Nietzsche and Buddhism

Or, Dionysus versus the Awakened One

Buddhism begins from the premise that life is fundamentally unsatisfactory. Life is dukkha says the Buddha in his First Noble Truth. Dukkha is often translated as “suffering” but that isn’t quite right. The Buddha is not a pessimist, at least not absolutely. Dukkha means unsatisfactory-ness. Some translate the First Noble Truth as “life is tinged with suffering.” It’s not that life has nothing pleasant or good—it’s that even the good and pleasant things are tinged with suffering because they are impermanent. We want the good things to last, but they never do. Everything in the phenomenal world is compounded—made up of aggregate parts—and impermanent. Also, sentient beings are delusional. They do not understand the true nature of things, and so their desires and expectations are unrealistic. We want more than we have, and also less than we have (of bad things). At the same time, others want things from us that we can’t or won’t give. “You love her, but she loves him. And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win,” as the old song says.

The Buddha’s solution to the problem of suffering is renunciation. The means of renunciation is the Noble Eightfold Path. I won’t elaborate it here, you can read about it in books or online. The basic idea is that because life is like this, you turn your back on life. You give up what causes suffering to yourself and others, to the degree that this is possible. Ultimately what this means, what it leads to, is giving up the ego, the notion of an independent self. The renunciation of the ego, the realization of its transitory and compounded nature, empty of essence, leads to new possibilities on the Buddhist path. This is because some or even all of the things in the world that were renounced as causes of suffering turn out not to be real causes of suffering. They cause suffering for the ego, but if the ego isn’t there, neither is the suffering.

The path of renunciation is sometimes called the Sutrayana, the path (or vehicle) of the Sutras. The sutras are the scriptures which record the Buddha’s teachings to his monks and nuns, his renunciates. The counterpart to Sutra is Tantra, the teachings which the Buddha gave to those who could not become renunciates, the first of whom was a king who could not abdicate his throne because of duty to his people, so the Buddha taught him another path to enlightenment. Whereas the principle of Sutra is renunciation, the principle of Tantra is transformation. Tantric practitioners are known for doing many or all of the things which are forbidden or discouraged for renunciates: they eat meat, they drink alcohol and take drugs, they express negative emotions, and most famously, they have sex. This apparent libertinism is of course why everyone loves Tantra, not only in the West but in the East as well. Being a monk is no fun, whereas being a tantrica means you get to party.

That’s not quite how it’s supposed to be, though. Besides the Sutra-Tantra distinction, another way to divide the Buddhist teachings is into the Three Yanas, the three “vehicles.” These are Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. Hinayana means “lesser vehicle” because it’s the path of personal realization. It is said that everyone necessarily begins as a hinayana practitioner. You hear the Buddhist teachings, you have some sense that they’re true, and so you begin to practice the dharma, not because you give two shits about anyone else, but because you’re interested in your own salvation, in reducing and eliminating your own suffering. But in practicing the Buddhist path and beginning to realize emptiness, something happens. Compassion naturally and spontaneously arises, and your motivation begins to change. Rather than just working for your own benefit, you start to work for the benefit of everyone, of “all sentient beings” as the teachings say. This is the Mahayana, the “greater vehicle.” The Mahayana is still a part of the sutric teachings, it’s still the path of renunciation, but it’s called the greater vehicle because it denotes a higher level of realization. The goal of the Hinayana is to become an Arhat, a solitary realizer of the truth. The goal of the Mahayana is to become a bodhisattva, a being who vows to benefit all sentient beings, and who forswears his own enlightenment until all other beings have attained it.

This brings us to the third vehicle, the Vajrayana. Vajra means “indestructible.” It is variously translated as “diamond” or “thunderbolt,” the former because of its hardness, the latter because of its speed. It is said that whereas a renunciate must reincarnate thousands or millions of times before attaining enlightenment, a practitioner of Vajrayana, which is tantric, can attain enlightenment in a single lifetime.

“Wow, instant enlightenment and you get to drink and fuck?! Sign me up!” That’s the thinking behind most people’s interest in tantra and Vajrayana. But there’s a catch. As the Hinayana is the necessary basis for the Mahayana, so Mahayana is the necessary basis for Vajrayana. More specifically, the bodhisattva vow and the genuine desire to benefit all beings and to put others before self is an essential prerequisite for Vajrayana practice. If you practice without this, from an egoic motivation, the path leads not to enlightenment but to becoming a demon, as exemplified in the story of Tharpa Nakpo:

Tharpa Nakpo, along with his servant, become the students of a guru who teaches the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) doctrine that whatever arises is the enlightened mind. While his servant correctly understands the teachings and becomes enlightened, Tharpa Nakpo badly misinterprets the Great Perfection, taking the teachings to mean that he can perform whatever actions he wants. …

Tharpa Nakpo and his servant get into an argument about who is correct in their interpretation of the Great Perfection and when they ask their guru to clarify, the guru states that Tharpa Nakpo is wrong. He becomes enraged and banishes both his servant and guru. He then goes to live in the charnel grounds, killing men and eating their corpses and engaging in orgies with prostitutes. When he dies, he is subsequently reborn in the lowest hell for incalculable eons, followed by thousands upon thousands of rebirths in other hells, and then as different types of particularly wretched life-forms, such as vomit-eating spirits. At last, he is finally reborn as Rudra, the son of a rakshasi prostitute who dies in childbirth. …

Rudra finds he is endowed with practically limitless evil magical power and proceeds to conquer and gain control over every being in the world, starting with the charnel ground spirits, and gradually moving up until he overthrows the gods themselves, stealing their wives for himself. He sets up a kind of palace made of piled corpses and bones on the Isle of Lanka, and due to his malevolence the entire world begins to resemble an hell-realm. Seeing this woeful state of affairs, the buddhas decide that Rudra must be subjugated. They initially send Shakyamuni Buddha who tries to convert Rudra to the Buddhadharma peacefully, but Rudra laughs in his face and drives him off. The buddhas then send a series of wrathful buddhas to attempt to subjugate him by force. Eventually, Vajrapani takes on a form identical to Rudra and impregnates his main consort through deception. From this union, a being called Vajra-Demon is born who goes on to defeat Rudra in combat, painfully subjugates him by eating him, then resurrects him as dharma protector.

So all’s well that ends well. A couple points here. First, as an aside, this is the closest I’ve seen to an inspiration for the Sith in Star Wars, much closer than any demonology in Abrahamic traditions. Second, note the understanding of how evil must be dealt with which is implicit in this Buddhist tale: in order for the Buddhas, “the good guys,” (the Jedi!) to defeat Rudra, they have to become identical to him. Whereas in Christianity wrath is one of the seven deadly sins, in Buddhism it is the enlightened aspect of anger, righteous anger that results from clarity rather than from delusion. There is no Kantian fretting about whether it’s wrong to lie to Rudra’s consort—in order to trick her into having sex!—because this is the skillful means necessary to cause Rudra’s eventual defeat.

So, there is Buddhism in a nutshell. It starts with renunciation and ends with what appears to be “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” except you can’t just “Do what thou wilt.” Now, what does all this have to do with Nietzsche?

Nietzsche represents the most radical critique of religion in modern times, and that includes Buddhism. In The Antichrist and elsewhere, he distinguishes Buddhism as superior to Christianity in some ways, but ultimately he still considers it a religion of decadence and he rejects it. Some today like to think that he only rejected the limited and incomplete understanding of Buddhism that was available to Europeans in the late 19th century, with its nihilistic tendencies, e.g. translating sunyata as “nothingness” when it really means something like “empty pure potentiality.” But Nietzsche’s rejection of Buddhism doesn’t stem from an incomplete understanding of it.

In The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, Nietzsche defines his concept of the Dionysian in a way that very much conforms to Buddhist metaphysics:

Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence—yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming figures. … the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly.

In this book Nietzsche was still very much under the influence of Schopenhauer, and it is the first and last time that he would speak of any “metaphysical comfort.” (He later changed his understanding of what the “Dionysian” meant.) Schopenhauer basically adopted the metaphysics of the Vedanta, which are very similar to Buddhism, arguably differing only in semantics. (The gap between the two is bridged in traditions such as Kashmir Saivism and the Shentong school of Tibetan Buddhism.) Nietzsche knew Schopenhauer very well. He also knew Greek philosophy and Christian theology very well, which means that he was more than familiar with the tradition of Plotinus and Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism, as any good Guenonian Traditionalist will tell you, is the Western counterpart to the Vedanta. What unites all of these traditions (and allows writers like Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy and Evola to speak simply of one metaphysical “Tradition”) is their embrace of the primordial distinction between Being and Becoming, their exaltation of Being as superior, and their identification of Being with what Kant called the noumenon, in opposition to the phenomenon, mere appearance, mere becoming.

In Greek philosophy the exaltation of Being over Becoming goes back to the pre-Socratic writer Parmenides. From him it passes to Plato, who develops it considerably into the doctrine of the Forms, which have true Being, in opposition to the things in this world which are at best a mix of being and becoming (partially partaking in the eternal Forms but also being impermanent and imperfect, unlike the Forms). From Plato, the Being-Becoming distinction and hierarchy passes into Christianity, where it becomes mythologized and theolgized. (Nietzsche called Christianity “Platonism for the masses.”) The Hebrew god Yahweh becomes the almighty God of Plato and Aristotle, and the world becomes His bastard creation, implicitly identified with and degraded as the world of becoming, of mere phenomena, the kingdom of Satan. The Kingdom of God, in contrast, “is not of this world.”

In all of this theology and metaphysics Nietzsche sees a common denominator: the devaluation of the world—the apparent world, the only world of which our senses actually give us data—in favor of an imagined “other world.” The “other world,” because it cannot be directly seen or experienced, except perhaps by mystics with supranormal perception, becomes the repository of all of man’s hopes and dreams. Everything that is bad and disappointing about this world is absent in the “other world.” More and more, people neglect this world for the imagined “other world.” Christians and Muslims place their hope in heaven or paradise. Hindus wait for their next reincarnation with better karma. Buddhists try to attain Nirvana.

Now it could be argued that Buddhism avoids Nietzsche’s criticism insofar as the Buddha taught the non-duality of Being and Becoming, which in Buddhist terminology is Nirvana and Samsara. Samsara is the apparent world, which is impermanent, full of suffering and illusion (maya). Nirvana is everything that Samsara is not. Since the Buddha taught, in the Heart Sutra and elsewhere, that “Nirvana is Samsara, Samsara is Nirvana,” one might think that Buddhists avoid this trap of degrading the world for the “other world.” But all one need do is spend some time among Buddhists to know that it isn’t so, and the reason is simply because of human nature.

Christian doctrine too could potentially avoid this pitfall. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is not somewhere else but rather is “within you.” (This perhaps contradicts his other saying that the Kingdom is “not of this world,” but oh well.) This is a parallel to the Buddhist teaching of nonduality—any good Traditionalist will tell you there are many parallels between Buddhism and Christianity, especially at the level of esoteric doctrine. But everything hinges on how the doctrine is actually interpreted and how the teachings are actually practiced. And in practice, Nietzsche’s criticism is entirely correct. And furthermore, it is entirely correct as pertains to Buddhism as well. Any religion or philosophy which posits an “other world” in contrast to the “apparent world” is anathema to Nietzsche. This idea is one of the primary poisons of life that Nietzsche identifies, and it is one of the reasons that he called Buddhism, like Christianity, a religion of decadence, despite having more respect for its methods and ethos than that of Christianity. (But perhaps if he had lived in a Buddhist society rather than a Christian society, where he could see the practice of the religion at ground level, he would have felt differently.)

The path that Nietzsche lays out, which stands in stark contrast to all religious teaching heretofore, is that the “apparent world” is in fact the only world, that the mind or “spirit” (the German word is the same for both) is an epiphenomenon and the body is that which is primary. It isn’t so much that he denies absolutely the possibility of transcendence or religiosity as such, it is that he denies that they can or should be arrived at through negation of life—religious asceticism—rather than through affirmation of life.

Because religiosity has been a feature of human life for millennia, Nietzsche knew that it was inadvisable and probably impossible to try to “get rid of it.” His concern was therefore not to prohibit it for everyone, but to open up a mental space for a few, his “free spirits,” who would become explorers of the possible, unencumbered by superstitions and moral shackles. If he thought that Buddhism was the way, he would have said so. Instead, he saw that whatever there may be that is noble and admirable in it, it was in the end a religion like the others and did not produce the kind of men that he hoped to see in the future of the species.

Now, having said all that, is there still a possibility for something like a “Nietzschean Buddhism”? Maybe. The key point to be made is that Nietzsche rejects the desacralization of the world and of nature. Any religion or metaphysics which does not reject or devalue the world could, at least in theory, be informed by Nietzsche’s ideas and values. But it must be said that Nietzsche believes that any idea of an “other world” implicitly devalues this world, even if it does not explicitly do so.

Tantric Buddhism, Hindu tantra, and Taoism all have a spirituality of the body which regard it as a sacred vessel rather than a defiled thing of fallen nature. But they are also all suffused with supernaturalism, superstition and fanciful ideas of “other worlds.” The Christian writer R.J. Rushdoony, in his book The Flight from Humanity, argues that the anti-physical values that one finds in Christianity are not Biblical but are a foreign import from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. One could perhaps construct a “nature-positive” Christian theology based on the Incarnation as the divinization or redemption of nature, and on the human body as the temple of the spirit rather than as “the flesh,” source of temptations and defilements.

But this is theory and speculation. The fact is that such traditions do not, at present, exist, either in Christianity or in Buddhism, and Nietzsche’s criticism of religion therefore remains as pertinent now as in his own time.