the erroneous identification of the metaphysical communion of the individual with the cosmic soul as also of the negation of the will to live as 14

Tragedy does not signify the spirit of resignation following the insight that life and the world are insufficient and ultimately unworthy of human devotion, as Schopenhauer sees it. Nietzsche reverses the conception of tragedy in the words: "Only the Dionysian joy suffices — I first discovered the tragic. The Greeks, thanks to their moral superficiality, misunderstood it. Even resignation is not a doctrine of tragedy - but a misunderstanding of the same. The longing for Nothingness is the denial of the tragic wisdom, its antipodal" (KGW VII, 3; 25 (95), 27. Cf. BGE, 56).

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"Buddhist", the association of the two postulates reveals an acute sense of perspectivism in the early Nietzsche, who sought debate with a philosophy he deemed hostile to life and strove to assert its opposite.15 Nietzsche sanctions the supposedly "Buddhistic" unio mystica as an incontrovertible cultural and spiritual landmark in individual existence; contrarily, he exposes the dangers to which such a metaphysical union can lure the individual, provoking in him a disgust for existence, enticing him away from concentration on circumscribed activity and impressing upon him the uselessness of action. The ostensibly Buddhist nirvana is envisioned from a dual perspective as both a sublime and a dangerous condition. Nietzsche's exposition of the dangers of the Vedantic revelation, then, indicates that his later arguments against metaphysical idealism are a development of his ambivalence towards this idealism in his first work, not a volte face in his dialectic.16 The dualism of perspective in The Birth of Tragedy marks Nietzsche's transition from the vision of empirical reality as directed by a transcendental force to the experience of the same reality as the domain of man, spiritually transformable and surmountable by man alone.

Following The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche directly attacked Vedantic idealism as inimical to the reality of transience and recurrence, without, how15

16

In equating Dionysian rapture with Buddhist nirvana U. v. Wilamowitz Moellendorf limits himself to the criticism of one significant perspective in The Birth . . . namely, the ineffable rapture of identification as tragic art; he fails, however, to appreciate Nietzsche's dialectic linking identification (nirvana) with the negation of empirical existence and so also Nietzsche's insistence upon the Apollonian interpretation of Dionysian significance within the framework of empirical reality, i. e. the overcoming of Dionysian ecstasy and its logical extreme of willnegation through its objectification in art. (See Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf "Zukunftsphilologie! eine erwidrung auf Friedrich Nietzsches gehurt der tragödie (Berlin, 1872) in Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie, Hildesheim 1969, pp. 28—29; also: '"Zukunftsphilologie!' Zweites Stück, eine erwidrung auf die rettungsversuche für Fr. Nietzsches gehurt der tragödie, Berlin, 1873, in ibid., pp. 117-118). E. Rohde, on the other hand, interprets Nietzsche's perspective of "tragedy" essentially as the overcoming of Dionysian ecstasy and its logical extreme of will-negation through its objectification in art. (See E. Rohde, "Afterphilologie. Zur Beleuchtung des von dem Dr. phil. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf herausgegebenen Pamphlets: 'Zukunftsphilologie!'" (Leipzig, 1872, in ibid., pp. 72-73.) Lou Andreas Salome notes the presence of this perspectivism even in writings written well after Birth. She maintains that Deussen's Das System des Vedanta (Leipzig, 1883) was one of the last worthy scholarly writings with which Nietzsche intensively pre-occupied himself and which brought him closer to his earlier Weltanschauung. "It is impossible to overlook" she writes, "the influence of this book on writings after 1883 - particularly in regard to the apotheosis of the creator-philosopher and his equation with the highest all-encompassing lifeprinciple as also in regard to the conception that this principle embraces the succession of all that has been so to speak as a psychic co-existence and as a spacial rather than temporal metempsychosis." "One is occasionally tempted", she continues, "to note in margin 'Atman' and 'Brahman' as elucidations when one brings together Nietzsche's scattered delineations on individual states of the soul in their half-mystical state" (see Salome, op.cit., p. 242).

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ever, renouncing his perspectivistic position. Regardless of his reaction to Vedantic metaphysics as theoretically concentrated and ethically peripheral, he continued to encourage his friend Paul Deussen to pursue his study of Vedanta while unabashedly admitting that this form of knowledge provided a very antithesis to his own.17 His encouragement is hardly surprising, if we bear in mind that Nietzsche did not fail to demonstrate his interest in those very spheres of knowledge that challenged and opposed his own direction of mind. He could, therefore, genuinely acclaim Deussen for a versatility which enabled him to carry out an appropriately formidable task: "Many things would have to combine in a man so as to allow him to disclose such a doctrine as the Vedanta to us Europeans; and I praise you not least for remembering to work efficiently . . . " (March 16, 1883);18 or communicate his delight and gratitude to Deussen for acquainting him with the classical expression of a mode of thought which was utterly foreign to him: "Everything that I suspected of this way of thinking is brought to light in the simplest way (in your book): I am reading page by page with sheer spite — you could not have wished yourself a more grateful reader, dear friend!"19 Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly recognised the necessity and value of Deussen's task while himself engaged in revealing the efficacy of its opposite: "By chance a manifesto of mine is being published right now, which says "yes" with about the same eloquence where your book says "no!" That is ridiculous; but perhaps it will do you good, and I have not as yet decided whether I shall send it to you. In order to write your book you could not have allowed yourself to think as I do; and your book had to be written."20 17

18 19 20

It is hardly likely that Nietzsche derived information on Buddhism from Deussen who specialised exclusively in the study of the Vedanta. But this is often and erroneously believed to be the case. Cf. e.g. Okochi: "Nietzsche came in touch with Buddhism indirectly through Schopenhauer but directly through the results of the prevailing German indology, in particular through his friend Deussen." (Okochi, op.cit., p. 39). Nietzsche's letter of 16 March 1883 to Deussen in Erinnerungen, p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Cf. Nietzsche's letter of 8 September 1887 to Peter Gast: "Deussen is the first independent Schopenhauerian who has a professorship in Germany - / am responsible for the fact that Deussen is Schopenhauer's most ardent admirer and promulgator (by the way eminently rational); he thanked me emphatically for the turning point of his life. The more important thing (in my eyes) is that he is the first European who has approximated Indian philosophy from within: he brought me his recently published Sutras des Vedanta, a book of sophisticated scholarship on Indian thought in which the sagacity of the most modern European systems (Kantianism, atomism, nihilism etc) was anticipated centuries earlier (there are pages in it which sound and not only sound like the 'Critique of Pure Reason') . . . He is a speciality; even the most accomplished of English philologists (such as M. Müller) who have similar goals, are asses in comparison with Deussen because they "lack belief", issuing from Schopenhauerian-Kantian presuppositions. He is now translating the Upanishads. How delighted Schopenhauer would be!"

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Subsequent to The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche stigmatised the central philosophy of the Vedanta — tat tvam asi — now directly, now through his polemic against Schopenhauer's "Mitleid".21 Paragraph 142 of Dawn (II) ironically defines this Indian teaching as ". . . the theory of a mystical process, just now so popular and sanctified, by means of which pity makes two beings one, so enabling mutual understanding . . ." Schopenhauer's embrace of this metaphysical revelation is derided with characteristic pungency: " . . . when I recall that so clear a head as Schopenhauer's delighted in such fanciful and infamous trash, and transferred this delight to clear and half-clear heads, I feel no end of astonishment and pity. How great must be our delight in inconceivable nonsense!" (loc cit). Consequently, Nietzsche deplores Schopenhauer's gratefulness to Kant for having established the categorical supremacy of the thing-in-itself above empirical knowledge and created thereby a basis for the European belief in a metaphysical Absolute; or he ridicules Schopenhauer for applauding the "inconceivability" of Kant's categorical imperative (a corollary of the Upanishadic Brahman) and correspondingly opposing with horror any possibility of a conceivable thing-in-itself denuded of its occultness. Quoting Schopenhauer on the subject: — "Conceivability of the categorical imperative! Preposterous thought! Egyptian darkness! Heaven forbid that it should become conceivable! The very fact that there is something inconceivable, that this misery of understanding and its conceptions is limited, conditional, final, deceptive — this surely is Kant's great gift" — Nietzsche debates whether one should not regard with suspicion the predilection of a man "who feels comforted by the belief in the inconceivability of these things," "who still truly believes in revelations from above, in magic and ghostly apparitions and the metaphysical ugliness of the toad" and can yet entertain "a good will to acquire insight into moral things" (loc. cit.). Nietzsche's criticism here is doubtless focused upon the conflict between exclusive metaphysical concentration and human ethical development (cf. WP, 141). He questions, moreover, the meaningfulness of reconciling what is inconceivable and non-perceptible with that which reveals itself as plausible and necessary. The conclusion at which he arrives is that the morality of action is possible only when the metaphysical hindrances have been removed. Vedantic, or for that matter any other intellectually concentrated knowledge could well obstruct an ethical life here and now. This argument, we will recall, 21

Although Nietzsche's will to power is antagonistic to the Upanishadic Atman-Brahman, .the Platonic Good, the Kantian Thing-in-itself and the Will of Schopenhauer, A. Coomaraswamy places Nietzsche in the "direct line of European mysticism" asserting that "though less profound" Nietzsche speaks with the "same voice as Blake and Whitman" and proclaims with these two the "religion of idealistic individualism." ("Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche", in The Dance of Shiva, Bombay and Calcutta, 1948, p. 155).

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was represented in the dichotomous activities of the saint and the artist in Schopenhauer as Educator. In the Genealogy (III, 17) Nietzsche avers that Vedanta, Buddhism and Christianity are to be praised for superseding moral considerations in their definition of what ultimately constitutes redemption. "The Buddhist considers both good and evil to be fetters: the perfect man must master both. The Vedantist, likewise, confirms of the sage that what is done and undone do not hurt him; he shakes off from him what is good and evil. . . his kingdom suffers no longer from any act; he goes beyond good and evil". Christianity, in agreement, states that redemption is unattainable by means of virtue and moral improvement alone. Conversely, although these religions are praiseworthy in this one respect, their dictum underscores the pre-eminence of theoretical knowledge over ethical action. In substantiation of this argument, Nietzsche provocatively quotes passages from Deussen's book on Sankara's Commentaries on the Vedanta (GM III, 17) in which he finds an indifference to morality confirmed: "For the man of knowledge, there is no duty." "Redemption is not effected by the accretion of virtues, for redemption consists in the unity with Brahman, who need acquire no perfection; and equally little is it wrought by the giving up of faults, for the Brahman, unity with whom is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure." (loc. cit.)22 The perspective of redemption, Nietzsche reminds, is doubtless respectable; the Vedantic adumbration of it, however, is pernicious, resulting as it does, in his view, in a vis inertiae. In counterperspective to his own anti-metaphysical stance — "Evil I call it, and misanthropic — all this teaching of the One, the Plenum, the Immovable, the Sated and the Imperishable. Whatever is permanent is only a parable" (Z II, Upon the Blessed Islands) — Nietzsche communicates with sarcasm that the unity with Brahman in this "oldest and most venerable script" and the "deepest of the three religions" is occasioned by a "deep sleep", to which only an exhausted pessimist would subscribe: "When he has fallen asleep . . . and entered wholly into rest, so that he no longer beholds a dream image, then, dear one, is he one with Being, he has entered into his own self — encircled by the all-perceiving Self, he no longer has consciousness of that which is without or within. Day and night do not cross over these bridges, nor age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good deeds, nor evil deeds." "In deep sleep . . . the soul lifts itself from out this body, enters the highest light and obtains therein its true form. Here it is the supreme spirit itself, which travels about, while it sports and plays and delights itself, whether it be with women, or chariots, or friends; there its thoughts do not 22

Cf. Deussen, Das System des Vedanta, Chapter XII (The Brahman as Soul); Chapter XXVII (The Origins of the Soul); Chapter XXXI (The Passing of the Soul from the Body); Chapter XXXV (The Path of Liberation, esp. sections 2-4).

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return to this appanage of a body, to which the 'prana' (the vital breath) is harnessed like a beast of draught to the cart."23 A corresponding comment from Nietzsche's Nachlass reads: "The Brahmins seek to recognise him (Brahman) through the study of the Vedas, through sacrifices, alms, penance and fasting. Their own means of cognition are peace of mind, taming, renunciation, patience, equanimity (composure) — Means for a mystical intuition as the highest bliss of man (KGW VII, 2, 26 (199), 200). Nietzsche establishes herewith an affinity between the Vedanta and Epicureanism. The hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the "peace of the deepest sleep" or "passionlessness in short" (GM III, 17) is welcomed by sufferers and manic depressives as a supreme good, a positive value and essence — alternatively expressed, Nothingness or God. The union with Brahman, as Nietzsche insinuates, is a negation of pain, complication and the demands of reason. It initiates and sustains a speculative laziness and encourages the negligence of the body. Nietzsche in fact harps upon this last characteristic which he found in Vedanta, and which appears to have confirmed for him an almost exclusively extra-terrestrial concentration in this philosophy: "... even those philosophers and teachers of religion who found the most compelling reason in their logic and piety to consider their bodies an illusion, had no choice but to acknowledge the stupid fact that the body did not disappear: of which the most curious witnesses are found partly in St. Paul, partly in Vedantic philosophy" (WP, 659); Vedantic asceticism "reduces corporeality to illusion, likewise pain, multiplicity, the entire concept-opposition 'subject' and Object' — Errors, nothing but errors" (GM III, 12); "The body proves itself less and less as appearance! Who previously thought of the body in terms of appearance} The consummate worshipper of Brahman" (KGW VII, 3; 39 (18), 357); "Regarding the superficiality of the spirit! — nothing is more dangerous than the self-sufficient 'navel-contemplation' of the spirit, as in the case of the Brahmins" (KGW VII, 2; 27 (62), 290); ". . . the aversion from man led astray the Brahmins, Plato etc. into striving for an extra-human, divine form of existence — beyond space, time, multiplicity etc. The aversion applies to what is inconstant, deceptive, unstable, 'stinking' etc. A solution was indeed suggested by 1) ecstasy 2) deep sleep ..." (KGW VII, 2; 26 (285), 224); " . . . the restricted means of cognition 'he is calmed, tamed, abstinent, patient, composed, the particular (means): Veda studies, sacrifice, alms, penance, fasting — a means to inheriting cognition" (KGW, VII, I; 7 (34), 261); "The saint as an ideal of bodily atrophy, also the entire Brahmanphilosophy a sign of deterioration" (KGW VII, I; 7 (42), 264); " . . . the

23

Cf. ibid., Chapter XII and XXVIII (Special states of the Soul; section 2 on 'Deep Sleep').

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Indian (Brahmin) (feels) in consequence of a lack of initiative — 'all action is suffering'" (KGW VII, I; 8 (15), 346). The pre-eminence accorded to theoretical knowledge and mystical intuition in Vedanta at the expense of exertion to accomplish life's daily tasks was also found, Nietzsche felt, in Schopenhauer's representation of the Will, the affirmation of which was securable only by the compulsive denial of empirical reality. Schopenhauer's Will, as an ens metaphysicum, mirroring — if erratically — the Upanishadic Brahman, the Platonic Good and the Kantian thing-in-itself, is the reverse of Nietzsche's will to power.24 As a composite of the metaphysical and the phenomenal reality, Schopenhauer's Will, in Deussen's identification, represents a perfect and indissoluble Unity: "Our body is just this undivided Will, as it appears viewed through the forms of our intellect. These cannot make any change in its essence, and therefore the phenomenon, though appearing extended in space as body, and in time as life shows the same unity which it possesses as thing-in-itself or Will."25 The Will, then, both metaphysical and individual, is impervious to reform and progress. This contention, as also the affirmation of the Will's blindness and impenetrability to the intellect, moreover, would support Nietzsche's recurrent thesis that the concept of the Will was in effect antithetical to ethical concerns:26 "Schopenhauer's basic misconception of the Will (as if craving, instinct, drive, were the essence of Will) is typical: diminishing the value of the will to the point of being truly mistaken. Also hatred against willing; attempt to envision something loftier, indeed that which is loftier and valuable, in willing-no-more, in 'being a subject without aim and purpose' (in the 'pure subject free of will'). Great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the will: for the will is precisely what treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure" (WP, 84); "Schopenhauer: we are something stupid and, at best, even something that abrogates itself. Success of determinism of the genealogical derivation of obligations that had formerly been considered absolute, the doctrine of milieu and adaptation, the reduction of will to reflexes, the denial of will as an 'efficient cause'; ultimately — a real rechristening: one sees so little will that the word becomes free to designate something else!" (WP, 95) " . . . he did not, however, understand how to deify this will: he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal. Schopenhauer was still so greatly subject to the dominion of Christian values that, 24 25 26

Cf. Stambaugh, Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return, pp. 9, 14, 15, 77. Deussen, Elemente der Metaphysik, § 158. Cf. Simmel's perspicacious remark: "Despite all his self-descriptions as an immoralist, his (Nietzsche's) thought is infinitely more ethically oriented than the thought of Schopenhauer who incessantly designates morality to be the real worth of life and the sense of all thinking" (G. Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Leipzig, 1923, p. 189).

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when the thing-in-itself was no longer 'God' for him, he had to see it as bad, stupid, absolutely objectionable. He failed to comprehend that there can be inexhaustible ways of being able to be different, even of being able to be God" (WP, 1005); "Our acts of willing are not necessary' — this lies in the notion of WM" (KGW VII, I; 24 (15), 694-5). Deussen, however, would contest such interpretations in vindication of Schopenhauer's ethics of "denial". The latter, Deussen finds, is "transparent in every moral deed, as that which really and truly is, whereas, on the other hand, this whole world of affirmation metaphysically speaking is that which is not, and in a moral sense that which should not be."27 Deussen argues with reason, moreover, that the metaphysical antithesis between the undivided Brahman and the manifold world in the Upanishads is at once to be associated with "the ethical antithesis between denial and affirmation through the celebrated 'tat tvam asi', a sentence which expresses in three words at once the deepest mystery of metaphysics . . . and the highest morality."28 Nietzsche's representation of Schopenhauer and the Vedanta, on the other hand, is emphatically coloured by his conviction of a strong antagonism between "knowledge" and "action" in the two systems. The passages he chose to represent Vedanta in the Genealogy, for instance, reveal a distinct partiality for esoteric practices. Nietzsche can of course be criticised for placing the total emphasis on the mystical aspects of Vedanta: on its predilection for intuitional knowledge in place of everyday duty, its so-called divorce of the ethical from the spiritual development, of the exoteric application from the esoteric theory. On the other hand, it would be implausible to presume that he was ignorant of the morality inculcated by Upanishadic metaphysics; his psychological examination of Schopenhauer's delineation of the ethics of compassion — the gradual outrooting of Will — would deny such an assumption, as it would also reveal why he should have expressed his misgivings against this metaphysically concentrated ethic. Moreover, the "companionship in sorrow" ("Mitleid") signified to Nietzsche the harbouring of a concealed egoism. This was intensified by Schopenhauer's provocative association of compassion with the denial of life and longing for Nothingness. Schopenhauer had, it will be recalled, reinforced the primacy of knowledge over action by repeated citations to esoteric maxims from the Upanishads in which moral considerations appear superseded by mystic knowledge.29 Henri Frederic Amiel, for example, a contemporary writer who had occupied himself intensively with Schopenhauer, derived from his delineation of compassion that duty and toil were in the final instance useless forms of striving, that "Truth" was revealed 27 28 29

Deussen, Elemente der Metaphysik, § 169, § 260. Ibid., §176. Cf. Chapter I. Schopenhauer's citation to the Mundaka Upanishad 11. 2. 8.

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essentially in an intuitional absorption in Being not in the renewed suffering engendered by human action. The perversion of the Upanishadic revelation — "Of him who sees that which is highest and the lowest — the knot of the heart breaks — all his doubts are resolved — his works become nothing" (Mundaka Up. 11,2.8) — witnessed by the practice of an exoteric pseudo-mysticism in nineteenth-century Europe cannot be overestimated. Amiel, once again, in confessing his intimate response to Schopenhauer's metaphysics, claims ambivalently that since the ultimate human aims do not concern the practical reality in which man moves but rather a world which is accessible only to the imagination, man is almost compelled to shirk this reality. He exhausts his energies in the yearning for what is inaccessible and undermines the urgency of existence by seeking distraction from its ordeals.30 The "Hindoo genius" he specifies, is a "vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative phenomenon", but at the same time one devoid of "ambition, personality and will". It appeals to his peculiar inclinations towards "pantheistic disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action." In contrast, the Western side of his personality, he confesses, drives him to do his duty, to accomplish something, to perform the "microscopic task allotted to us" and "to inform the details of life, all that is passing, temporary and insignificant, with beauty and nobility." Whereas he singles out the "Eastern mind" as aborting action, surrendering to the weariness of existence, seeking to cultivate indifference and dissolve individuality, giving up personal duty and all forms of success, negating the pleasures of life and seeking to escape from its trials, he holds the "Western heart" to be duty-conscious, desirous of expanding the individuality, willing to hope and believe, trusting in human progress, undespairing of the abyss of "nothing ahead".31 If Nietzsche can be reproached for deliberately sundering Vedantic or Schopenhauerian metaphysics from the ethical concentration on human responsibility and endeavour it can be said in his defence that his arguments find support in the spiritual disposition and confessions of his contemporaries. In the light of these, his warnings against the incoming Asian mysticism and speculation as responsible in part for the existing spiritual malaise are justifiable. In view thereof, moreover, that the ethics of self-redemption do not depend upon the "knowledge" of a supramundane Reality either by revelation or by rational demonstration, as is proved by the Socratic faith, "It is better for a man to suffer injustice than to commit injustice",32 Nietzsche 30

31 32

Cf. Amiel's Journal, op.cit., esp. pp. 20, 40, 54, 107, 211, 300, 359. Also Nietzsche's reference to Amiel in WP, 270. Amiel's Journal, pp. 80, 95, 301 -302. Socrates as cited in D. Hildebrand, Christian Ethics (New York, 1953), p. 175.

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35

could plausibly deem the intellectual debate regarding a metaphysical Absolute to be wearisome and meaningless. In Buddhism's rational confrontation with the prevailing intellectual events that had culminated in a scepticism regarding the concept of deity and attendant metaphysical equivalents, on the other hand, Nietzsche recognised a highly consequential philosophic revolution to which he calls attention with surprising frequency. At least half a dozen times he makes the connection, in varying contexts, between the intellectual and psychological predilection of his age and the era of the Buddha (566-486 B.C.) with the intention of underlining the existing overthrow of the conventional notions of God, Being and Immortality and inviting his contemporaries to implement and advance this philosophic revolution. The confusion in religious outlook at a time which synchronised with the birth of the Buddha is consistently juxtaposed through his writings with the spiritual exhaustion of modern times in which one form of nihilism (the scepticism regarding a metaphysical Reality) is represented as battling against the other (the superficial adherence to morality), without, however, producing a constructive interpretation of human existence. The success of the Buddhist encounter with a philosophically immature environment had doubtless encouraged Nietzsche to continue his attack upon an equally inert generation for concealing agnosticism under the halfhearted obeisance to conventional Truths instead of trying to discover, each person by himself, a practical ethic to self-purification. Ironically, it is a "madman" who "audibly" proclaims the death of God (JS, 125; Z I, 2 and 3). The modern European "backwardness" in religious matters, accordingly, is distinguished in Dawn from the progress of the culture of mind in India witnessed by the historical rise of Buddhism, the religion of "self-redemption", which dominated after the gods and the priesthood had been dethroned. Europe may well be far advanced in other respects, Nietzsche intimates, but it has not yet obtained "the liberal naivete of the ancient Brahmins," a lack indicating that four thousand years ago man in India thought more profoundly and transmitted universally a greater delight in thinking than contemporary Europe could show. The Brahmin belief in the power of the priests over the gods and the corresponding faith in the beneficence of priestly practices culminated eventually, he notes, in first casting aside the gods, then the priests and mediators till Buddha "the teacher of a religion of self-redemption rose". Europe, Nietzsche continues, is still far removed from this stage of culture, cherishing as it does observances and customs on which the power of the gods is based. Only when it succeeds in eliminating these as well as its priests, redeemers and morals will the day come when metaphysical idealism can be pronounced superfluous. His criticism concludes with the hope that Europe will eventually retrieve what India, "the nation of thinkers", had achieved

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several hundred years ago in accordance with the precept of thinking; moreover, that eventually those ten to twenty million people who had already brushed aside idealistic speculation would unite Europe in the common conviction of its futility (D, 96). The Genealogy of Morals reinforces the comparison between the Buddhist era and the modern in Nietzsche's defence of the contemporary "unconditional and honest atheism", a "final phase in the development of the ascetic ideal" and "the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a 2000 year old discipline undertaken in pursuit of the ideal of truth: namely, the discipline which overcame the "lie of the belief in God" (III, 27). The same development, compelling the ascetic ideal to an analogous conclusion, Nietzsche notes parenthetically, was demonstrated in India five centuries back with the Buddha; it was initiated by Sankhya philosophy which in turn was popularised by the Buddha and transformed into a religion (loc. cit.). The analogy between the two eras recurs in a number of random notations posthumously grouped under The Will to Power. Paragraph 31 recalls times more devastating in their thinking than the present, witnessed by the Buddha and his contemporaries, and in which the people after centuries of sectarian quarrels had fallen into the abyss of philosophical doctrines just as the Europeans had from time to time surrendered to the subtleties of religious dogmas. In contrast with the Buddhist pessimism, however, European pessimism, Nietzsche felt, was still arguably in its infancy; it had not yet attained to that "prodigious yearning rigidity of insight reflecting Nothingness" — once reached in India. Disclaiming the authenticity of European pessimism, Nietzsche concludes that "there is still too much that is "ready-made" and not "evolved" in its constitution; it is too "learned" and "poetic"; it has been "discovered" "invented" and "created" but not, as in India, "caused" (WP, 31; also A, 20, 22). In a similar context his defence of the perspective of the Eternal Recurrence for the Europe of his day is fortified by the reference to the analogous psychological exigency in the Buddhist era. The fact that "God, morality, resignation", which once were crutches to man in his deepest misery, are now being discarded, is the encouraging sign of a certain level of intellectual culture and relative well-being in Europe: "A certain spiritual exhaustion deriving from the long struggle of philosophical opinions and resulting in a hopeless scepticism against philosophy, reveals that the level of these nihilists is by no means low. Consider the situation in which the Buddha appeared: the teaching of the Eternal Recurrence would presuppose scholarly principles (as the Buddha's teaching, e. g. the notion of causality, etc)" (WP, 55). As contrasted with the Buddhist development, Nietzsche attributes the successful dissemination of Vedanta and Christianity to the circumstance that the communities embracing these creeds were not confronted with the necessity of waging war to preserve themselves and therefore ceased to lend

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37

an ear to things the utility of which they could not conceive. This was the case, he avers, "when Buddha appeared amidst a peaceable community afflicted with great spiritual exhaustion" (WP, 204, 239). Nietzsche's citations to Buddhism in the foregoing comparisons are likely based upon the information he found in the studies of Buddhism by C. F. Koeppen, H. Oldenberg and in Max Muller's Essays on comparative religion.33 In the books by Koeppen and Oldenberg the initial chapter is devoted to a delineation of the historical background of Buddhism. Koeppen states that the Buddhist era must have been a time of immeasurable suffering to warrant so great a desire for escape from reality as also its unqualified negation.34 Philosophically, he places the roots of Buddhism — Nietzsche recaptures this information in a notation cited above35 — in Sankhya philosophy, arguing that it was "but a step from the Brahmin contempt for works to the reproachment of the Vedas as the highest authority and source of knowledge and that the Sankhya philosophy accomplished it." Again, that the Sankhya was more decisive in paving the way for Buddhist reform than the Vedantic doctrine which had intensified the already existing theoretical rupture in Brahmanism effected through systematic speculation. Kapila, the founder of Sankhya and Buddha's forerunner by several centuries, Koeppen continues, prepared the way for the Buddha not simply as a philosopher and systematizer but because he denied the godhead (Brahma), the popular deities as well as Vedic authority, and replaced the theory of revelation and practice of ritual by the exercise of human reasoning and philosophy. The difference between the Sankhya and Buddhism, he notes, is that the Sankhya finds the means of liberation in knowledge and cognition, by means of which mind can be separated from matter and thus freed from the fetters of corporeality; the Buddhist on the other hand arrives at pure wisdom through the exercise of moral discipline. In the final instance, Koeppen maintains, the Buddha denied not only the Brahmanical Soul but also the Matter of the Sankhya. Buddhism therefore is an atheism not only without God but also without matter. Against these realities is postulates nothingness.36 Oldenberg remarks that on 33 34 35

36

See introduction, pp. 16—17. C. F. Koeppen, Die Religion des Buddha, 2 vols (Berlin, 1857-59), I, p. 56, also pp. 121-122. See GM III, 27. Nietzsche's interest in and familiarity with the Sankhya philosophy is endorsed by his letter to Deussen (autumn 1886; Erinnerungen, p. 91) and the reference to this philosophy in The Antichrist, § 32. Cf. Koeppen, pp. 54, 63-64, 122f, 126, 214f. Koeppen's account of the differences between the Sankhya and Buddhism is unreliable. Although the earliest formulations of the Sankhya were pre-Buddhistic and the Buddha's teacher's were Sankhya philosophers, the Sankhya is closer to the Upanishads than it is to Buddhism. In rejecting the sole reality of the Upanishadic Brahman (purusha) and postulating the independent entity of matter (prakrti) the Sankhya objects to the sole validity of Upanishadic Impersonalism from a rationalistic standpoint.

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the philosophical level the classical age of Brahmanical speculation was notoriously represented, apart from its serious thinkers, by: sceptical and materialistic dialecticians astute enough to modify or reverse the thought of their predecessors; quarrelsome schools either advocating or denying absolutism, endless disputations over such issues as a world beyond the immediate reality, the freedom of the will, retribution, the existence of a moral world order. Owing to propaganda on behalf of various conflicting theories, the individual mind, he concludes, was a welter of adopted ideals and beliefs which were detrimental to independent thinking and to the spiritual culture of personality.37 The philosophical confusion on the advent of Buddhism, as summarized in Müller's book, succinctly paraphrases Nietzsche's notations: "No nation was ever so completely priestridden as the Hindus were under the sway of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought, and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied nor asserted; they were of no greater importance in the system of the world of thought than trees or mountains, men or animals; and to offer sacrifices to them with a hope of rewards, so far from being meritorious, was considered as an impediment in the attainment of that emancipation to which a clear perception of philosophical truth was to lead the patient student. There was one system which taught that there existed but one Being, without a second; that everything else which seemed to exist was but a dream and illusion, and that this illusion might be removed by a true knowledge of the one Being. There was another system which admitted two principles — one a subjective and self-existent mind, the other matter, endowed with qualities. Here the world, with its joys and sorrows, was explained as the result of the subjective Self, reflecting itself in the mirror of matter; and final emancipation was obtained by turning away the eyes from the play of nature, and being absorbed in the knowledge of the true and absolute Self. A third system started with the admission of atoms, and explained every effect, including the elements and the mind, animals, men, and

37

Prakrti functions independently, but it has no value other than in the relation with purusha. The Sankhya is therefore much closer to the Upanishads than to Buddhism. The Buddha rejects the purusha of the Sankhya altogether. Hence the conjecture of a chronological development from the Upanishads through the Sankhya to Buddhism is erroneous. Max Müller argues in this connection: " . . . though the starting point of Kapila and Buddha is the same, a keen sense of human misery and a yearning after a better state, their roads from the very first diverge so completely and their goals are so far apart, that it is difficult to understand, how almost by common consent, Buddha is supposed either to have followed in the footsteps of Kapila, or to have changed Kapila's philosophy into a religion" (Essays, Vol. II. p. 215). H. Oldenberg, Buddha. Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (Berlin, 1890), pp. 72-3.

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39

gods, from the concurrence of these atoms. In fact, as M. Cousin remarked many years ago, the history of the philosophy of India is 'un abrege de l'histoire de la philosophic.' The germs of all these systems are traced back to the Vedas, Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and the man who believed in any of them was considered as orthodox as the devout worshipper of the gods — the one was saved by knowledge and faith, the other by works and faith. Such was the state of the Hindu mind when Buddhism arose or rather, such was the state of the Hindu mind which gave rise to Buddhism."38 Despite the enormous interval of time, culture and science between the Buddhist era and the nineteenth century as also the attendant divergencies in mood and social climate, Nietzsche's association of the two eras seems plausible in view of the fact that the lack of harmony and stability in social and spiritual life was augmented in both cases not only by economic expansion but by a plethora of speculative philosophies which had destroyed or weakened man's faith in God. The Buddha's as also Nietzsche's effort was directed against an all-consuming but shrouded faithlessness in thought, word and deed. Socio-politically, the Buddha experienced the impotence of the traditional Brahmanical doctrines in producing an effect upon society and their disintegration into a performance of rites, sacrifices, supplications and the idle repetition of mantras and texts.· The revealed truth of the Upanishads, "Atman is Brahman", moreover, which superseded human reasoning was not ultimately accessible by human creativity on the ethical plane. The "egoism" underlying this existing metaphysics, in which intellectual knowledge was accorded greater significance than ethical action, was intensified by the fact that the "highest" level in social hierarchy was determined by heredity, not by character. The Buddha consequently witnessed the rise of various conflicting systems and organised schools of thought contending against Brahmanical influence and authoritarianism. Since these, in his view, served only to intensify the prevailing philosophical confusion, his initial contribution to the resuscitation of philosophy lay in the negation of their postulates. The most representative of those negated were: the Upanishadic dogma of an eternal and immutable Self as the sole Reality; the Sankhya claim of the absolute reality of Soul and Matter, two independently functioning principles, though interdependent in terms of value; the fatalism of the Ajivakas, their systems of prognostication through dreams and omens as also their doctrine of inaction; the materialism of the Charvakas who based creation upon indivisible atoms and claimed the primacy of matter over mind; the Lokayata, which asserted an absolute free will and emphasised the pleasures of the senses; the selfmortification and asceticism of the Jains who hoped therewith to exhaust 38

Müller, op.cit., pp. 244-245.

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previous bad action.39 Social reform was instituted by the Buddha through the attack upon the tyrannical sovereignty of the Brahmanical priesthood which dictated public and private conduct. His opposition to the prevalent religious speculation and theorising of his contemporaries is crystallised in the claim that he was not a "dogmatist" but an "analyser",40 a claim which marks his pursuit of truth in the spirit of enlightened and constructive criticism. On the insight, analogous with Nietzsche's, that the so-called "knowledge" of metaphysical Self could hinder ethical development, the Buddha excluded it from his teachings. In uncovering the dogmatical superficialities inherent in the Brahmanical tradition, as also their inconsistency with a truly spiritual existence, he was aware of "proclaiming a way not proclaimed before" and of initiating a new ethic (Siii, 66).41 The majority of scholars of Buddhism interpret its original form as an explicit denial of the prevailing metaphysics. Repudiating all mystic sources of knowledge in Buddhism, Jayatilleke claims that it was "empiricist to the last degree."42 Lamotte notes that it was almost exclusively moral and that it deliberately omits metaphysics in its refusal to pass an opinion on the great problems of existence as they present themselves such as the infinity of the world, the destiny of the sage after death.43 Babbitt writes that the Buddha cannot be called an idealist in any sense in which the term has been used in the Occident just as he does not qualify as an atheist in the Western sense.44 In contradiction of the Upanishadic postulate that Atman is Brahman, it is the basic premise of Buddhism that the atman, the individual and cosmic substance and the sole Reality of eternalist philosophy is non-existent and an object of senseless speculation. The reality and immediacy of change and evanescence in phenomenal existence reveals the reality of the untransformable atman to be chimeric. Rational experimentation with the Upanishadic postulate had convinced the Buddha of the efficacy of his own position. The banana tree, he makes an analogy, reveals only a series of layers peeling off one after the other with no substance visible inside: the existence of an essence in all things is likewise illusory: "Suppose, friend, that a man should roam about in need of heart of wood, searching for heart of wood . . . and, taking a sharp axe, should enter a forest. There he sees a mighty plantain-trunk, straight up, newgrown, of towering height. He cuts it down at the root. Having cut it 39 40 41

42 43 44

Cf. A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism (Delhi, Patna, Varanasi, 1970), pp. 39-42. Cf. T. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London, I960), p. 3. Citations to the Samyutta Nikaya (abb. S) in the text are from The Book of Kindred Sayings, 5. vols., trl. C. A. F. Rhys Davids (London, 1917ff). (PTS) K. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (London, 1963), p. 426. E. Lamotte, The Spirit of Ancient Buddhism (Venice, Rome, 1961), pp. 24-25. I. Babbitt, op. cit., p. 84.

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down at the root he chops it off at the top. Having done so he peels off the outer skin. But he would find no pith inside. Much less would he find heart of wood. Even so, friend, a brother beholds no trace of the self nor of what pertains to the self in the sixfold sense-sphere. So beholding, he is attached to nothing in the world." (Siv, 167). Conjunctly, the Buddha deems the notion of identity to be a mental projection resulting from the confusion of the effect with the cause. On the observation of the flame of a lamp we witness change each moment; but we are faced with the illusion that there is no change because the new flame born of the old closely resembles it. Consider the dialogue below: N: M: N: M: N: M: N:

"It is as if, sire, some person might light a lamp. Would it burn all night long?" "Yes, revered sir, it might burn all night long." "Is the flame of the first watch the same as the flame of the middle watch?" "No, revered sir." "Is the flame of the middle watch the same as the flame of the third watch?" "No, revered sir." "Is it then, sire, that the lamp in the first watch was one thing, the lamp in the middle watch another, and the lamp in the last watch still another?" M: "O no, revered sir, it was burning all through the night in dependence on itself." N: "Even so, sire, a continuity of dhammas runs on; one uprises, another ceases; it runs on as though there were no before, no after; consequently neither the one nor another is reckoned as the last consciousness." (MP, I, [II] 55—6) 45

With the aid of experimental proof, the Buddha denies the nondualistic (advaita Vedanta) position of Sankara crystallized in the intuition that the individual (atmari) and the cosmic (Brahman) souls were identical (aham Brahma asmi) and that this identity was to be experienced by the practice of prescribed Upanishadic disciplines. Moreover, the Buddha ironically points out that the human essence is not that of the Creator Brahma, since it does not share his qualities of omnipresence, immutability and omniscience: "That worshipful Brahma . . . he by whom we were created, he is permanent, constant, eternal, unchanging, and he will remain so for ever and ever. But we who were created by that Brahma, we have come hither all impermanent, transient, unstable, short-lived, destined to pass away." (D III, Pätika Suttanta, 17).46 As witnessed by the dialogues cited later, the Buddha was convinced that nothing could be predicated of a cosmic soul or of its manifestations in the universe. The unquestionable accent in Buddhism is on the reality of evanescence in place of stability: "Monks, these six things are parts 45

Milinda's Questions (Milindapanha), trl. I. B. Horner, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, I (London, 1964), pp. 55—56. Henceforward cited in the text with the abbreviation MP. 4 * Citations to the Dighanikaya (abb. D) are from Dialogues of the Buddha, 3 vols., trl. T. W. Rhys Davids (London, 1899-1921). (PTS)

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of wisdom . . . the idea of impermanence, the idea of ill in impermanence, the idea of not-self in ill, the idea of renunciation, of dispassion, of ending." (A iii, 332)47 Theravada Buddhism in its negation of Upanishadic esotericism recommends a pragmatic and ethical approach to existence; in so far, it vindicates the spiritual worth and potential of empirical reality that is denied by speculations upon a supernatural world. Its ethics are unconcerned with spiritual convenience or rewards. Virtue is not enjoined as a stepping-stone to ultimate happiness or to the knowledge of an extra-terrestrial Reality. It is the "raft" to self-overcoming. In this conviction the Buddha developed the speculative system of the Vedanta into a practical dharma negating the importance of a "secret" irrational knowledge but retaining and emphasizing the concentration on its less obviously implicit ethical presuppositions. Of the ethical revolution in a land intellectually jeopardized by warring philosophies, Max Müller writes: "A sense of duty, extending from the narrow limits of the house, the village, the country to the widest circle of mankind, a feeling, a sympathy and brotherhood toward all men - the idea, in fact, of humanity, - was in India first pronounced by Buddha."48 The ethics of the Buddha are claimed in another opinion to supersede those of the Upanishads: " . . . we should not forget what the Buddha's invaluable and positive contribution to Indian thought was. In the scheme of his religious order, he laid the greatest stress on the fact that one should always train one's mind and body in strict accordance with certain ethical standards called sila. In the Upanishads we find little about ethics. Indeed the ethics that we come across in some of the passages is overshadowed by overstressed enquiries about the soul and the Brahman and allied subjects. The Buddha thought such enquiries were of little value in our endeavour to bring our day to day sufferings to an end."49

Correspondent to Nietzsche's antipathy for metaphysical idealism, the otherworldly spiritualism fostered by Christianity became the obvious target of his attacks in his immediate environment. Summarily: Nietzsche deems the Pauline interpretation of Christ's significance and the corresponding persuasion to a belief in prayer, sin, punishment and grace to be an abnegation of human independence, the violation of human reason and a political rather than spiritual move to boot (A, 49; WP, 136, 137). Christianity declares man guilty and sinful, a condition ostensibly inherited from his forefathers and to 47

48 49

Citations to the Anguttara-Nikaya (abb. A) are from The Book of Gradual Say ings, 5 vols., Trl. F. L. Woodward (London, 1932ff). (PTS) Max Müller, op. cit., p. 255. 2500 Years of Buddhism, ed. P. Bapat (Govt. of India, 1959), p. 340.

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be expiated by the voluntary surrender of personal freedom for the freedom signified by the reconciliation with God's will. This freedom derives from the theoretical revelation that God redeemed man by taking man's sins upon himself and sacrificed himself out of his love for man (A, 27; WP, 224). Selfredemption, if advocated by Christian ethics, as by the Upanishadic, is ultimately rendered superfluous by the ingredient of faith — corresponding to the Upanishadic "knowledge" — that is supposed to absolve man of his guilt (loc cit; cf. GM III, 9, 21). The institutionalism of Christianity, paralleling for the most part the Brahmanical tradition of revelation, shifts the emphasis from the natural to the supernatural, from reason to belief, causing man to rely solely upon speculative categories: "imaginary causes" such as "God", "soul", "ego", "spirit", "free or non-free will"; "imaginary effects" such as "sin", "redemption", "grace", "punishment", "forgiveness of sins"; an "imaginary psychology" expressed in the language of "repentance", "pangs of conscience", "temptation by the devil"; an "imaginary teleology" represented for example by the "kingdom of God", "the last judgement" and "eternal life" (A, 15). These "imaginary" media, Nietzsche infers, were introduced as a counter-measure to the progress of scientific enquiry regarding metaphysical truths (A, 48, 49). They were "invented" to "destroy man's causal sense" (A, 49). The postulate, moreover, that the natural consequences of a deed are not natural but moral consequences attributable to "God" is obviously an abrogation of the presupposition of human knowledge (loc. cit.). In short, the Pauline interpretation of God is his negation (i.a. A, 47). The incommunicability of this God — in contrast with Christ, the man of ethics — as also his failure to alleviate the distress of suffering humanity, Nietzsche notes, had only intensified the prevailing atheism. Having conversed with people on this subject, he concludes that contemporary atheism was in large measure attributable to the dying belief in such inconceivable notions as the "father" in God or the "judge" or the "rewarder" and no less to the "inaccessibility" of the supraterrestrial phenomenon (BGE, 53). It is essentially in opposition to Christianity that Nietzsche appreciates Buddhism, though paradoxically, and for the most part, he polemises against both religions conjunctly. In contrast with Christianity which presupposes unconditional faith, Nietzsche pronounces the Buddhist interpretation of reality to be a "scientific" one (e. g. A, 20, 23). By virtue of its advocacy of "knowledge" and "science" the "uplifting above other men through logical discipline and training of thought" as "distinguishing signs of holiness", Buddhism, he intimates, is expressly directed, towards combating blind belief (HA, I, 144). Nietzsche saw no contradiction between the personalities of the Buddha and Christ; he identifies their spiritualism in the claim that with Christ's death upon the cross the genuine and real effort towards a "Buddhistic

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movement of peace" terminated (A, 20). As against the Christianity of Paul, however, Nietzsche declares Buddhism to be the "outcome of centuries of lasting philosophical activity" and "a hundred times more realistic", confronting the human problem with "objectivity", "coolness" and "truthfulness", in conformity with its constitutional inheritance. Buddhism is the only genuinely "positivistic" religion in history, even to the extent of professing a "strictly phenomenalistic" epistemology. It is absented of such supra-rational concerns as sin, grace, faith, soul, the kingdom of God, eternal life. It does not speak of the "struggle with sin" (A, 20, 23) — the concept of sin being remote from it altogether (WP, 342) — but true to the nature of empirical reality, it accentuates the "struggle with suffering"; accordingly, it does not postulate a "categorical imperative" or recommend prayer and asceticism which would intensify suffering; it declares itself on the other hand free from all types of "compulsion", as is evidenced by its permitting individual monks to leave the monastic societies if desired. (A, 20; WP, 240). Nietzsche's opposition of Buddhism with Christianity has foundation in fact and is not essentially an expedient prop to highlight his polemic against Christianity in The Antichrist. Buddhism dispenses altogether with postulates akin to original sin or inherited guilt and divine grace which characterise Christianity. It does not assume, as does Christianity, that man is from the outset guilty and limited by his sin and therefore in need of divine pity. To the Buddhist the interpretation of sin in the sense of man's lack of the insight into his personal incapacities and into his complete dependence upon God would signify the end of human striving and the total abrogation of human spiritual exertion. Buddhism explicitly denies, moreover, the existence of an extra-terrestrial ineffable Will corresponding to Christian divinity. The Buddhist dharma or moral law, which determines re-existence, is altogether different from the divine law the source of which is God. Buddhism, in contrast with the latter proclaims the natural moral law to be created by human action itself; a knowledge of the existence of God is not required to grasp or fulfil this law. According to the Buddhacharita: "Then the thought arose in him, 'What does this birth proceed from?' Then he saw rightly that birth is produced from existence due to the power of the act." (xiv. 55); "With his divine eyesight he saw that active being proceeds from the act, not from a Creator or from Nature or from a self or without a cause" (xiv. 56).so If the world, the Buddha contends, moreover, were caused and mirrored by the immutable and stable Isvara, as is claimed by the Vedas, it would not demonstrate flux and destruction; nor would it be able to explain earthly sorrow and calamity or the existing moral distinctions between what is right and 50

The Buddhacharita, ed. E. H. Johnston (Delhi, 1972), p. 136.

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wrong. If, furthermore Isvara is considered omniscient and powerful, merciful and in full control of the world of human beings, man's exercises of virtue would be redundant: " . . . others say that creation proceeds from Isvara. What is the need in that case for action by man? The very same being, who is the cause in the continuing activity of the world, is certainly also the cause in its ceasing to be active" (ix, 63); "There are others who assert that the coming into being and the passing away from being is solely on account of the soul. But they explain coming into being as taking place without effort, and declare the attainment of liberation to be by effort" (ix. 64).51 In negating the existence of Isvara the Buddha inevitably exposed the hollowness and egoism of the Vedic tapas according to which self-abnegation through physical torture could possibly compel the gods to bow down to the will of the aspirant and bestow their grace upon him. The Buddha's remonstrance against the phenomenon of divine grace in this form was not simply a protest against Upanishadic ritualism and asceticism but an experienced reality. His personal experience of asceticism in extreme forms of penance in the company of the Sankhya samanas, from whom he received his initial spiritual instruction, convinced him that bodily injury was not a way to human deliverance. His leave-taking of these ascetics was, in fact, prompted by the conviction that the damage inflicted upon the body by physical torture was unconnected with the experience of self-discovery. The ascetic negligence of the body was not only pronounced unnecessary but denounced by him as a hindrance to the development of the spirit (M I, 36)." The human state was considered by original Buddhism to be more favourable than any other for the attainment of redemption. Enlightenment, unaided by outer grace, was an event to be individually experienced in the present. Buddhism, as Babbitt puts it, is "devoid of the nostalgic longing for infinity; it entertains no hope for an altogether different world which promises greater peace."53

Both Nietzsche and Buddhism, it was stated earlier, reject the conventional superrational view of Deity on the grounds that it detracts from rather than assists individual spiritual development. Zarathustra says: "God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight and makes turn whatever stands" (2 II, Upon the Blessed Islands). The Buddha tells Ananda that the surety of the 51 52

53

Ibid., p. 136. Citations to the Majjhima-Nikaya (abb. M) are from Middle Length Sayings, 3 vols., trl. I. B. Horner (London, 1954-59). (PTS) Babbitt, p. 91.

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existence or the non-existence of atman could only produce confusion in the mind of the questioner and devotee of truth and obstruct him from concentration upon immediate spiritual needs (S iv, 398). Overcoming, in both cases, is a question of operating within a "limited" human framework which repeatedly and relentlessly enforces the perspective of humility upon human existence. In both ethical philosophies, the conventional notion of God is negated as a convenient human invention or "egoism" indissociable from man's desire for self-preservation, his fear of insecurity and impermanence as also his illwill and impatience against phenomenal suffering. Nietzsche's "negation" of God, it is generally acknowledged, is more essentially his negation of man's will to expediency and complacence. "God" as also His murder, he says, is an event of human opportunism. Man created God for his mental consolation and comfort: having experienced, however, the inaccessible and implacable powers of what he venerated and so also the threat posed by this concept to his personal identity, man revengefully killed God. That the "most murderous of murderers" eliminated the "highest and mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed" (JS, 125) is doubtless evidence of human egoism. But, Nietzsche avows, it must not lead to the negation of man. The way of undoing the nihilistic murder of God would be to overcome the need of Him, the fear of man and the loss of man's self-love, veneration, hope and will-power (GM, I, 12; cf. also WP, 137). Nietzsche's perspectivism is underlined in his revelation of the constructive potential behind the prevaling nihilism. The renunciation of God would involve man's renunciation of supernatural aid, his confession of his opportunism and fear. Conversely, it would absolve God of the responsibility of whatever happens to man and nature; man would cease to reproach God for human error and suffering (WP, 184, 765). Zarathustra appeals strongly to the human potentiality of becoming "god-like": "For many who are noble are needed and noble men of many kinds, that there may be a nobility. Or as I once said in a parable: "Precisely this is god-like that there are gods, but no God" (Z III, On Old and New Tablets). In the Joyful Science it is likewise urged that "man will rise higher when he no longer flows out into a God" (285). "It is our nature", Nietzsche informs elsewhere "to create a higher being than we ourselves are. To create beyond ourselves. That is the drive of creation, that is the drive of action and of deed. As all willing presupposes a purpose, so man presupposes a being that (is) not there but that serves as the purpose of his existence. This is the freedom.of all willing" (KGW VII, I; 5 (203), 213). Nietzsche's stance on the creation and elimination of God by man, regardless of the vehemence with which it is represented and advocated, is one of humility. It acknowledges human creative power and expresses at once the consciousness of its limits.

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47

In rejecting the higher Will, Nietzsche concurrently voices an appeal to man's personal will — the will to power and overcoming — which can transform and elevate the present moment. Zarathustra does not impose the ideal of man overcome in the form of a "thou shah"; he exhorts the effort in this direction, be it remote from the last step: " . . . you could well create the Übermensch. Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers. But into fathers and fore-fathers of the Übermensch you would re-create yourselves, and let this be your best creation" (Z II, Upon the Blessed Islands). It is the human will, not a Will above man, that emancipates: " . . . my will always comes to me as my liberator and bringer of joy. Willing liberates . . . Willing no more, and creating no more — oh! that this great weariness might always remain far from me ... Away from God and gods my will has lured me. What would one create if gods existed?" (loc. cit.). Ultimately, Zarathustra tries to impress upon man the reality of the Übermensch as synonymous with the overcoming of egoism and the will to continual self-training. This will is likened to a hammer knocking against the "ugliest and hardest stone" and so refining and beautifying it: ". . . my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Pieces of rock hail from the stone: what is this to me — the stillest and lightest of all things came to me as a shadow. my brothers, what are the gods to me now?" (loc. cit.). The "man overcome" in contradistinction to the Christian divinity as also to the Absolute of Vedanta is a purely empirical phenomenon. It makes no pretensions to metaphysical knowledge. It stands for self-culture, for the culture of the "whole" man. Transcendence or the transempirical experience in Nietzsche is not access to what is beyond and above this world but spiritual well-being, as a modern scholar of Buddhism defines it, "an intense and sustained self-reflection, self-criticism", a "ceaseless watchfulness of one's doings — speech, bodily and mental action", "the ever alert self-criticism of one's activity".54 The contemplative silence of Nietzsche's poetry is not a cryptic acknowledgement of extra-terrestrial ecstasy, but an affirmation of the poetry and tranquillity of the earth, of a beauty that signifies redemption here and now. Nietzsche urges, as for example in The Birth of Tragedy, that the concentration on what is beyond can petrify human energy and the will to endeavour; the frustrating complexity of earthly life on the other hand compels the will to endurance as it also expresses the need for a transition from man to man overcome. Zarathustra, in accordance, underscores the inseparability of the Übermensch and the earth: "The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Make your will say: the Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you . . . remain faithful to the earth, and do 54

Murti, op. cit., p. 268.

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not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes . . . To trespass against the earth is now the most terrible thing, and to esteem the entrails of the inscrutable higher than the meaning of the earth" (Z I, 3). Once again: "I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to perish and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day belong to the Übermensch" (Z I, 4). The Buddhist perspective ofanatta (not-I) branded as "nihilistic" (M 1,22) because it does not verbalise the existence of a metaphysical entity, does not, however, denote a hatred against divinity per se; it is, analogous with Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God, a critique of man and directed against human stupidity and egoism. Stcherbatsky notes that in labelling the Brahmanical teaching of atman a "doctrine of fools" the Buddha repudiated an established tradition in the spirit of opposition and animosity that could be sensed in his words.55 The initiate anxious to gain knowledge of metaphysical phenomena at the expense of focusing upon the present reality is likened, as is demonstrated later, by the Buddha to a foolish man wounded by the arrow, who before being treated for his injury insists upon knowing what kind of arrow struck him, whence it came and who aimed it and so forth. The discarding of the hypothesis of atman and Isvara on the contrary, is proclaimed to be an effort in the direction of the overcoming of egoism. Buddhism views the self, variously, as a thought-construct born of human egoism, of the need for spiritual comfort, self-protection and preservation and as an expedient counteragent to suffering and transience.56 It attests to human ignorance and lack of will-power. It represents man's fear of earthly existence and of the moment. Man denuded of soul and so of a substantial reliable and permanent foundation in the present existence finds himself in a state of torment. This is explicit in the Buddha's reply to the question as to whether man is tormented when he has no surety of permanence: "A man has the following view: 'The universe is that Atman, I shall be that after death, permanent, abiding, ever-lasting, unchanging, and I shall exist as such for eternity.' He hears the Tathagata or a disciple of his preaching the doctrine aiming at the complete destruction of all speculative views . . . aiming at the extinction of thirst, aiming at detachment, cessation, Nirvana. Then that man

55 56

Stcherbatsky, The Soul Theory of the Buddhists (St. Petersbourg, 1919), pp. 824-25. Cf. Rahula, op. cit., p. 51: "Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends upon its parent. For selfpreservation, man has perceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically."

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thinks: Ί will be annihilated, I will be destroyed, I will be no more.' So he mourns, worries himself, laments, weeps, beating his breast, and becomes bewildered. Thus, o bhikkhus, there is a case where one is tormented when something permanent within oneself is not found!"57 The Upanishadic intuition, moreover, betrays according to the Buddha a lack of tolerance and perspectivism and is pronounced by him to be the cause of enervating passion, ill-will, pride and ressentiment. The notion of 'permanence', attractive as it is, produces attachment and in its turn a lack of tolerance for all contrasting perspectives. This is frequently expressed in the Sutta Nipata: "When man, confined by views, holds in the world / A thing in worth and as the yondermost, / Then doth he say all else is lacking worth. / And hence he hath not passed beyond disputes" (796);58 "The man who in his cave stays cleaving to it / Clouded by many moods, in error steeped, / Is from the aloof state surely far removed, / For hard to leave are pleasures in the world" (772); "The sage who fathoms all surmise, not soiled / By laying claim to things, could cross the flood; / He earnest wayfarer, with dart withdrawn, / Longs not for this world or a world beyond" (779). The Buddha's "atheism", supposedly implicit in his silence on metaphysical questions, was based on a scrutiny of the functioning of man as a "whole" and his power to become "god-like" without supernatural intervention. He was convinced, Govinda notes, "that the highest reality dwells within us — and this is not a theory to him because he himself has experienced it — but he emphasises that as long as we have not transformed our consciousness into a receptacle of such a reality we shall not be able to take part in it. This reality is superindividual and therefore we have first to overcome the individual limitations of our consciousness if we want to attain it . . ."S9 Again: "In Buddhism the centre of gravity lies within the individual, in his own private experience which must furnish proof of the truth of what is first of all assumed to be worthy of confidence. Here what makes the man blessed is not belief (in the sense of the acceptance of a definite dogma), but the becoming conscious of reality, which latter is metaphysics to us only for as long as we have not experienced it."60 Buddhism's ethical discipline, the shifting of the emphasis from word to action, the attendant dispensing with prayer, ceremonial and penance is in essence simple and pragmatic — endorsing Nietzsche's injunctions to a fidelity to the earth. In the creative transformation

57 58

59 60

Cited in Ibid., p. 56. Citations to the Sutta Nipata (abb. SN in the text) are in the translation of Ε. Μ. Hare, Woven Cadences of the Early Buddhists (London, 1945). L. A. Govinda, The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy (London, 1961), p. 29. Ibid., p. 39.

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of suffering — i. e. in the overcoming of the spirit of revenge, the exercise of reason, the extinction of such motivational forces of action as craving, hatred, delusion, the Buddha proclaimed the discipline of self. The transition from man to man overcome signified by this discipline is declared to be the meaning of human existence: "If a man were to conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, and another conquer one, himself, he indeed is the greatest of conquerors" (Dh. VIII. 4 (103)).

π The analysis of personality and universe The analytic perspective of personality in Nietzschean and Buddhist philosophy is not formulated in terms of a scientific theory. The fascination of both insights — Nietzsche's expressed in scattered and cryptic notations, the Buddha's systematically constructed - lies in their contradiction of the "truth" of personality and of the professed knowledge of man and universe as postulated in idealistic philosophy. The "ego-centric" vantage point intrinsic to the substance views of reality is attacked by both philosophers in a dialectic which declares human "individuality" to be a fictitious representation and which offers an interpretation of man attuned to the empirical framework of impermanence. From Nietzsche's rejection of the metaphysical categories of God, Being, All-Soul and Immortality it is but a step to his denial of man as "individual" or "subject", incorporating a "soul" or "spirit" in the suprarational sense of an unidentifiable essential substance reflecting the cosmos and opposed to matter. The traditional terminology formulating the said concepts is to be understood, Nietzsche insists, as a conceptual and verbal media, "simplifying" or at best "describing" the complex human make-up but not "explaining" or "solving" it. To view man-made concepts as "explanatory" or "knowledgeable" of the human phenomenon is tantamount to a false egoism. Nietzsche declares the word "individual" in its customary application as a composite of "body" and "soul" to be epistemologically invalid: "It is not nature which cheats us individuals, and furthers her purposes by deceiving us: rather, men explain all existence to themselves according to individual i.e. false standards; with these we want to be in the right and consequently "nature" must appear to us as the deceiver. In reality there are no individual truths, but only individual errors — the individual himself is an error . . . We are buds on one tree, — what do we know of that which could become of us in the interests of the tree! But we have a consciousness, as if we wanted and ought to be everything, a fantasy of 'ego' and all 'non-ego'; Stop feeling to be such a fantastic ego! Learn step by step to throw off the supposed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Envision egoism as an error! . . . Beyond "me and you" you must go! Feel cosmicallyl" (GA, XII, 120). Again: "Continual

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transition forbids us to speak of 'individuals' etc; the 'number' of beings is itself in flux" (WP, 520). Nietzsche accordingly envisaged the individual within the framework of pre-existence and evanescence as composed of a multiplicity of energies interrelated and engaged in interminable conflict for the purpose of preservation, fortification and the growth of personality. In so far, man is at once an entity in himself and an immediate part of universal energy: "The human being, a group of atoms complete in its motions, dependent on all energy-distributions and changes in the universe — and conversely, incalculable like each atom, an in-and-for-itself" (KGW VII, I; 4 (126), 152); "The individual as multiplicity" (KGW VII, I; 7 (273), 332; WP, 490). The energies comprising the individual are not independent or isolated, i.e. they are not substantial in themselves; their centre of gravity is mutable. The continuous production and reproduction of cells in the human "process" necessitates their change in number, thereby rendering them incalculable by arithmetical addition (KGW VII, 3; 34 (123), 181-2; cf. also VII 2; 26 (141); WP, 628). The attempt at grounding or explaining individual personality either on a physiological or mathematical basis, Nietzsche says, is bound to be inconclusive or erroneous. The notion of heredity, for instance, which attempts to explain human make-up is objectionable because it cannot account for that indefinite quanta of formative powers constituting the present individual and engaged in struggle, government and control from the earliest beginnings. Heredity, moreover, is of no help in explaining the indestructible flow of energies. It primarily designates or fixes a problem. Morphological description, in the same regard, be it complete in itself, explains nothing. It simply "describes" the facts of a case (KGW VII, 3; 36 (28). 286; WP, 645). The "conditionality" implicit in the formation and continuation of the energies constituting the personality, furthermore, is so subtle that it defies any specification or immediate relation as is claimed by heredity: " . . . that something that has originated is not discerned, when its origin (father and mother) is known: rather, that it must already be discerned in order that something 'related' be discovered in the conditions of origination — and that this is mostly an appearance". — in truth the recognition of the paternal and maternal elements in the child are only possible in terms of an aggregate; we seek involuntarily, in order to expfoin, to comprehend something new only as an aggregate, a compilation, i.e. the analysis does not concern the real origin, only a feigned 'mechanical' compilation and addition that has not taken place at all. The explicator always takes the facts to be sillier and simpler than they are" (KGW VII, 3; 34 (122), 181). A "subject" Nietzsche says, is denied by the multiplicity of forces constituting the personality. In order to prove itself the subject would "have to have a steady point without and it is lacking" (KGW VII, 3; 40 (20), 370).

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Once again: "The subject is only a fiction: there is absolutely no ego of which is spoken when egoism is censured" (WP, 370, 371). The postulate of a subject behind the vast interdependent processes of thinking, feeling and willing — as asserted by the substance views of reality from Vedanta on to the present day — is, Nietzsche reiterates, a colossal fiction of metaphysics. It was this fiction and not the pre-eminence and independence of thought itself that dominated Descartes' cogito ergo sum: "He wanted to go beyond 'imagination' to a substance, which thinks and fancies itself" (WP, 484). Contradicting this view, Nietzsche maintains that the essence or substantiality in the human "process" would involve a multiplicity of interpretations. Instead of asking the question "Who interprets then?" it should be realised that interpretation itself has existence; not as a "being" but as a "process", a "becoming", an "affect" (WP, 556). To endorse this: "Man is not only a single individual but part of a total organism that lives on in one specific line. That he endures, proves that a species of interpretation (even if continually subject to accretion) has also endured, that the system of interpretations has not changed. 'Adaptation!'" (WP, 678). In perceiving himself as a plurality of energies or interpretations the individual can control his feelings of exclusiveness. Nietzsche found this, in contradistinction to the traditional view of man, to be an essentially unegoistic perspective ("The 'unegoistic'. The multiplicity of persons (masks) in one 'ego'" [KGW VII, 2; 26 (73), 166]). Correspondent to Nietzsche's rejection of the individual or subject as an imaginative figment on the epistemological level, the Buddha's denial of the unchanging permanent soul the knowledge of which depended upon mystic ability was the result of direct observational and introspective experience. Empirical data revealed the so-called "individual" to be nothing other than a broken series of combinations of physical and mental processes, a stream of ideas, needs and feelings, a multiplicity of elements, attitudes, activities, energies conditioned and continually changing in response to natural law. Nietzsche was aware of the Buddhist analysis of individuality concurrent with its categorical rejection of the "thinghood" of the soul. He had at least read Oldenberg's rendering of the Buddhist causal nexus in which the perspective of a metaphysical essence is discarded in favour of a "process" of formation and disintegration in existence, a process indicating continual reforming: "There is no question in Buddhism of things or substances in the sense of an existence resting in itself . . . For the most general designation of those essences, whose mutual relation is expressed in the formula of causality, one could almost say, whose existence is precisely their standing in that mutual relation, the language of the Buddhists possesses the expressions: Dhamma and Sankhära. We can about translate: 'arrangement' (i.e. 'putting into order') and 'formation'. Both designations are essentially synonymous:

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with both is associated the idea that it is not something formed and ordered but rather arrangements and formations in themselves that make up the content of the world; moreover, that each arrangement and formation must give place to other arrangements and formations. Corporeal as well as spiritual developments, all emotions all ideas, all conditions, all that is, i.e. all that comes to pass is a Dhamma, a Sankhära. Whereas the old speculation posited all existence in the atman, the great immutable ego, the fundamental proposition now formulated as a doctrine was: all Dhammas are Not-I (anatta) . . . they are all impermanent. . . Here we must fully renounce the representational mode to which we are accustomed. If we are used to envisioning our inner life as comprehensible essentially if we may observe its changing content, each individual feeling, each individual act of willing in relation to one and the same pleasurable ego, this way of thinking is entirely repugnant to Buddhism. Here, as everywhere, it reproaches the support which we gladly give to the tumult of going and coming events by the idea of a substance through or in which these events occur. A seeing, a hearing, a perceiving, above all, a suffering exists; a substance, however, which could see, hear and suffer is not recognised by the Buddhist doctrine."1 The traditional concept of the individual is replaced in Buddhism by a perspective of personality as made up of five aggregates of attachment which constitute the essence of "suffering". The so-called "I" of Buddhism — usable only on the level of conventional truth — is not a substance category or eternal essence but a designation for the composite of the five attachment groups. Technically, they are arranged as the aggregate of matter or form (rupakhanda), the aggregate of sensations or feelings or mind (vedanakhanda), the aggregate of mental formations or volitional dispositions (samkharakhanda) and the aggregate of consciousness (vinnanakhanda); alternatively, the self is a composite of perception (samajna), feeling (vedana), volitional faculties (samskaras), intelligence (vijnana) and form (rupa)2. There is nothing constant about the five aggregates as a substitute for the soul. They are not in themselves permanent entities but subject to universal flux as also to change in accordance with the natural law. Their movement is said to constitute their essence: there is no "mover" behind it. In Nietzsche's terminology, only "interpretation" exists here. The question as to how Buddhism then explains the phenomenon of transmigration is answered by the contention that the "physical and mental energies which constitute the so-called being have within themselves the power to take a new form and

1 2

Oldenberg, op.cit., pp. 271-275. See Rahula, p. 20f; see also Radhakrishnan and Moore, p. 272.

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grow gradually and gather force to the full"3. The aggregates by themselves are devoid of an own nature or substance and exist by virtue of their interrelation. Their compartmentalisation into five groups, is, in Nietzschean terms, a "simplification"; we continue to remain conscious of the perspective that each of the "attachment-groups" as well as their interrelation involves incalculable indeterminable energy-formations. Here, as also with Nietzsche, the individual is declared inconceivable in terms of an independent isolated entity. The "I" remains a matter of organisation and is only of designatory relevance. The dialogue between Nagasena, a Buddhist monk, and King Menander, from the Milindapanha, affirms Nietzsche's perspective of the "lack of ego" in the human process, as also his admission that the traditional terminology purporting to "explain" man and the universe is valid only in a "descriptive" sense. The spiritual problem with which King Menander (l B. C.) is purported to have been faced was his inability to understand how the Buddha could believe in rebirth without belief in a reincarnating ego or self. At the end of the conversation which is said to have lasted for some days, the king expressed his gratitude to the monk for having resolved his doubts. Nietzsche was familiar with the dialogue in the version of Oldenberg cited below: King Milinda says to the great saint Nagasena: "How does one recognise you, ο venerable one, what is your name, sir?" The saint replies: "I am called Nagasena, great king; but Nagasena . . . is only an appellation, a denotation, a designation, an expression, a mere word; there is no subject (i.e. person) to be found here." Then King Milinda spoke: "Now then, may the five hundred Greeks and the eighty thousand monks hear it; this Nagasena says: "There is no subject to be found here. Can one give him approval?" And King Milinda spoke further to the venerable Nagasena: "If . . . a subject cannot be found here who is it then that provides you with what you need, clothes and food, lodgings and medicaments for the sick? Who is it that enjoys all these things? Who practises virtue? Who works at himself? Who reaches the path and the fruit of sainthood? Who reaches nirvana? Who murders? Who steals? Who revels in lust? Who lies? Who drinks? Who commits the five deathly sins? So there is no good and no evil; there is no doer and no causer of good and evil deeds; noble deed and evil deed bring no reward and bear no fruit. If someone killed you, venerable Nagasena, even he could commit no murder." "Are, sir, the hairs Nagasena?" "No, great king." "Are nails or teeth, skin or flesh or bones, Nagasena?" "No, great king." "Is, sir, the corporeal form Nagasena?" "No, great king." 3

Rahula, p. 33.

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"Are the feelings Nägasena?" "No, great king." "Are the ideas, the formations cognition Nägasena?" "No, great king." "Or, sir, the combination of corporeal form, feelings, ideas, formations and cognition Nägasena?" "No, great king." "Or, sir, outside of the body and the feelings, the ideas, formations and cognition, is there a Nägasena?" "No, great king." "Wherever I put the question, sir, nowhere do I find a Nägasena. A mere word, sir, is Nägasena. What is Nägasena then? Wrongly, sir, you speak, and falsely; there is no Nägasena." Then the venerable Nägasena spoke to the King Milinda thus: . . . "Did you come on foot or by carriage" . . . " . . . I came here by carriage" "If you came by carriage, great king, then explain the carriage to me." And now the saint turns against the king the argumentation used by the latter. Neither the shaft nor the axle nor the wheels nor the body of the carriage nor the yoke make up the carriage. The carriage is also not the combination of all these component parts or something other than these. "Wherever I put the question, great king, nowhere do I find the carriage. A mere word, king, is the carriage. What is the wagon then? You speak falsely, king . . . there is no carriage . . . Well indeed, may the five hundred Greeks and the eighty thousand monks hear it; this king Milinda said: "I came by carriage." Then I spoke: "If you came by carriage, great king, then explain to me the carriage. But he is not capable of showing me the carriage. Can one then give him approval?" When he spoke thus the five hundred Greeks applauded the venerable Nägasena and spoke to King Milinda: "Now speak, great king, if you can?" King Milinda but spoke to the venerable Nägasena: "I am not telling a lie ... With reference to pole and axle, wheels, the body of the carriage and shaft, the appellation, the denotation, the designation, the expression, the word 'carriage' is used." "Well, for sure, great king, you recognise the carriage. So also in reference to my hairs, my skin and bones, body, feelings, ideas, formations and cognition the appellation, the denotation, the designation, the expression, the word 'Nägasena' is used; a subject, however, in the strict sense of the word is not found here. So also, great king, the nun Vajirä spoke before the Buddha: "As there, where the parts of the wagon come together, one uses the word 'carriage' so also where the five groups are, is also the person; this is the common opinion.'" "Magnificent, venerable Nägasena. So many questions came to my mind and you have answered them. If Buddha lived he would applaud you."4

The Visuddhimagga reinforces Nagasena's explanation as "truth": Just as the word "chariot" is but a mode of expression for axle, wheels, chariot body, pole, and other constituent members, placed in a certain relation to each 4

Oldenberg, pp. 276-279.

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other, but when we come to examine the members one by one, we discover that in the absolute sense there is no chariot; and just as the word "house" is just a mode of expression for wood and other constituents of a house, surrounding space in a certain relation, but in the absolute sense there is no house; and just as the word "fist" is but a mode of expression for the fingers, the thumb, etc., in a certain relation; and the word "lute" for the body of the lute, strings etc.; "army" for elephants, horses, etc.; "city" for fortifications, houses, gates, etc., "tree" for trunk, branches, foliage, etc., in a certain relation, but when we come to examine the parts one by one, we discover that in the absolute sense there is no tree; in exactly the same way the words "living entity" and "ego" are but a mode of expression for the presence of the five attachment groups, but when we come to examine the elements of being one by one, we discover that in the absolute sense there is no living entity there to form a basis for such figments as "I am", "I"; in other words, that in the absolute sense there is only name and form. The insight of him who perceives this is called knowledge of the truth. 5

The conventional expressions devised to "explain" the personality, then, fail in the Buddhist view, to explain or characterise it; they remain modes of expression or mental projections which have become beliefs. On the other hand, Buddhism proclaims the necessity of taking into account the dualism in the levels of statement when examining a proposition: there is a conventional (functional) truth and an ultimate truth. In the philosophical sense, as proved by Nagasena's argument there is neither an "I" nor a "you" that suffers. There is but suffering: "Misery only doth exist, none miserable, No doer is there; naught save the deed is found. Nirvana is, but not the man who seeks it; the Path exists, but not the traveler on it" (Visuddhimagga). Once again: " . . . Monks, when a monk lives much with the thought of there being no self in ill heaped around the mind, taking thought is free of ideas that make for "I" and "mine" as to this discriminative body, as to all outward signs, is beyond the vanities, calmed, wholly liberated." (A iv, 53)

Consistent with his view of man as a grouping of energy-aggregates', Nietzsche declared the conventional postulate of the soul in need of redefinition. He rejects the "soul" as a "concept of the beyond". The soul-atomism of Christianity, alternatively, the notion of the soul as something "indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon" is declared "in need of being expelled from science" (BGE, 12; A, 15). The perspectives, on the other hand, of the "mortal soul", "soul as subjective multiplicity" or "soul as the social structure of the instincts and passions" are to be scientifically acknowledged (loc. cit.). The soul, Nietzsche notes, is comprised of an indefinable 5

Citations to the Visuddhimagga are from Buddhism in Translations, ed. H. C. Warren (Cambridge, 1915).

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The analysis of personality and universe

multiplicity of affections and of an intellect, the boundaries of which are indistinct (KGW VII, 2; 25 (96), 29); or, the term "soul" per se is useful only in a designatory reference to a system of emotions and judgements of value (KGW VII, 3; 35 (6), 233). It is no less mortal and transient than the body (i. a. KGW VII, 2; 25 (7), 7). Zarathustra characterises the soul accordingly as something about the body or about the self which is capacitated with the power of reason and which provides the basis for self-surmounting: " . . . the awakened and knowing man says: Ί am body entirely and nothing apart; and soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great intelligence, a plurality in one sense, a war and peace, a herd and a shepherd. Your little intelligence . . . which you call 'mind' is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and joy of your great intelligence. T you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith - your body and its great reason: that does not say T but does T" (Z I, 4; cf. Z II, 17). The culture of the "soul" in an other-worldly sense and at the expense of the body is envisioned as an abrogation of the human personality. As an immediate and tangible reality it is the body, Nietzsche insists, that provides the most reliable interpretation of the human personality: "Granted that the soul is an attractive and mysterious thought which the philosophers have had to abandon with great reluctance, the entity which is put in its place, the body, is even more attractive and mysterious. As an organic rejuvenation of the events of the farthest past and their crystallisation and development within the present, the body is an even more astounding phenomenon than is the "old" soul (WP, 659). The bo