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Prof. Jim Peterman

Veronica Holmes is a sophomore at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia and is currently pursuing a degree in Philosophy. She has a keen interest in Eastern philosophy--specifically Indian, Chinese and Japanese--and is fascinated by the fact that both Western and Eastern thinkers have developed similar thoughts and doctrines. Veronica also enjoys international travel and photography and regularly travels to third-world countries to photograph indigenous peoples in native costumes. She had a single-artist exhibition of her portraits of the Huli Bushmen of Papua, New Guinea in March 2000. 

 
 

Nietzsche was familiar with Buddhism and dismissed it as passive Oriental nihilism, which he felt encouraged man to "withdraw into...self-extinction" in response to a tremendous "disease of the will" (GS 36, 289). Ironically, Nietzsche saw that Western man had also fallen into passive nihilism after science revealed that he was a naturally evolved organism, and not one created by a God with a plan for mankind, thus causing man to "mistrust any 'meaning' in suffering, indeed in existence" (WP 55). Nietzsche feels that the way out of this malaise requires active nihilism, in which this weariness of spirit is resisted and overcome. Nietzsche believes that "Pain does not count as an objection to life," and that suffering can be used by man as a pickax to release a wellspring of joy (EH 70).

Through understanding that man is the exception, an "animal whose nature has not yet been fixed," Nietzsche wants man to know that active participation in his existence leads to an "increased power of the spirit" (EH 89, WP 22). He wants "To teach man the future of man as his will" (BGE 126). In his book Nietzsche and Buddhism, Robert Morrison claims that the Buddha also taught a doctrine of active nihilism and that although Nietzsche disdained Buddhism, his doctrine does in fact parallel the Buddha's. Nietzsche did not have an historical reading of Buddhism, but is extremely close to a doctrine from which he believed he was diametrically opposed. In what follows, I will pursue what Morrison calls "the ironic affinities" between Nietzsche and the Buddha.

Nietzsche saw that without God the value of life becomes a new proposition, that  "at long last the horizon appears free to (man) again" (GS 343). He responded to man's despair by creating a new vision of man and existence, with values founded in life as it is. For Nietzsche, "The meaning of life is thus found on earth, in this life" (Z 116). He thinks it is destructive to miss the opportunity to live now because man has been duped into thinking that this life must be endured in order to escape to a blissful afterworld. Nietzsche feels that man cannot look to the past for guidance, since history is based on the error of linear time that makes man erroneously believe he is making progress towards an end, striving and suffering in order to receive his reward in the next life, and Nietzsche asks, "how could we have a duty to something unknown?" (TI 50). Nietzsche wants to free man from the lie of a two-world framework, the "warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons" (GS 328). He wants man to know that this is the only world that will exist for him and that he can will what he is in it. His writing shows man that life is beautiful and joyous, despite suffering and cruelty, and that life is not to be denied, but unconditionally affirmed. 

Both Nietzsche and the Buddha saw that man's power (Macht) is diminished by the limiting labels with which he identifies. Both believe that man is conditioned "to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit...will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage" (GS 93). They both see that man never realizes that life contains infinite possibilities beyond imposed names, that "all of us harbor concealed gardens" (GS 84). Unaware of his freedom, man is overdetermined by accidents, such as his place of birth. He fixes on a bundle of labels, the 'self,' believing it is a fixed entity through time, thinking that he can legislate a life that fits his beautiful name and that he can bend life into giving him the existence that his name prescribes. Nietzsche and the Buddha were both aware that the beguiling nature of language creates the fiction of the atman or the soul, that man "endowed himself with fictitious attributes," and both say the 'I' is only "a synthesis produced by thinking" (GS 174, BGE 81). 

Chained to the 'self,' man suffers in a prison of non-dynamic predicates. Both Nietzsche and the Buddha want man to overcome the immobility of names caused by his environment. They want man to know that he is part of the dissonance of life and that the power of its complexity perishes when man believes that his life has a fixed and narrow path, for "everything fixed killeth," and Nietzsche asks, "How does one compromise oneself? By being consistent. By going in a straight line" (AC 156, TI 88). For both thinkers, life is an adventure that brings joy and laughter, rather than the seriousness of fixed names. Nietzsche saw Buddhism as a sign of weakness and lack of power, but Morrison claims that in the ancient texts, the Buddha "is compared to a bull bursting free of his bonds...like a lion he is fearless and roars his lion's roar" (N&B 35). Nietzsche would approve of this Buddha, since he claims that "laughing lions must come" after man bursts through the strictures of conventional naming (Z 395). 

Man lives in herds, categories wherein they identify themselves as the good, the inside that knows how to live the "right" life. The herd labels all others as the outside and, therefore, evil. Even on the inside, man is forced to live within narrow confines, for whoever "stands apart will always have the whole herd against him" (GS 202). Nietzsche claims that no fixed self or reality exists, that there is no good or evil, and no "right" way to live. Nietzsche wants man to remain flexible with naming and judging, thus putting man on a frontier where the borders of good and evil and inside and outside do not exist. Without boundaries, naming would only give an identifier that makes life orderly, but man could then access the infinite number of possibilities that life presents if he no longer has a fixed view. Morrison says that in Buddhism "the liberated person holds no views.... Even having views that work well in a given situation, (he) does not hold on to them or identify with them (N&B 186). Nietzsche agrees, saying, "freedom from constrictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength" (AC 54).

Nietzsche wants man to understand "the truth of becoming...that he is not...'something that remains constant in the midst of all the flux' but, just like any other natural phenomenon, is something that has become" (HAH 2). The Eastern doctrine of perishing and becoming has existed for thousands of years, and when Nietzsche says, "There are no eternally enduring substances," one might ironically hear the echo of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist, who says in The Fundamental Wisdom of The Middle Way: "Those who see essence and essential difference / And entities and nonentities, /They do not see" (GS 168, XV 6). In both doctrines, there is no essence or substance to anything, including the self, and it is only naming that makes something what it is, but everything is always more than its name, which can never exhaust potential. 

Both thinkers say that there is no human nature and no rule that legislates what man should be, therefore, man can be whatever he wishes, and since there are no essences, everything can be a myriad of possibilities. Both teach that flexible naming leads to unblocked engagement that enables man to participate in the world without the idea of a fixed self and a rigid path, thus enabling him to experience the world as magical, devoid of the mistakes of language. From this perspective, nothing is a "this" or a "that" and man can then participate in the play of Sankara's netti netti, where everything can be "either/or." From this position, there can be no inside/outside dialectic with which man judges everything as good or bad. Nietzsche's highest man, the transhuman, knows that he is his flexible name, as well as all the multiple alterities that life brings, and understands his 'self' in relation to the world, that neither has a permanent nature. He gains independence from the mores of the herd-type through Nietzsche's will to power by consciously practicing self-overcoming, the leaving behind of negative habituated affects and the willing of a higher 'self' in each moment, thus continually re-creating himself. 

Both Nietzsche and the Buddha want man to realize that it is only a weak and sick will that fights for the enslavement of a rigid name as if it were fighting for its freedom. They both say that the multiplicities comprising the body are continually changing and maintain that the self is a gradual process in which one bodily self is replaced by another. Buddhism calls this anattan, or no-self, the lack of an autonomous, eternal and unchanging 'self,' essence or substance. And Nietzsche says, "There is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; the "doer" is simply fabricated into the deed" (GM i. 13). This is a conatus-destroying thought, that there is no 'self' at the ground of man, that there is no 'I' underneath a man's plan for his life. Both say that the self comes into being as if from nowhere in each instant, that a lifetime is simply a series of discontinuous moments, each giving birth to an autonomous entity, and that it is man's memory of some of his attributes that misleads him into believing that he is the same self through time. Nietzsche is saying that the illusion of a fixed 'self' is a synthesis of what is in fact a continually fluctuating multiplicity of states under a single, static concept that is then misunderstood as the bearer and cause of such states. 

In reality, the self is overcoming what it was and becoming what it is not, in a continuous process of self-overcoming from moment to moment, and notions such as subject, ego, being, are merely the creations of "a conceptual synthesis" (WP 371). The Buddha said of the 'self' that "these are merely names...turns of speech...in common use in the world," and that "attachment to such doctrines will only bring one dukkha (suffering)" (Majjhima-Nik¥ya i.137, N&B 130). 

Willing a new self happens in the micro instant between perishing and becoming, when the self stands at the gateway that Nietzsche calls the Moment, the juncture between past and future. It is here that the self can jettison the habituated names of its past, thus achieving sunyata--emptiness. This enables man to then propel himself into the future moment as a higher self, through the conscious willing of a flexible name that is open to all its alterities and the rich ambiguity of life. This new self cooperates with the dream of life in a non-judgmental way and is a self that does not grasp onto life, but lets life go, so that life can continue its dream, enabling life to bring even more possibilities to another new self in the next moment. 

The Buddha also taught that man would not develop spiritually unless he could "change the pattern of his sankharas (his drives)" (N&B 111). Willing for the Buddha is getting rid of bad and projecting good sankharas in the continuing process of sankhara-khandha, the Buddhist version of self-overcoming. Willing for both Nietzsche and the Buddha involves the conscious projection of drives, sankharas, in each moment, so that a progressively higher self is always becoming in "a continual ascent as on stairs"(GS 231). Through self-overcoming, the higher man can bring about affects not shared by the herd type by overcoming the negative affects such as resentment, vengefulness and hatred. Nietzsche says that if man identifies with these labels, he will be unable to access other more enriching perspectives. Through conscious willing from moment to moment, Nietzsche's transhuman adds distance between himself and those whose lives are defined by rigid names. Transhumans understand Nietzsche when he says, "Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching and improving others.... Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example even more brilliantly" (GS 254). 

For both Nietzsche and the Buddha, the higher man now has "right view," sees that there are no enduring essences, and that predicates can be flexible. He knows that "there is much filth in the world.... But that does not make the world itself a filthy monster" (Z 317). Instead, he sees life as a woman, "covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise" (GS 272). In Buddhism, the higher self now pursues brahmacariya, the life of excellence, which "refreshes the body and mind by pervading them with energy which thrills and elates" (N&B 193). This Buddhist is diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's opinion of him escaping the world with a weariness of spirit. Morrison says, "out of the one hundred and twenty one classes of consciousness...in Buddhist psychology, sixty three are accompanied by joy and only three are painful," demonstrating that there is far more potential for happiness than suffering in Buddhist doctrine (N&B 34).

Both thinkers show a way in which nihilism can overcome itself, thus creating a higher human who steadily increases in power through willing. Both recognize that man's greatest obstacle lies in desire for Nietzsche and tanha (thirst) for the Buddhist, which causes longing in man, leading to suffering, or dukkha. Desire enabled man to evolve into a higher species through his 'thirst' for knowledge and excellence. But desire also leads to longing and grasping onto the objects of desire, which causes the never-ending cycle of longing and suffering, because desire always desires desire, regardless of what man has. Nietzsche says, "one loves one's desires and not that which is desired" (BGE 106). This leads to dissatisfaction--the angst that propels man into the downward spiral of passive nihilism when it is discovered that nothing can satisfy man. For Nietzsche, suffering is necessary, for longing and apathy forces man to suspect that another way of life is possible. It is the tension between the life being lived, the actual, and the suspected life that is possible, the potential, that makes man capable of responding to new possibilities, which are unlimited, since potential always exceeds the actual. 

Nietzsche believed that the Buddhist withdraws from life because tanha, thirst, can never be quenched, but this is the opposite of Buddhism. Tanha is the thirst, the fever of unsatisfied longing. Morrison says: "Without tanha there would be no Buddhist spiritual life...or 'pursuit of excellence'--and therefore no Buddhas," the equivalent of Nietzsche's transhuman (N&B 135). Like desire, tanha leads to upadana, which is clinging. When the objects of tanha cannot satisfy tanha, man falls into a state of dukkha, suffering. The never-ending cycle of tanha, upadana and dukkha--thirst, clinging, suffering--results in man having 'wrong view,' because satisfying basic needs never quenches tanha since, like desire, tanha always only wants itself. But tanha, too, drives the Buddhist's quest for satisfaction and meaning in life. Morrison states: "As long as 'right view' has not arisen, (the Buddhist) will continue to experience dissatisfaction which, in turn, is the primary condition for the search to continue" (N&B 149). 

Dukkha, suffering, allows a Buddhist the freedom to 'see' new opportunities, enabling the emergence of a new perspective about life. Tanha and desire can only be appeased by thirsting after those things that aid the pursuit of excellence, and both doctrines are saying that suffering is necessary in order to give birth to a higher self. Nietzsche says that "the path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's hell" and that "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star" (GS 269, 129). Like desire, tanha is the catalyst for seeking a better life and is overcome by consciously selecting higher goals to present to the mind. But man runs the risk of falling back into passive nihilism because the struggle to control desire's and tanha's continual return to grasping is difficult. The Buddha cautions that man must 'guard the doors of the senses' so that he does not fall back into grasping onto a familiar and fixed label to tell him he is something because he fears that he is nothing. In both doctrines, it is only when man realizes that he is nothing that he has the potential to be everything. 

They both say that having 'right view' makes man tolerant of all things and persons. He feels love, metta, for all sentient beings, because he no longer has absolutes, having overcome his narrow, self-oriented and limited perspective, having gotten rid of his bad affects. This makes man able to live anywhere, even in the midst of the herd, since he can no longer disdain them. Nietzsche's transhuman does not criticize. His only negation is looking away, and Morrison says that the Buddha teaches that "someone who has attained enlightenment...cannot feel ill-will towards anyone regardless of what they do to him" (N&B 101). For both Nietzsche and the Buddha, man's behavior now springs from what he has become, what he is instinctively, rather than being one who behaves according to a legislated rule. Nietzsche says, "all perfect acts are unconscious...one acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively" (WP 289, 440). This represents the ubermensch becoming the transhuman, the one who saw himself as higher than the herd, now sees himself as of all things and does not judge. 

The enlightened transhuman and bodhi knows that all phenomenon is impermanent. He knows that when he uses terms such as "I" and "mine" he does so in a merely conventional sense, without being beguiled into assuming that when he says "I think," there is an "I" who thinks. He now knows that names do not speak to what a thing is, because everything is nothing fundamentally and, therefore, can be anything. The primary aspect of both doctrines is self-overcoming, which involves man directly willing, and thus, affirming his drives. Both involve only the subject and are connected to the natural world, with no supernatural realm held up to man as a reward for suffering with a fixed name. 

After using their doctrines to develop 'right view,' Nietzsche wants no disciples and the Buddha wants man to abandon the raft, his doctrine, that man used to cross the river of ignorance. Both feel that man can now rely on his own experience for guidance, since he now has confidence that is based upon knowing and seeing for himself. If he stays with their doctrines, both philosophers feel that man will be adopting another label--Buddhist and Nietzschean--that will legislate how he "should" behave, thus falling back into herd-like behavior. Both Nietzsche and the Buddha want man to use their doctrines to know the truth, in order to be himself, to be a continuously developing entity that lives joyfully with an ever-changing world, to be the possessor of "a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow...of impending adventures, of seas that are open again" (GS 32). 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1990. 
_____ Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1990. 
_____ Ecce Homo. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books. 1992. 
_____ The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books: Random House, Inc., 1974. 
_____ Human, All Too Human. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1986. 
_____ On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark & Alan Swenson. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1998. 
_____ Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1990. 
_____ The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufman & R. J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books: Random House, Inc., 1968. 
_____ Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1969. 
Nagarjuna. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Oxford University Press: New York, 1995. 
Morrison, Robert G. Nietzsche and Buddhism. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999. 

AC: The Antichrist
BGE: Beyond Good and Evil
EH: Ecce Homo
GS: The Gay Science
HAH: Human, All Too Human
GM: On the Genealogy of Morality
TI: Twilight of the Idols 
WP: Will to Power 
Z: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
N&B: Nietzsche and Buddhism