Beyond Good and Evil?
A Buddhist Critique of Nietzsche
by David R. Loy

Asian Philosophy, Volume 6 March 1996, pp. 37-55

ABSTRACT: In what ways was Nietzsche right, from a Buddhist perspective, and where did he go wrong? Nietzsche understood how the distinction we make between this world and a higher spiritual realm serves our need for security, and he saw the bad faith in religious values motivated by this need. He did not perceive how his alternative, more aristocratic values, also reflects the same anxiety. Nietzsche realized how the search for truth is motivated by a sublimated desire for symbolic security; philosophy's attempt to create the world reflects the tyrannical will-to-power, becoming the most "spiritualized" version of the need to impose our will. Insofar as truth is our intellectual effort to grasp being symbolically, however, Nietzsche overlooks a different reversal of perspective which could convert the "bad infinite" of heroic will into the good infinite of disseminating play. What he considered the crown of his system -- eternal recurrence -- is actually its denouement. Having seen through the delusion of Being, Nietzsche still sought a Being within Becoming. Nietzsche is able to affirm the value of this moment only by making it recur eternally. Rather than the way to vanquish nihilism, will-to-power turns out to be pure nihilism, for nihilism is not the debacle of all meaning but our dread of that debacle and what we do to avoid it.




Buddhism already has -- and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity -- the self-deception of moral concepts behind it -- it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil. (The Anti-Christ)[1]

Although Nietzsche viewed Buddhism as superior to Christianity, and went so far as to call eternal recurrence "the European form of Buddhism", he considered both religions nihilistic. Buddhism, which fights ressentiment, was a convenient whip for Christianity born out of ressentiment. Inasmuch as Buddhism attempts to view the world as it is, without the distortions of metaphysics, Nietzsche believed that it offers no moral interpretation of the suffering that necessarily attends the human condition: no one is responsible for that suffering. Yet this did not amount to a recommendation, for Buddhism is nonetheless a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization, the consolation of weary spirits longing for a dreamless sleep.[2] Sakyamuni Buddha was not an Ubermensch.

Such a conclusion is not surprising for someone who learned his Buddhism largely through Schopenhauer. But we have learned much more about Buddhism since Nietzsche's day, enough to consider a Buddhist response: in what ways was Nietzsche right, from a Buddhist perspective, and where might he have gone wrong?

The answer is complex, of course, and there is much that Buddhists can learn from Nietzsche, the first postmodernist and still the most important one. In order to reach that answer, however, it will first be necessary to gain some understanding of anatman,

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the "no self" doctrine central to Buddhism and to the still-widespread misunderstanding of Buddhism as nihilistic. Of the various ways for us to approach anatman, one of the most insightful is through modern psychology. Buddhism anticipated its reluctant conclusions: guilt and anxiety are not adventitious but intrinsic to the ego. That is because our dissatisfaction with life derives from a repression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion that "I" am not real. For Buddhism, the sense-of-self is not some self-existing consciousness but a mental construction which experiences its own groundlessness as a lack. On this account, our most problematic dualism is not so much life fearing death as a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own no-thing- ness. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, however, I can discover that I have always been grounded, not as a self-present being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.

What does this understanding of self-as-lack imply about ethics, truth, and the meaning of life for us? That is the question which motivates this paper, for to raise these issues in the Western tradition is to find ourselves in a dialogue with Nietzsche, whose own texts resonate with many of the same insights: for example, his critiques of the subject ("The 'subject' is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is." WP 481) and substance ("The properties of a thing are effects on other 'things'... there is no 'thing-in-itself.'" WP 557). From this critique, Nietzsche also drew some conclusions quite similar to those of Buddhism: in particular, that morality, knowledge and meaning are not discovered but constructed -- internalized games we learn from each other and play with ourselves. Perhaps the history of his own psyche reveals how momentous these discoveries were; and inevitably his insights were somewhat distorted.

Nietzsche understood how the distinction we make between this world and a higher spiritual realm serves our need for security, and he saw the bad faith in religious values motivated by this need. He did not understand how his alternative, more aristocratic values, also reflects the same anxiety. Nietzsche ends up celebrating an impossible ideal, the heroic-ego which overcomes its sense of lack, because he does not see that a heroic ego is our fantasy project for overcoming lack.

Nietzsche realized how the search for truth is motivated by a sublimated desire for symbolic security; his solution largely reverses our usual dualism by elevating ignorance and "untruth" into conditions of life. Philosophy's attempt to create the world reflects the tyrannical will- to-power, becoming the most "spiritualized" version of the need to impose our will. Insofar as truth is our intellectual effort to grasp being symbolically, however, those who no longer need to ground themselves can play the truth-versus-error game with lighter feet. Nietzsche overlooks a different reversal of perspective which could convert the bad-infinite of the heroic will-as-truth into the good infinite of truth-as-play.

What he considered the crown of his system--eternal recurrence -- is actually its denouement. Having seen through the delusion of Being, Nietzsche could not let it go completely, for he still sought a Being within Becoming. "To impose upon becoming the character of being -- this is the supr eme will to power" (WP 617). Having exposed the bad faith of believing in eternity, Nietzsche is nonetheless able to affirm the value of this moment only by making it recur eternally. In place of the neurotic's attempt to rediscover the past in the future he tries to rediscover the present in the future, yet the eternal recurrence of the now can add something only if the now in itself lacks something.

Rather than the way to vanquish nihilism, Nietzsche's will-to-power turns out to be

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pure nihilism, for nihilism is not the debacle of all meaning but our dread of that debacle and what we do to avoid it. This includes compulsively seizing on certain meanings as a bulwark against that form of lack. If so, the only solution to the dread of meaninglessness is meaninglessness itself: only by accepting meaninglessness, by letting it devour the meanings that we use to defend ourselves against our no-thing-ness, can we realize a meaning-free-ness open to the possibilities that arise in our world.

In sum, when the lack-driven bad infinite transforms into a lacking-nothing good infinite, the dualisms of good-versus-evil, truth-versus-error, and meaningfulness-versus- meaninglessness are realized to be games. Do I play them or do they play me? As long as we do not understand what is motivating us, we play with the seriousness of a life-versus-death struggle, for that is what the games symbolize for a self preoccupied with its lack. We are trapped in games which cannot be escaped yet cannot be won, since playing well does not resolve one's sense-of-lack. When there is no need to get anything from the game or gain cloture on it, we can play with the seriousness of a child absorbed in its game.[3]

The Lack of Self

Existential psychologists such as Ernest Becker believe that our primary repression is not sexual wishes, as Freud thought, but the awareness that we are going to die.4 This is closer to Buddhism, yet the anatman doctrine implies a subtle although significant distinction between fear of death and dread of the void: our worst problem is not death, a fear which still keeps the feared thing at a distance by projecting it into the future, but the more immediate and terrifying (and quite valid) suspicion each of us has that "I" am not real right now.

Sakyamunimuni Buddha did not use psychoanalytic terms, yet in trying to understand the Buddhist denial of self we can benefit from the concept of repression and the return of the repressed in symbolic form. If something (a mental wish, according to Freud) makes me uncomfortable, I can ignore or "forget" it. This allows me to concentrate on something else, but what is not consciously admitted into awareness tends to irrupt in obsessive ways--as symptoms--that affect conscious ness with precisely those qualities it strives to exclude. What does this imply about anatman?

Buddhism analyzes the sense-of-self into sets of impersonal mental and physical phenomena, whose interaction creates the illusion of self-consciousness--i.e., that consciousness characterizes a self distinct from the world it is conscious of. The death-repression emphasized by existential psychology transforms Freud's Oedipal complex into what Norman Brown calls an Oedipal project: the attempt to become father of oneself, i.e., one's own origin. The child wants to conquer death by becoming the creator and sustainer of its own life.5 Buddhism shifts the emphasis: the Oedipal project is better understood as the attempt of the developing sense-of-self to attain autonomy, like Descartes' supposedly self-sufficient consciousness. It is the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground: the ground (socially conditioned and maintained yet nonetheless illusory) we know as being an independent, individual subject.

If so, the Oedipal project derives from our intuition that self-consciousness is not something "self-existing" but a mental construct. As with Nietzsche, consciousness is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths that it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them. The problem arises when this conditioned consciousness wants to ground itself--i.e., to make itself real. If the sense-of-self is a

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construct, it can real-ize itself only by objectifying itself in some way in the world. The ego-self is this never-ending project to objectify oneself, something consciousness can no more do than a hand can grasp itself or an eye see itself.

The consequence of this perpetual failure is that the sense-of- self has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack, which it always tries to escape. In deconstructive terms, the ineluctable trace of nothingness in our non-self-present being is a feeling of lack. The return of the repressed in the distorted form of a symptom shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to make ourselves real in the world. We experience this deep sense of lack as the feeling that "there is something wrong with me," but of course that feeling manifests, and we respond to it, in many different ways. In its "purer" forms lack appears as an anxiety that gnaws on one's very core. For that reason such anxiety is eager to objectify into fear of something, because then we have ways to defend ourselves against feared things.

The problem with objectifications, however, is that no object can ever satisfy if it's not really an object we want. When we do not understand what is actually motivating us -- because what we think we want is only a symptom of something else (our desire to become real, according to my interpretation of Buddhism) -- we end up compulsive. Then the neurotic's anguish and despair are less the result of symptoms than their source; those symptoms are necessary to shield him from the tragedies that "normal" people are better at repressing: death, meaninglessness, groundlessness.

The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of nonenjoyment."[6]

Buddhism agrees yet shifts our focus from the terror of future annihilation to the anguish of a groundlessness experienced here and now. A Buddhist interpretation of self-as-lack accepts much of the psychotherapeutic understanding while offering a way to resolve our unhappiness. Buddhism traces human suffering back to desire and ignorance, and ultimately to our lack of self. Deconstructing the sense-of-self into interacting mental and physical processes leads to Nietzschean conclusions: the supposedly simple self is an economy of forces.[7] The Buddhist solution to its lack is simple although not easy. If it is no-thing-ness I am afraid of (i.e., the repressed intuition that, rather than being autonomous and self-existent, the "I" is a construct), the best way to resolve that fear is to face up to what has been denied: that is, to accept my no-thing-ness by becoming no-thing. The 12th century Japanese Zen master Dogen summarizes this process:

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by [or: perceive oneself as] myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.[8]

Forgetting" ourselves is how we lose our sense of separation and realize that we are manifestations of the world, not subjects confronting it as an other. Meditation is learning how to become nothing by learning to forget one's self, which happens when I become absorbed into my meditation-exercise. If the sense-of-self is consciousness reflecting back upon itself in order to grasp itself, such meditation practice is an exercise in de-reflection. Consciousness unlearns trying to grasp itself, objectify itself, real-ize itself. Enlightenment occurs in Buddhism when that usually-automatized reflexivity ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into a void.

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Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma." (Huang-po)[9]

When I no longer strive to make myself real through things, I find myself "actualized" by them, says Dogen.

This process implies that what we fear as nothingness is not really nothingness, for that is the perspective of a sense-of-self anxious about losing its grip on itself. According to Buddhism, letting- go of myself and merging with that no-thing-ness leads to something else: when consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become no-thing, and discover that I am everything--or, more precisely, that I can be anything. The problem of desire is solved when, without the craving-for-being that compels me to take hold of something and try to settle down in it, I am free to experience my nonduality with it. Grasping at something merely reinforces a delusive sense of separation between that-which-is-grasped and that-which-grasps-at-it. The only way I can become a phenomenon is to realize I am it, according to Buddhism. A mind that real-izes this is ab-solute in the original sense of the term: unconditioned. Meditative techniques decondition the mind from its tendency to circle in safe, familiar ruts, thus enabling its freedom to become anything. The most-quoted line from the best-known of all Mahayana scriptures, the Diamond Sutra, encapsulates all this in one phrase: "Let your mind come forth without fixing it anywhere."[10]

When anatman is understood this way, as a self-as-lack shadowing our illusory sense-of-self, Nietzsche and Buddhism have a lot to talk about.

Qualifying for Being

"There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena."[11] That brings the ethical issue back from the other "true" world to this one, as we inquire into the genealogy of our moral interpretations. Why do we make the interpretations that we do? As we become more conscious of our motivations, what other interpretations become possible?

Nietzsche distinguishes two basic types of morality. Master morality does not hesitate to affirm the exercise of power, whereas slave morality is based upon rejecting master morality as evil and valuing the opposite of that evil. Behind the piety of conventional Christian morals, Nietzsche detected the fear and ressentiment of the weak who use ethical codes to control the strong. When this fear is projected onto the universe, it becomes a God who tells us to love each other even as he loves us, who will take care of us if we do and punish us if we do not. We may cower before such a God, yet this scheme seems to afford us some grip on our ultimate fate -- and, as Nietzsche emphasizes, a pretty good grip on our fellow man. We know who we are, what we can do and where that is likely to get us. But this also destroys the innocence of our existence.

That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as "spirit,"--this alone is the great liberation--thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored... The concept "God" has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence... We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world. (TI 54)

We would be accountable to God because he would want to accomplish something through us. Nietzsche calls our bluff. We say we want to be free, yet we also want

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somebody, somewhere, to be taking care of us. There seems to be a correspondence between monotheism (a consciousness unifying and controlling the external world) and the ego-self (a consciousness unifying and controlling the internal). Then the issue is not only accountability but ego-integrity: without a God to keep us straight, who is strong enough to determine one's own direction? If God expires all is permitted, and the century since Nietzsche's proclamation has certainly fulfilled his predictions of nihilism.

Perhaps a period of chaos is unavoidable.

One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain" (WP 55).

As with the adolescent forging an independent identity, some disorientation is inevitable before humankind matures enough to forego its projected parent and determine this-worldly criteria for moral interpretations. This would also explain the difficulty with Nietzsche's own solution, which understands the problem yet cannot quite escape it. Nietzsche saw that the dualism of good versus evil is an internalized game we learn to play with ourselves. "In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part" (BGE 227). Since Christianity is the victory of pity over aristocratic values, his alternative is, in part, revaluing those aristocratic virtues. "The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities" (BGE 116). This includes embracing the fact that "life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation" (BGE 259).[12] However, this famous passage is easily misunderstood. Nietzsche idealizes the aristocrat, and especially the overman, insofar as they are masters of their own "inward chaos", self-overcome men: "You shall become master of yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments."[13] Yet from a Buddhist perspective the concept of self-mastery contains a problematic ambiguity: who is master of whom? If the ego-self is that which vainly tries to grasp itself, the project of self-mastery is not only questionable but impossible. That for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth: does that happen when I master myself or when I let go of myself?

For Buddhism these questions reduce to how our sense-of-lack may be overcome, and for Nietzsche that involves our embodiment of will-to-power. Retracing the genealogy of this, his master concept if he has one, will help us relate his will-to-power to the Buddhist sense-of-lack.

The will-to-power cannot be separated from its sublimation (or "spiritualization"), for Nietzsche discovered them together. He was one of the first classicists to realize that the original Olympic games were a sublimated form of war. Nietzsche contended that Greek civilization was noble and sublime precisely because it had been so cruel and bloodthirsty; the "golden age" was created by bringing this original ferocity under control. "The thought seems to be: where there is 'the sublime' there must have been that which was made sublime -- sublimated -- after having been for a long time not sublime."[14] Having detected this phenomenon in ancient Greece, Nietzsche began to notice sublimated "base" impulses in many kinds of activity; for example, Wagner's ferocious will sublimated into the Bayreuth festival. This makes Nietzsche the first, as far as I know, to undertake a systematic study of repression.

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Nietzsche sees the sublimity of Greek culture as the sublimation of its original ferocity, yet here perhaps the genealogist of morals does not trace his genealogy back far enough. What makes man so ferocious? Can even the will to power, irreducible for Nietzsche, be deconstructed? What, after all, does power mean to us?

All power is in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that mankind is really obsessed with. Power means power to increase oneself, to change one's natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance. (Becker)[15]

We feel we are masters over life and death when we hold the fate of others in our hands, adds Becker; and we feel we are real when the reality of others is in our hands, adds Buddhism. From that perspective, however, desire for power is little different from the slave morality Nietzsche criticizes. Both become symptoms of our lack, equally frustrating inasmuch as we are motivated by something that cannot be satisfied in the way we try to satisfy it. No wonder Nietzsche's will-to-power can never rest, that it needs to expand its horizons, and that for most of us morality has been a matter of collecting religious brownie points. In both cases we think that we have found the way to get a grip on our eligibility for immortality -- or being.

The whole basis of the urge to goodness is to be something that has value, that endures.... Man uses morality to try to get a place of special belongingness and perpetuation in the universe .... Do we wonder why one of man's chief characteristics is his tortured dissatisfaction with himself, his constant self- criticism? It is the only way he has to overcome the sense of hopeless limitation inherent in his real situation. (Becker)[16]

When I realize that I am not going to attain cloture on that diabolical part of myself, it is time to project it. "The Devil is the one who prevents the heroic victory of immortality in each culture-- even the atheistic, scientific ones."[17] As long as lack keeps gnawing, we need to keep struggling with the Devil, and as we all know the best devil is one outside our own group. Evil is whatever we decide is keeping us from becoming real, and since no victory over any external devil can yield the sense of being we seek, we have become trapped in a paradox of our own making: evil is created by our urge to eliminate evil. Stalin's collectivization program was an attempt to build a more perfect socialist society. The Final Solution of the Nazis was an attempt to purify the earth of its vermin.

The Buddhist critique of such ressentiment includes understanding the self-deception involved in such dualistic thinking, when I identify with one pole and vainly try to eliminate its interdependent other.[18] Buddhism gets beyond good and evil not by rebaptizing our evil qualities as our best, but with an entirely different perspective. As long as we experience ourselves as alienated from the world and society as a set of separate selves, the world is devalued into a field-of-play wherein we compete to full-fill ourselves. That is the origin of the ethical problem we struggle with today: without some transcendental ground such as God, what will bind our atomized selves together? When my sense-of-self lets-go and disappears, however, I realize my interdependence with all other phenomena. It is more than being dependent on them: when I discover that I am you, the trace of your traces, the ethical problem of how to relate to you is transformed.[19]

Of course, this provides no simple yardstick to resolve knotty ethical dilemmas. Yet more important, I think, is that this absolves the sense of separation between us which

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usually makes those dilemmas so difficult to resolve, including the conceit that I am the one who has privileged access to transcendental principles, or who embodies more fully the will-to-power. Loss of self-preoccupation entails the ability to respond to others without an ulterior motive which needs to gain something from that encounter. Buddhist ethical principles approximate the way of relating to others that nondual experience reveals. As in Christianity, I should love my neighbor as myself--in this case because my neighbor is myself. In contrast to the "Thou shalt not--or else!" implied in Mosaic law, the Buddhist precepts are vows one makes not to some other being but to one's t o-be-realized-as-empty self: "I vow to undertake the course of training to perfect myself in non-killing," and so forth. If we have not developed to the degree that we spontaneously experience ourselves as one with others, by following the precepts we endeavor to act as if we did feel that way. Yet even these precepts are eventually realized not to rest on any transcendental, objectively-binding moral principle. There are, finally, no moral limitations on our freedom -- except the dualistic delusions which incline us to abuse that freedom in the first place.

Grasping the Symbols that Grasp Reality

How much one needs a belief in order to flourish, how much that is "firm" and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one's strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one's weakness).[20]

If one's final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions, and if there is no greater delusion than the one that eliminates all others, mustn't that delusion be... the truth? "What really is it in us that wants 'the truth'?" begins Beyond Good and Evil, a question that echoes throughout Nietzsche's writings. The value of truth must be called into question. Perhaps no one yet has been sufficiently truthful about what truthfulness is -- in which case we should be careful, for that may be for good reason. Nietzsche warns that one might get hold of the truth about truth too soon, before humankind is strong enough to give up the need for truth.

Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?[21]

Then what might truth become for a person who no longer seeks to restore a feeling of security? Nietzsche saw the relationship between our will-to-truth and our need for being: "Man seeks 'the truth': a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world--a world in which one does not suffer; contradiction, deception, change--causes of suffering!" (WP 585) The will-to-truth manifests will-to-power; the problem with this form of will is when it thinks the world rather than creates it. "Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers... Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--will to power" (BGE 211). Even basic logical categories reflect our need to perceive things in a stable way. That some things are equal, that there is such a thing as matter, that things naturally fall into categories: these are fictions, even if more or less indispensable in daily life. Such instrumental truths work to preserve us and give us a grip on our situation. In his later writings, when Nietzsche saw through the illusion of a unitary ego-self, he realized that

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these truths derive from the sense-of-self objectifying its own self-image. Then what would happen if we could cease believing in ego as a self- determining cause? If we cling to these "facts" for survival, can those who let-go of themselves let go of them?

Nietzsche does not consider this Buddhist possibility, yet he contemplates "the most extreme form of nihilism," which might also be called "a divine way of thinking": the view "that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world)." Nietzsche describes this as another reversal: just as our rebaptized evil qualities trade places with our best qualities, so truth becomes lie --

Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.[22]

--and lie becomes a kind of truth, for this makes the will to appearance, even the will to deception, "deeper, more metaphysical, than the will to truth" insofar as that will-to-truth is motivated by the need for security. Nietzsche accordingly calls his own philosophy "inverted Platonism: the further it is from actual reality, the purer, more beautiful, and better it becomes. Living in illusion as the ideal." There are no objective facts, no Immaculate Perception, no ultimate revelation of truth. Everything becomes a matter of perspective since "there is no solely beatifying interpretation."23 Like eternal recurrence, perspectivism is a test and an intensification of our will-to-power. Perspectives gain in power by competing with each other. Superior perspectives develop by refuting or refining lesser ones. In this way the will continually surmounts itself, as individuals develop according to their own ability.

Ernest Becker also believes that illusion is necessary. The Denial of Death starts with an insight of William James: "mankind's common instinct for reality... has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism." Why do we want to be heroes? Our narcissistic need for self-esteem mean that each of us yearns to feel of special value, Тf irst in the universe Т. Heroism (in the broad sense: e.g., Nietzsche as an intellectual hero) is how we justify that need to count more than anyone or anything else. Human society can be understood as a codified hero system, a symbolic-action structure whose roles and rules function as a vehicle for heroism. That raises the essential question:

If transference is a natural function of heroism, a necessary projection in order to stand life, death, and oneself, the question becomes: What is creative projection? What is life-enhancing illusion?... Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal.[24]

"The essence of normality is the refusal of reality", a refusal that Becker, like Nietzsche, justifies as psychologically necessary. Yet he too goes for what Nietzsche calls the bloody truths, peeling away repressions to arrive at "the potentially most liberating question of all, the main problem of human life: How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?"[25] Thus Becker ends up with a double-tiered truth similar to Nietzsche's, between a life- enhancing illusion and the truth about this illusion, too painful for most of us to cope with. From the first perspective, the important truths for Becker too are the ones that defend my existence, all the more important if they are believed to help me qualify for eternal existence (or self-being,

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according to Buddhism). From the second and deeper perspective, however, the question is how much truth we can bear.

Buddhism also has a two-truths doctrine which distinguishes the usual truth of the everyday world from a higher truth that is not only difficult to understand but dangerous to misunderstand. The paradigmatic formulation is in chapter 24 of the Mulamadhyamikakarikas[26] of Nagarjuna, the most important Buddhist philosopher:

The teaching of the Buddhas is wholly based on there being two truths: that of a personal everyday world and a higher truth which surpasses it.

Those who do not clearly know the true distinction between the two truths cannot clearly know the hidden depths of the Buddha's teaching.

Unless the transactional realm is accepted as a base, the surpassing sense cannot be pointed out; if the surpassing sense is not comprehended nirvana cannot be attained.

The feeble-minded are destroyed by the misunderstood doctrine of sunyata, as by a snake ineptly seized or some secret knowledge wrongly applied.

For this reason the mind of the enlightened one was averse to teaching the Truth, realizing how difficult it would be for those of feeble insight to fathom it. (MMK XXIV: 8-12)

In this version, the higher truth that is fatal to the feeble-minded is sunyata, a term usually translated as "emptiness" yet better understood as "lack of self-existence". In the West the two-truths have often been understood in a Kantian way, as distinguishing the higher Absolute from the relative phenomenal world. Yet they do not presuppose another Reality transcendent to this world. If the terms absolute and relative are used, it is better to reverse their meaning: the Тl ower truth У is our usual, commonsense but illusory world of apparently discrete, hence self-existing, un- conditioned (ab- solute) things, while the Тh igher truth У is that phenomena are empty of self-existence because they are relative to each other.

Candrakirti's commentary on this MMK passage explains that someone who misunderstands sunyata will reject the self-existence of things only to fall into the opposite extreme of believing that everything is merely illusion, and will get into trouble by ignoring the physical and moral laws of cause-and-effect. Yet the higher truth is bloodier than that. Buddhism is more than a philosophy that refutes self- existence: it is a practice which deconstructs our sense-of-self, and letting-go of ourselves in order to realize our own sunyata is seldom easy. If normality is the refusal of reality, it is because few of us are ready to face the truth about our lack of self-existence and the social games whereby we reassure ourselves. For many, the alternative to self- illusion is not Becker's creative play but a nihilism that no longer sees any reason to live. No wonder, then, that after his enlightenment Sakyamuni Buddha hesitated to teach what he had realized, according to the traditional account. The problem is not only that we are unable to understand such a difficult doctrine "beyond the reach of reason"; we resist it, for it does not grant us the kind of salvation we want, a grounding being fo r the ego-self.

One form of that danger is that we will cling to sunyata, by accepting it as the correct description of the way things are. So Nagarjuna emphasizes that the concept of sunyata is relative to the self-existing things it refutes; having fulfilled that function, sunyata refutes itself. Sunyata is "the exhaustion of all theories and views" and those who make sunyata into a theory are "incurable." (MMK XIII: 8) While Nietzsche ends up with an infinity of possible perspectives, Nagarjuna seems to conclude with none, since

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sunyata is merely a heuristic device. Are these really contradictory, or does the exhaustion of perspectives liberate us for the polyvalence of many perspectives?

Ultimate serenity is the coming to rest of all ways of taking things, the repose of named things; no Truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere." (MMK XXV:24)

If truth is a matter of grasping the symbols that grasp reality, all truth is error on the Buddhist path. When nirvana is the end of all ways of taking things, the game of truth-and-delusion is turned upside-down. There is no truth to be taught because nothing needs to be attained; delusion is something to be unlearned. In the Diamond Sutra Subhuti asks the Buddha if his realization of supreme enlightenment means that he has not gained anything.

Just so, Subhuti. I have not gained the least thing from supreme enlightenment, and that is called supreme enlightenment."[27]

Buddhism does not provide a metaphysical system to account for reality but shows how to deconstruct the socially-conditioned metaphysical system we know as everyday reality. It does not give us truths but shows how to become aware of and let go of the automatized truths we are normally not aware of holding. Buddhism agrees with Nietzsche's and Becker's insight that our truth consists of illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, yet the Buddhist path is predicated on the possibility of deconstructing the ones that cause us to suffer: most of all, the ones that maintain our delusive sense-of-self.

The crucial issue is whether our search for truth is another attempt to ground ourselves by fixating on certain concepts that are believed to give us an effective fix on the world. When there is this compulsion, certain ideas become seductive: i.e., they become ideologies. The difference between samsara (this world of suffering) and nirvana is that samsara is this world experienced as a sticky web of attachments which seem to offer something we feel the lack of, a grounding for the groundless sense-of-self. Intellectually, that seductive quality manifests as a battleground of conflicting ideologies competing for our allegiance. Ideologies offer to ground the sense-of-self by providing the mind with a sure grasp on the world: now we know how the world is meaningful and what our role in that meaning is.

Ideology is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently lived out according to the ideology."[28]

If there is no specifiable difference between nirvana and the everyday world (MMK XXV:19), then very different ideologies such as religions, metaphysical systems, Marxism and psychoanalysis are in the same dimension insofar as they serve the same psychological function: trying to resolve the sense-of-self's intellectual sense-of-lack by identifying with a belief-system. The problem is that ideologies tend to become computer-viruses of the mind. When we assent to them -- let them in--ideologies take it over and fill it up.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are: metaphors which are worn

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out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (Nietzsche)[29]

As metaphors lose their sensuous power they gain another role, as emblems. The freshness of the original meaning decays into tokens. Once objectified and socially-validated, a truth enters the exchange market: it can be gained, possessed, and lost.

Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think that I do.

Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that can no longer be challenged. (Carse)[30]

In this antagonistic encounter the will-to-truth is readily identifiable as will-to-power. When sense of lack evaporates because sense-of-self evaporates, however, the seductive web of samsara transforms into polyvalence, where each viewpoint is able to appreciate others because it no longer identifies with a Truth-project that is threatened by those others. This is not Nietzsche's perspectivism, the competition among perspectives each trying to impress its own will-to-truth upon the world, but a non-abiding wisdom that can wander freely among truths since it does not need to fixate on any of them.

Is this relativism, the bugaboo of all value-theory? Even if all ideologies are competing in the same intellectual arena, there are some important internal differences. Many ideologies are difficult to escape once you are committed. An old-style Marxist who began criticizing Marxism would be told to purge himself of his bourgeois tendencies; a psychoanalyst will tell the analysand that she is resisting. On the other side are what might be called meta-ideologies because they are designed to self- negate: to free us from all ideologies including themselves. Derrida writes about the need to lodge oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it31, which nicely expresses one of the reasons Nagarjuna insists on two truths: the everyday transactional realm must be accepted in order to point to the higher truth that negates it. According to Nagarjuna's Madhyamika Buddhism, sunyata is like a poison-antidote that expels the poison from our bodies and then expels itself, for if the antidote stays inside to poison us we are no better off than before. The difference between ideologies and meta-ideologies rests on whether the sense-of-self's anxious groundlessness is to be resolved by providing something to identify with or by letting-go of itself. Then the important issue is the liberating function of any truth or practice. The same thought that is liberating in one situation may be binding in another. Even the most valuable insights can lose their freshness and become "sticky" because they are now understood as something to cling to rather than a pointer to freedom; or rather, clinging to them is now misunderstood as the path to freedom.[32]

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The Nihilism of Eternal Recurrence

If everything manifests the will to power in one way or another, why bother to sublimate? Nietzsche found his answer in eternal recurrence, which solves the problem ingeniously: not by grounding this life in some otherworldly eternity but by impressing the form of eternity on this life. Eternal recurrence has been celebrated as the capstone of his philosophy, yet I shall argue that, instead of vanquishing nihilism, it eternally defers it. That is because nihilism is not the always- impending debacle of all meaning, but our fear of that debacle and flight from it -- which perpetuates the debacle and gives it power over us. The dread of nihilism, which Nietzsche rightly saw as our collective shadow, the ghost that haunts Western civilization, is the true nihilism. From a Buddhist perspective the problem is not our nothingness but the ways we try to evade it.

This puts Nietzsche in the same camp as Plato. If the Platonic invention of another Reality is an attempt to escape the lack we experience now, so too is Nietzsche's attempt to fill in the lack of that now by making the now recur eternally. The basic problem is that eternal recurrence of the now can add nothing unless the now-as-now lacks something. Again we encounter sense-of-lack, here in its implications for meaning. This lack is not the meaninglessness of life but the threat of meaninglessness, and therefore it manifests as the devices we use to deny meaninglessness. In this way too the repressed returns, sublimated into symbols/symptoms. Tillich believed that the problem of meaninglessness is the form in which nonbeing poses itself in our time, and that all human life can be interpreted as a continuous attempt to avoid despair.33 He also gave the solution: the meaning of life must be reduced to despair about the meaning of life, in order to take more nonbeing of the world into ourselves. Yet one must despair in the right way.

How to overcome nihilism was the fundamental problem for Nietzsche, whose sensitive nose detected its stink almost everywhere. It is not a late development of Western civilization but man's normal condition, which is why the Overman is an overcoming of man. Then does nihilism have an essential connection with lack, also humankind's normal condition? Nietzsche defines nihilism as increasing gloom, then terror at the exhaustion of all meaning, a grand disgust directed at oneself as well as at the world. Goals are missing, the desert grows. What Nietzsche the posthumous man predicted we postmodern men are now living, and no one can say yet when or how nihilism -- today becoming recognized as a global problem -- might be resolved.

At first, nihilism disguised itself by creating Platonic-type values. Nihilism shows its disgust at life by creating a "true world" having all the attributes that life does not: unity, stability, identity, goodness, happiness. This invention of another world is the nihilistic act par excellence because it devalues this world. The incomplete nihilism which constitutes the development of Western civilization is the slow decomposition of that true world, and when it finally disappears we are left with this one, the "apparent" world that can no longer be considered apparent if there is nothing to juxtapose it with, yet nonetheless remains devalued and therefore experienced as unsatisfactory.

Nietzsche's solution to this is eternal recurrence. As many have noticed, the key to what is otherwise a peculiar doctrine seems to be the ethical motivation behind it. "The question in each and every thing, ФD o you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight", because this thought would transform us in one way or the other: either crush us under its weight or prompt the supreme affirmation that Zarathustra makes: "Was that life? Well then! Once more!"[34] This would be the great liberation that restores the innocence of Becoming

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because it makes one accountable only to oneself -- which from a Buddhist viewpoint, however, is still one too many.

Given Nietzsche's attitude towards truth ("Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy..."), this may have been his self-conscious attempt to promulgate a myth. By what myth do you live? asked Jung. Well, this one is better than most. Like Heidegger's analysis of death in Being and Time, it can inspire us to live the way we want to live rather than let life pass by while we are making other plans. For Nietzsche and the early Heidegger, the future is necessary to focus us in the now, for otherwise we are diverted and scattered by chance possibilities. In lack terms, both try to resolve our sense-of-lack by making the sense-of-self more efficient. But do their solutions replace one type of evasion with another? Unamuno dismissed eternal recurrence as "a sorry counterfeit of immortality," yet that puts the shoe on the wrong foot: the problem is not that it is a poor immortality but that it is an immortality, which still reflects a felt need to "stamp the for m of eternity upon our lives." Eternal recurrence seems to exalt the now by refusing to evaluate it according to some other standard or to ground it in some other reality, yet here too the now is weighed and found wanting: its lack can be filled up only by repeating it. The now as now --just this!-- is still not enough. A Buddhist may agree with Nietzsche that "this life is your eternal life!", but the eternity of this life must be understood differently, as a not-falling-away eternal now that, when it lacks nothing, may be discovered to be all we need.

Nietzsche calls eternal recurrence the basic conception of Thus Spake Zarathustra, yet it becomes a dominant theme only near the end of part four. Zarathustra teaches the Higher Men how to overcome the Spirit of Gravity, and at the beginning of "The Intoxicated Song" one of them asserts: "For the sake of this day -- I am content for the first time to have lived my whole life.... 'Was that -- life?' I will say to death. 'Very well! Once more!'" At that moment Zarathustra hears the sound of the midnight bell and sings its song, "whose name is 'Once More', whose meaning is 'To all eternity!'":

O Man! Attend! What does deep midnight's voice contend? 'I slept my sleep, 'And now awake at dreaming's end: 'The world is deep, 'Deeper than day can comprehend, 'Deep is its woe, 'Joy -- deeper than heart's agony: 'Woe says: Fade! Go! 'But all joy wants eternity, '--wants deep, deep, deep eternity!'

This roundelay is so important that it appears at the end of both part three and part four; and the reason it is so important is that it reveals the origin of eternal recurrence to be joy. This joy wants to recur eternally, and because it is deeper than the heart's agony such joy can even will that suffering to recur again too, if necessary for its own recurrence.

Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; If you ever wanted one moment twice, if you ever said: 'You please me, happiness, instant, moment!' then you wanted everything to return.[35]

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Alas, for the failure of Nietzsche's moment of joy! However deep it was it was not deep enough, for he needed it again, and again...: "Joy, however, does not want heirs or children, joy wants itself,... wants everything eternally the same." (Z, p. 331) This reaction is natural yet nonetheless ruinous. Ironically, that very desire for its recurrence is the worm which burrows in to destroy it, as in those most-cherished musical moments that inspire us to think "this is so beautiful, I wish it would never stop" -- only to discover that the moment has ceased, destroyed by the self-consciousness which reflexively distinguishes itself from the music in order to enjoy enjoying it. Nietzsche yearns for that moment of joy again, because it absolves his sense of lack, yet his desire for its recurrence is itself part of the problem that the deepest joy resolves. For contrary to his roundelay the deepest joy does not even will to recur: it wills nothing because it lacks nothing, if it is the deepest joy. By wanting to retain that joy Nietzsche separates himself from it and thereby loses it into the past as a memory, then can only try to bring it back by willing the recurrence of everything -- not realizing that his moment of pure joy was a temporary collapse of willing. Since the will-to-power always strives to overcome itself, it must project a future, which is why the only consummation it can attain is in the eternal recurrence of such moments. However, striving to find the past in the future is less a formula for joy than a psychoanalytic definition of neurosis.

What is attractive about eternal recurrence is that it foregoes the need for any other Reality to compensate for the defects of this one. It is an affirmation of this world, yet this world not as let-go but as grasped-at, fixated by being brought back again and again. "Very well: once more!" is his deep affirmation; yet deeper would be: "To all that has been: thanks! To all that will be: yes!" To say yes! to a single moment of joy, completely affirming it, is by definition an experience of no lack. At that instant one wants nothing else, no void needs to be filled in or evaded, which means (if, as Buddhism implies, sense-of-lack is the shadow of sense- of-self) that this must be a moment of egolessness. Then one cannot have such a joy, one can only be such a joy. Blessed are those who have had or rather been such a moment, for it transforms all other moments as well -- although not because of the entwined contingency that Nietzsche refers to. "An affirmation that is truly full and complete is also contagious: it bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limits." (Haar)[36] Yes, but this chain is not each contingent affirmation causing another. Just the opposite: a complete affirmation breaks all causal chains. The joy of just this! -- the Buddhist experience of tathata thusness -- needs nothing, desires nothing , and thus reveals that the causal chain is a succession of just this! in an eternal-now where there is nothing to gain or lose. Paradoxically, when the causal chain is such a succession, our experience is that there is no causal chain and no succession. As long as we experience the causal chain as a means to get somewhere else, we lose just this! and the eternal-now. In sum, life becomes joyous not when we get something from it but when we become it.

So a moment of deepest joy does not banish woe by discovering the interdependence of joy with everything else, past and future. Rather, it reveals that what we thought was the means for solving our lack is what maintains the problem. End of lack is not an effect that can be experienced at the conclusion of some causal chain, but the shattering of all causal chains insofar as they are our means for trying to overcome lack. Eternity is found not in the recurrence of time but in the evaporation of that objectified time whereby and wherein we hope to end our lack. This realization is embodied in perhaps Nagarjuna's most important verse, which distinguishes between samsara and nirvana:

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That which, taken as causal or dependent, is the process of being-born and passing on, is, taken non-causally and beyond all dependence, declared to be nirvana." (MMK XXV:9)[37]

Nirvana cannot be caused and therefore cannot be attained. We might think of it as some kind of substratum pervading all our experience but that is still too dualistic: it is simply the nature of our experience when there is not the delusive sense of a self-conscious yet ungrounded self that has the experience and therefore feels something to be lacking in it. The joy of that experience is deeper than the heart's agony.

On this account, happiness in the form we seek it -- "that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss"[38] -- cannot be gained. All we can do is realize that nondual "perspective" where nothing has ever been lacking. The amor fati Nietzsche celebrates is not accepting everything due to its interdependence with a moment of complete Yes! but the absence of any need to will that things be any different. The amor is not willing that everything be exactly the same, over and over again, but that everything be as it is; that, however, is not something which needs to be willed. Or, finally, which can be willed. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche came close to this: only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence justified, which amounts to saying that existence experienced aesthetically does not need to be justified. Are what we call "aesthetic experiences" tip-of-the-tongue tastes of something that we have always been immersed in?

Instead of yielding to this groundlessness, eternal recurrence is a last gasp at self-grounding being, for it attempts to fill up lack by discovering a being within becoming. "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being" (WP 617). Nietzsche can find infinite value in the now only by having it recur an infinite number of times. Therefore he ends up not with the end of nihilism but with another, more will-ful reconstitution of it.

For Buddhism the problem of lack can be resolved only by ceasing to avoid it and instead becoming-one with it: letting-go of oneself and falling into the void, in order to realize that the void is not really void but the nondual realm of the Buddha- dharma, as Ch Хa n master Huang-po put it. What does this mean in terms of nihilism? To stop evading the debacle of all meaning and accept it, which requires experiencing the meaninglessness of one's life -- an anguish not to be recommended lightly. Such understanding of the solution also transforms our understanding of the problem, for this solution is usually understood as the problem. This implies that true nihilism is less the debacle of meaning than our terror of that debacle and the ways we flee it, which includes a compulsive need to find some meaning in life as a bulwark against that threat. If so, nihilism is not our lack but the fear and denial of that lack, experienced in this instance as impending loss of meaning. Insofar as Nietzsche's will-to-power is in flight from lack, then, the will- to-power is nihilism. Eternal Recurrence insures that flight will have no cloture, for it tries to fill up lack by flight itself, by repeated recurrence of the passing moment. Thus eternal recurrence would not be final victory over nihilism, but the final victory of nihilism: in grasping at the fleeting now by making it recur, it misses and loses the now that right now does-not-fall-away, and deflects us from the opposite solution of yielding to the nonbeing we most dread, which we might discover to be not so dreadful after all.

The "discovery" of objective meaning is one of our main ways of dealing with lack. As Zarathustra points out, man assigns values to things only to maintain himself. We can usually cope with anxiety and guilt as long as we know what the meaning of life is, for there is security in that even if we don't a lways do what that meaning implies we

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should do. However, such meaning-systems corrupt "the innocence of becoming" because in projecting and understanding them as objective we repress the fact that these meanings are our own creations, socially-constructed and - validated. Insofar as they originate in lack they are based on fear, so a test of our maturity is whether we are able to face that fear. "It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself" (WP 585A).

If the autonomy of ego-self is a delusion, we can see why that is difficult. Commonsense subject-object dualism presumes the sense-of-self to be the locus of awareness; subjectivism goes further to make the subject the only source of value and meaning, which devalues the world into a field-of-activity wherein the self labors to fulfill itself. Apparently objective meanings paper over the problem of lack because they provide some objective security. In order for the illusory self to feel secure, however, its meanings must be unconsciously projected. The sun that motivates me must not be realized to be my own creation, if I am to be inspired by it. When I am aware of constructing my own meaning, the absence of any external grounding for that meaning means I have nothing to lean upon. The natural response is a deepened sense of lack, experienced as anguish and ontological guilt: by what right do I create such meanings? Who am I to decide that this is the way to live?

Juxtaposing the possibilities in this way clarifies the Buddhist approach, which contra Nietzsche does not find any solution in strength of will. If the collapse of objective meaning exposes my sense of lack, that will be painful yet it is nonetheless desirable, since becoming aware of my lack is necessary in order to eventually solve it. Then realizing the subjectivity of meaning does not by itself resolve the matter, for it becomes a stage to be endured in order to realize something else.

If despair is a stage, however, one must despair in the right way. Odd as it sounds, the danger with despair is that one will cling to it. In Kierkegaard's school of anxiety (recommended in The Concept of Anxiety) despair is the final exam: it dredges up our most cherished meanings and devours them, leaving us disconsolate. But we do not become completely empty unless despair devours us wholly and also itself. Despair (literally "no hope") is the reverse side of hope and both are relative to the sense-of-self, for the ego-self alternates between the hope it will finally fixate itself and the dread it never will. Then despair evaporates with the self, like the matter and anti-matter of particle physics which disappear by collapsing back into each other. Yet often this does not happen, because when despair finally occurs after a lifetime of avoiding it, it appears with a force that makes it seem more real than the meanings it roots out, which had been used to repress it. From the Buddhist standpoint, the recurring thoughts and feelings that constitute despair are no more real and no less impermanent than any other thoughts and feelings. When we despair, however, our usual psychological defenses fail and we identify with self-pitying thoughts and self-destructive inclinations. Then, instead of despair consuming the self, it reinforces the worthlessness of that self. We end up not becoming-nothing but with a sense-of-self nourishing itself on self-disgust. This is the "reactive" tendency that so disgusted Nietzsche and he saw what the problem is: "He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises." (BGE 78) Man would rather will nothingness than not will.[39] Yet the void Huang-po recommends is not something that can be willed.

When we despair in the right way, what happens? Abandoning the hope that we will eventually become something, we yield to our nothingness and discover how we have always been everything. As Dogen expressed it in Genjo-koan, to forget oneself is to be

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actualized by myriad things, which is to perceive oneself as all things. What does such mutual interpenetration imply about the meaning of life? For Buddhism, meaning too is neither objective nor subjective. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless but what might be called meaningfree. To forget oneself and become nothing is to wake up and find oneself in or, less dualistically, as a situation -- not confronted by it but one with it -- and if one is not self- preoccupied then meaning arises naturally within that situation. As Buber put it, you start with yourself in order to forget yourself and immerse yourself in the world; you understand yourself in order not to be preoccupied with yourself.

The existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom has discussed the formidable problem posed by the "galactic" point of view, which seems to trivialize us into microscopic specks flickering in the vast expanse of cosmic time. He point s out that this renders life meaninglessness only from that perspective, a perspective that moreover is delusive from the Buddhist point of view: it abstracts me from my actual situation, yet there is no such "sub specie aeternitas " perspective outside our various perspectives. We are nondual with the whole only by virtue of our particular position within that whole. We are free to experience and appreciate different perspectives, but there is no perspectiveless-perspective. The therapist's goal, according to Yalom, is:

not to create engagement nor to inspirit the patient with engagement -- these the therapist cannot do. But it is not necessary: the desire to engage life is always there within the patient, and the therapist's clinical activities should be directed toward removal of obstacles in the patient's way."[40]

Searching for the meaning of life is searching for something that enables us to stop searching. When lack comes to an end, so does the problem of meaninglessness. And life becomes... play.[41]

Conclusion

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play. (BGE 94)

For Nietzsche, like Derrida today, the death of God unleashes limitless play.[42] Yet whether our god has died or not, we are already playing. The question is not whether we play but how. Do we suffer our games as if they were life-or-death struggles, because they are the means whereby we hope to ground ourselves, or do we dance with the light feet that Nietzsche called the first attribute of divinity? His philosophizing exceeds any system that can be constructed out of it, for, the will to power notwithstanding, it demonstrates how thinking can be such play.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his 'service of God.'" (GS 381)

A friend once complained to Samuel Johnson that he had tried to be a philosopher but cheerfulness kept breaking in; Nietzsche shows that the two need not be incompatible.

Zarathustra teaches three metamorphoses: from camel (a weight-bearing spirit) to lion (who captures freedom) to the child, who "is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning... a sacred Yes." Unless we become children, we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven--which does not mean that children will enter therein, for they are already there, since without a matured sense-of-self they do not yet have a debilitating sense-of-lack.

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Of course, the normal child can soon distinguish easily and quickly between what adults call "real life" and "play." The more psychological way of stating the matter is to say that the child acts out his fantasies and seriously tries, through the play- situation, to resolve conflicts in which these fantasies play a part. But he normally recognizes reasonably well which of these selves and lives are defined as real by the adults around him; and he learns to go along with their game -- until finally he is quite unaware that it was their game, for it is now his, too.[43]

One grows up by learning the socially-acceptable ways to try to overcome lack.

Becker, like Nietzsche, concludes that "childlike foolishness" is the calling of mature men.44 But few of us are ready to hear it. "So the grand destiny of man is... to play?" Does our incredulity reflect the absurdity of the proposal, or how far we have trudged from the Garden of Eden? Perhaps the negative connotations of the word reveal less about play than about us: our self-importance, our need to stand out from the rest of creation (and from the rest of our fellows) by accomplishing great things -- the ones we hope will make us more real. We are to play not because there is nothing else to do, not because the lack of some higher meaning means we just while away our time, but because we realize the nature of meaning and time. This is not inconsistent with the selflessness of the bodhisattva, for loss of self- preoccupation is what makes true play possible, what enables the bodhisattva to manifest the liberation he or she teaches:

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.[45]

The problem, ultimately, is "not enjoying yourself", Nietzsche's definition of original sin which is as good a definition of lack. This fits nicely with an equally simple definition of Buddhism offered by the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: a clever way to enjoy your life.

David Loy, Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, 1100 Namegaya, Chigasaki 253, Japan.

NOTES
[1]NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH(1968)in: Twilight of the Idols [hereafter "TI" in the text, with section number] and The Anti-Christ, tran. R. J. Hollingdale (Trans and Ed.)(Harmondsworth:Penguin), No. 20, p.129.
[2]NIETZSCHE,FRIENDRICH(1968)in: WALTER KAUFMANN & R. J. HOLLINGDALE (Trans.) The Will to Power ["WP"] (New York: Random House, 1968), No. 55. See also, e.g., WP Nos. 179, 23, 64, 55.
[3] This paper does not address the important question about how much Nietzsche's texts constitute a system or whether "there is no such thing either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche's text" (Derrida, Spurs). I assume that it is valuable to discover/construct a consistent philosophy. My interpretation of eternal recurrence is more "literal" than is fashionable nowadays, yet there is abundant textual support for it. In my opinion the apparent absurdity of such an identical repetition, rather than any lack of textual evidence, has led to the vast literature denying its literality. But to argue for this would leave little space for the rest of the paper.
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Dukkha, Inaction, and Nirvana: Suffering, Weariness, and Death?
A look at Nietzsche's Criticisms of Buddhist Philosophy

By Omar Moad


Comparisons between Buddhism and the various schools of existentialism have revealed a number of parallels. Such studies have frequently centered on each tradition's metaphysical approach and the fact that they all appear to share some form of phenomenological methodology. In the area of ethics, however, existentialism and Buddhism generally seem to differ radically. This difference is the most marked in the case of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is interpreted nowadays as having been a major pioneer of existentialism in the western world, and certainly deals with many of the same problems and even takes positions similar to those that emerge in Buddhist philosophy. In places, however, he explicitly attacks the Buddhist ethical prescription as diametrically opposed to his own doctrine of life-affirmation. For Nietzsche was not uninformed when it came to Buddhism. Some scholars claim that he '...was probably one of the best read and most solidly grounded in Buddhism for his time among Europeans'. Be that as it may, when philosophers juxtapose their own views against others, it becomes imperative to determine to what extent they understand and accurately depict the ideas they are attacking.

When it comes to Nietzsche's criticisms of Buddhism, such an investigation uncovers what seems to be a misunderstanding of the real meaning of Buddhist doctrine; and one not limited to Nietzsche alone, but common to much of the lay-level understanding of this religion in the West. My goals here, then, will be to address this misunderstanding by examining three important Buddhist concepts at its center: dukkha, inaction, and Nirvana. By focusing on the meaning of these concepts for Buddhists, I do not hope to reconcile Nietzsche with Buddhism in any way, but only to identify a few areas wherein his understanding of it was misconceived. Furthermore, by selecting these three areas for analysis, I do not mean to preclude that there are other important elements of Buddhism that need analysis in light of Nietzsche's critiques.

At the end, I hope it will be seen that the possibilities for comparative study between these two philosophies are rich and numerous, even if the present project is meant only as a beginning look into the relationship between them with a view to a clearer understanding of the Buddhist concepts in question. The first step necessary to this analysis will be to briefly outline an important position that is shared by Nietzschean and Buddhist doctrine. Next, I will present Nietzsche's criticism of the Buddhist response to this position, his description of this response and how it differs from his own. Lastly, I will examine the concepts of dukkha, inaction, and Nirvana and show how Nietzsche's understanding of these concepts plays a part in his misconception of Buddhism.

An interesting thing about the comparison between Nietzsche and the Buddha, as just alluded to, is that they begin from a common notion about the nature of the world and the human condition. These commonalities have to do with their epistemological views and their nihilistic attitudes toward metaphysical issues.

A dialogue in the Sutta-Nipata presents the Buddha responding as follows to an enquiry on competing metaphysical theories. 'Apart from consciousness', he says, 'no divers truths exist. Mere sophistry declares this 'true' and that view 'false'.' A similar notion appears in Nietzsche's Will to Power:

'Judging is our oldest faith; it is our habit of believing this to be true or false, of asserting or denying, our certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, our belief that we really 'know' what is believed to be true in all judgments?'
The products of this 'habit of believing', for both Buddha and Nietzsche, include substance, self, universals, and duration. Both philosophers radically deny the reality of these things in favor of a dynamic, interdependent stream of phenomenon that lacks any objective basis whatsoever. Instead, underneath our perceptions there is only what the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna called sunyata, and what Nietzsche referred to as the 'abyss', a void beyond the categories of being and nothing, true and false.

This 'emptiness'is the human condition to which both Buddhism and Nietzsche respond. The subtleties and complexities of this view in both philosophies run deep enough to write volumes about, and the focus of this study is limited to the controversy over their respective responses; the answer to the question of appropriate praxis in the face of such an existence. The Buddha is said to have become aware of the fleeting, temporal nature of reality through his first encounters with a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. Nietzsche refers to what he interprets as the Buddha's reaction in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
'There are those with consumption of the soul: hardly are they born when they begin to die and to long for doctrines of weariness and renunciation. They would like to be dead, and we should welcome their wish. Let us beware of waking the dead and disturbing these living coffins! They encounter a sick man or an old man or a corpse and immediately they say, ìLife is refutedî. But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence.'
Nietzsche criticized Buddhism for many of the same faults he attributed to Christianity, though he showed more respect for the former as being more realistic and opposed to revenge (he believed Christianity was a manifestation of latent resentment). He praised Buddhism for setting out to treat 'suffering'as opposed to 'sin', but believed the treatment itself represented a surrender of life, and ultimately a weaker response to the human condition than his own. In the following passage from Beyond Good and Evil, he contrasts his interpretation of Buddhism (along with Schopenhauer, a major contributor to this interpretation) with a general sketch of his own ideal response:
'Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking - beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality - may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity...'
These passages illustrate Nietzsche's interpretation of Buddhism as a life-negating philosophy that seeks to escape an existence dominated by suffering. In The Gay Science and Will to Power, Nietzsche comments on Buddhism further, characterising it as an effort to withdraw from pain into an 'Oriental Nothing - called Nirvana', by way of following the maxim 'One must not act'. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche categorizes Buddhism as one among a group of ideologies that promote '...nihilistic turning away from life, a longing for nothingness, or for life's 'opposite', for a different sort of 'being'' According to Nietzsche, Buddhism can be described as an effort, through restraint from action, to escape suffering and pass into absolute non-existence. But is this description accurate?
Dukkha is the Sanskrit word commonly translated as 'suffering'. Its full meaning, however, is much more extensive, and this has important implications for the interpretation of Buddhist doctrine, because it is an integral constituent in the articulation of the fundamental Buddhist doctrine, the Four Noble Truths, as expressed in the Vinayapitaka:

'And this, monks, is the Noble Truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, and old age is dukkha, and disease is dukkha, and dying is dukkha, association from what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what you want is dukkha - in short, the five aggregates of grasping are dukkha.'
Understood simply as 'suffering', the word dukkha in this central Buddhist passage expresses only simple pessimism. The common translation of dukkha as suffering has quite likely been the cause of a great deal of misunderstanding on the part of the non-Buddhist world. In fact, 'dukkha'comes in three flavors. The first is dukkha-dukkhata, suffering qua suffering in its direct physical and mental manifestations. The second is vapirinama-dukkha, or suffering through transformation. This refers to the awareness that one's happiness is highly contingent and dependent on factors beyond one's control. Though you may be happy now, it could change at any moment, and this is due to the ungrounded and fluctuating nature of existence itself.
The most important type of dukkha, however, is sankhara-dukkha, an existential incompleteness due to spiritual ignorance. This incompleteness arises from being limited to one's own contingent and unenlightened perspective. Panna is the word used to refer to the transcendental consciousness of those who have attained enlightenment and are thereby free from sankhara-dukkha and existentially complete. For those who have attained Panna, even the most blissful existence as a deva in one of the Buddhist Heavens would seem to be a miserable Hell. This is because any of these existences of a relative nature (more or less blissful, painful, etc.) are only results of the spiritual ignorance that results in sankhara-dukkha.

Interpreted in this way, it is easy to begin to see how the statement of the First Noble Truth takes on a much deeper meaning than was assumed by Nietzsche. Not only are birth, death, and disease painful, they are products of spiritual ignorance. To say that they are 'dukkha'implies that they are, as co-dependently arising oppositions, ultimately unreal. It is not, therefore, merely pain that the Buddhist wants to overcome, but the perspective within which these illusions (as well as their happy counterparts) are taken to be real. Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the primary motivation behind Buddhism is not simply suffering qua suffering is the fact that out of the 121 classes of conscious experience listed in Buddhist psychology, only three have to do with pain, while 63 are joyful. Both the joyful and the painful, however, are considered sankhara-dukkha - products of spiritual ignorance.

Kamma-niradha is the Sanskrit word for 'cessation of action'. This state is achieved through adherence to the eight-fold path, which guides the Buddhist into kusula, or 'skillful action'. Therefore, it is not simply ceasing to perform actions that the Buddhist believes will eventually lead one to his or her goal. Rather, the type of actions that are performed is the deciding factor. Likewise, it is wrong to conclude that just because one has attained Nirvana that one ceases to act. Such a conclusion implies a misconceived interpretation of kamma-niradha, as it is understood in Buddhism. This is the misconception Nietzsche seems to have made in characterising Buddhism as being centered on the guideline not to act. That such an interpretation is indeed misconceived is apparent when we consider the life and words of the Buddha. After attaining enlightenment and Nirvana, he continued to lead an active life for the next forty-five years. Again, it is the nature of the action that differentiates the enlightened, described in the following passage from the Vinayapatika:

'I, monks, am freed from all snares, both those of devas and those of men. And you, monks, are freed from all snares, both those of devas and those of men. Go, monks, and wander for the blessing of the manyfolk, for the happiness of the manyfolk out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the blessing, the happiness of devas and men. Let not two (of you) go by one (way). Monks, teach the Dhamma which is lovely at the beginning, lovely in the middle, and lovely at the end.'
As this passage illustrates, there are certain kinds of actions that are enjoined on the enlightened. However, it is inaccurate to use the word 'enjoined'in this context because the skillful actions are naturally done by the enlightened Buddhist, and are no longer performed as if they are obligations in a code of behavior. Following the Buddhist 'code', the eightfold path, is merely a means to the end of making it obsolete upon enlightenment. This is because of the way 'skillful action'is defined in Buddhism. The action that ceases is not activity in general, but only the unskillful actions that originate in spiritual ignorance. An action originates in spiritual ignorance when it is affected by one of three biases. These biases are sense desire, desire for some future form of existence, and spiritual ignorance. Buddhism further classifies actions into three categories. Wrong actions run counter to the goal of enlightenment and are driven by one or more of the biases. Of right actions there are those that tend toward enlightenment but are still driven by one the biases and those that are completely free of the biases and based on the correct understanding of the enlightened agent.
Examples of the former are actions performed by aspiring Buddhists who have not yet attained enlightenment and behave according to the Buddhist guidelines because they are enjoined on them by the religion itself. Upon enlightenment, the cessation of action that takes place is a cessation of the actions that are driven by the biases and, hence, unenlightened.

By interpreting the Buddhist conception of inaction as a cessation of all action, Nietzsche presented Buddhism as an escapist, and 'weary'ideology. Rightly understood, however, the Buddhist ideal of kamma-niradha actually comes closer to Nietzsche's ideal - being, in his own words, action that is 'beyond good and evil', or outside the moral categories of a dogma. Now that it has become clearer that Buddhism does not involve a retreat simply from pain, and that it does not prescribe complete inertness, we must ask ourselves about the goal toward which its genuine recommendations are directed. The most crucial point of contention over Nietzsche's criticisms of Buddhism might be the question: is Nirvana really an 'Oriental Nothing?'Do Buddhists really seek, by developing panna and performing kamma-niradha, to exterminate themselves beyond the possibility of re-birth?

'Since a Tathagata, even when actually present, is incomprehensible, it is inept to say of him - of the Uttermost Person, the Supernal Person, the Attainer of the Supernal - that after dying the Tathagata is, or is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not...'
(Majjhima-Nikaya)
It is hard to imagine that Nietzsche misinterpreted the concept of Buddhist Nirvana completely inadvertently, given the sheer amount of Theravada literature that exists on the topic. In so many passages, the texts insist that Nirvana transcends the difference between the four sets of categories given above (being, non-being, both, and neither), and that it is therefore inaccurate to say of Nirvana that it is nothingness - and just as inaccurate to conclude that it must be something. Nirvana is postulated as a state quite beyond the realm of reason and language. In the Suttanipata, the Buddha explains:

' 'There is no measuring of one who has gone to his setting, Upasiva,' said the Blessed One. 'That no longer exists for him by which people might refer to him. When all conditions [dhammas] are removed, then all ways of telling are also removed.'
All points of reference by which one makes descriptions and explanations are products of the unenlightened perspective. Nirvana, since it is beyond this perspective, is beyond description by way of these relative concepts and categories. It can only be understood by way of attainment ? of losing spiritual ignorance in exchange for enlightened understanding. That, according to Buddhism, is why it is so problematic to give an explanation for it. The Buddha replies to the bewilderment expressed by a disciple, Vacchagotta:
'It is enough to cause you bewilderment, Vaccha, enough to cause you confusion. For this truth, Vaccha, is deep, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. It is hard for you to understand when you hold to another view, accept another teaching, approve another teaching, pursue a different training, and follow a different teacher.'
Admittedly, having not attained the state of enlightenment described by the Buddhists, I find it perplexing to conceive of. It appears that in order to understand the concept one must transcend rationality itself and operate on some plane completely outside of anything we can imagine. In other words, only the enlightened can understand the goal they have achieved (at which point it ceases to be anything like a 'goal'). Though only a fool denies the reality of a thing based solely on the fact that one has not yet experienced it, it is quite understandable that in so many cases a concept that requires such direct experience should be completely misunderstood by those who have lack the experience. In such a case, one unenlightened onlooker has really no point of reference by which to test the accuracy of another unenlightened explanation. Indeed, it appears that any words used to explain Nirvana, according to the Buddhist postulations, would be horrendous mistakes. And so it is with this in mind that we should examine a statement by Schopenhauer (in The World as Will and Idea), who was a major influence on Nietzsche, regarding the subject.
'...We must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather, do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways - is nothing.'
Obviously, Schopenhauer, after being so influenced by Hindu and Buddhist ideas about the effect that desire and will has on binding us to continued existence, completely dismissed the perplexing descriptions of Nirvana as 'meaningless words'. Unable to conceive of a state beyond the categories of being and non-being, he concluded that the final state that is entered into after dissolution of the will is complete non-existence. Hence, his diagnosis that the philosophers who postulated inconceivable states were merely 'evading'the nothingness that they feared. Diagnoses of 'psychological dishonesty'such as this became, in some form or other, staples of later existentialist thinkers. Nietzsche, of course, made similar attacks against Christianity as well as Buddhism.
The fact is, Nirvana can only be explained to the 'unenlightened' by negation. The Buddhist texts tell us what it cannot be thought of as, but the only positive descriptions of it tend toward non-existence. An example of this is the simile of the fire that the Buddha uses in his dialogue with Vacchagotama. He asks whether the fire, when it is extinguished, can be said to have gone north, south, east, or west. Of course, the obvious answer is that the fire no longer exists. Nirvana, however, cannot be described as existing, not existing, both existing and not, or neither existing nor not. For Buddhism, even nothingness is constituted by the relative contingencies that arise co-dependently as samsara.

For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, nothingness is what is left when these illusions are removed. This explains their sharply opposed responses to the human condition as they understand it. Schopenhauer and, according to Nietzsche, Buddhism, prescribe a surrender into nothingness that can only be actualized by extinction of the will. Nietzsche, on the other hand, asserts an affirmation of the illusion by becoming the creator of it. His überman, by accepting the groundlessness of his own 'truths'and yet maintaining them and continually creating them - wanting to create them over and over again (as opposed to wanting to escape the cycle) - represents an ideal response to existence.

So both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer greatly misunderstood Buddhism,by interpreting Nirvana as non-existence. The Buddhist response to them both would be that they failed to understand the system fully because they failed to adopt Buddhist practices aimed at enlightenment - at which point they would have developed the capacity to conceive of Nirvana. 'Sire, Nirvana is', says the Buddhist disciple, Nagasena, 'cognizable by mind: an ariyan disciple, faring along with a mind that is purified, lofty, straight, without obstructions, without temporal desires, sees Nirvana.'



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Address for correspondence:

Omar Edward Moad, University of Missouri-Columbia, 601 S. Providence #707I Columbia, MO 65203 1 (573) 771-0240

email: erm264@mizzou.edu





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