Nietzsche and Buddhism:

·期刊原文
Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities,
By Robert Morrison

Reviewed by JAMES L. FREDERICKS

The Journal of Religion

Vol.79 No.1(Jan 1999)

P.153

COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Chicago

　

MORRISON, ROBERT G. Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and
Ironic Affinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 250 pp.

Any mention of Nietzsche necessarily raises the question of which
Nietzsche one has in mind. In recent years, French
deconstructionists have awarded him posthumous admission to the
Academie Francaise. Jaspers and then Kaufmann taught an earlier
generation to think of him as a prophet of existentialism. Robert
Morrison has made Nietzsche recognizable once again as a German
Romantic. More precisely, Morrison presents Nietzsche as a kind of
romantic guru: a teacher interested in spiritual practice.
Curiously, Morrison's return to Nietzsche's romanticism is made
possible by rereading him using Pali Buddhist thought. Morrison's
reading of Nietzsche is all the more intriguing when we note that
Nietzsche himself not only predicted the West's current interest in
Buddhism, but he was ready with a harsh dismissal of it. With the
death of God, a weakened and degraded bourgeoisie will be attracted
to Buddhism's nihilism and passivity. Western dalliance with
Buddhism should be seen as a symptom of a cultural disease. For
Nietzsche, Buddhism's nihilism and passivity must be overcome by
means of the will to power.
In Morrison's view, Nietzsche was wrong about Buddhism as a form of
passive nihilism. In fact, Buddhism and Nietzsche bear "ironic
affinities" with one another. To highlight these affinities,
Morrison provides his readers with close textual comparisons
bringing together a multitude of Nietzsche's works with texts taken
from the Pali Buddhist canon. Morrison's attention is focused almost
exclusively on the correspondences between Nietzsche's ideas
regarding will to power and self-overcoming (Selbstuberwindung) and
the Buddhist notions of desire (tanha) and mind cultivation
(citta-bhavana).
In a godless universe, a world without any transcendent basis for
values, new values must be established through the assertion of
will. Nietzsche's notion of will, in Morrison's reading, is similar
to early Buddhist teachings regarding the transformation of tanha.
Rightly understood, the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice is not
to annihilate desire. Buddhism seeks the transformation of desire
from egocentric clinging to compassionate action. Tanha can thus be
either skillful or unskillful. This distinction is central to
Morrison's retrieval of Nietzsche. Like tanha, will to power can
also be either skillful or unskillful. Skillful will to power leads
to self-overcoming and the rise of the Ubermensch. Morrison also
finds affinities between Nietzsche's demand for self-overcoming
(Selbstuberwindung) and Pali Buddhism's notion of mind cultivation
(citta-bhavana). For both Pali Buddhism and Nietzsche, the human
being is a welter of conflicting wills struggling for supremacy. The
Ubermensch arises in the establishment of a higher quantum of power
by means of the overcoming of lower drives. Morrison makes
connections with Pali Buddhist traditions regarding the cultivation
of mind through spiritual practice.
Morrison's is not the first effort at comparing Buddhism to
Nietzsche. The relationship between the two, however, can vary
considerably depending on what side of the Pacific one is working
from. Japanese interpreters of Nietzsche and Buddhism, such as
Nishitani Keiji, in his The Self Overcoming Nihilism (Albany, N.Y.,
1990), and Abe Masao in his various essays on Nietzsche, offer their
own critiques of the West. If Nietzsche thought of Buddhism as
symptomatic of the disease of nihilism, these Japanese thinkers
return the compliment in kind, only now Nietzsche is symptomatic of
the disease and Buddhism is held up as the cure. Contrary to
Nishitani and Abe, Morrison would make of Nietzsche a latter-day
practitioner of the Dharma by reading Buddhism as a kind of
Nietzschean call to will to power. Morrison ends several of his
later chapters with the observation that Nietzsche, had he the
benefit of a more critical understanding of early Buddhism, could
have learned much from its practical experience in spiritual
practice. The book even concludes with the suggestion that we might
think of the historical Buddha as a kind of Ubermensch.
Did Siddhartha Gautama really preach a form of the will to power?
One of Morrison's many virtues is that he does not ask his readers
to accept this conclusion without benefit of a carefully argued and
critical treatment of the texts in question. He also provides an
evaluation of the materials on Buddhism available to Nietzsche, even
speculation on the import of Oldenberg's mistranslations of early
Pali texts. An affinity, no matter how ironic, does not a difference
make. The affinities Morrison traces between Nietzsche and Pali
Buddhism allow him to read both Nietzsche and Buddhism in unusual
ways. The same, I believe, can be said for the differences that
distinguish the two. If will to power can be construed as a form of
skillful desire (tanha), should not compassion (karuna) be
recognized as a Buddhist form of ressentiment? Should this prove to
be the case, the historical Buddha would be a far cry from
Nietzsche's Ubermensch.