Calm and the Cataract: Zen and The Antichrist

This paper seeks to explore points of resonance between Nietzsche and Thich Nath Hanh. At first glance, these two thinkers seem entirely diametrical. One is a German philosopher echoed in electric phrases like “God is dead” and “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” As a young reader described, “he might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God” (Kamiya). The other is the founder of the Plum Village school of Mahayana Buddhism, known as a constant voice for peace and a teacher of the essential arts of sitting, eating, relaxing, and breathing. Hanh encourages us to immerse ourselves in the simple beauty of the present moment and absorb the “lessons we can learn from the cloud, the water, the wave, the leaf” (42). In contrast, Nietzsche urges us to surpass all small things and seek our own apotheosis, for “man is something that must be overcome” (Zarathustra, 125). One is an unrelenting, intoxicating rush of declarations, the evisceration of all things approved by the consensus of religious and societal authority. The other is a patient and tranquil stream of ever-reassuring ideas for the aspiring Buddhist. They seem almost irreconcilable.

However, further reflection reveals that these two are only as separate as the raging waterfall and the reflective pond. The pond descends into waterfalls and waterfalls feed the pond. Any river carving through tumultuous territory will have points of rapid descent and stretches of calmness. And existence is certainly a tumultuous territory. As Hanh writes, “understanding is like water flowing in a stream” (21). Sometimes the stream rushes and sometimes it settles. Without the blitzing onslaughts of water, sediments would stagnate into a complacency that could never transform landscapes. And without the stillness of the pond, sediments would flurry forever without ever finding rest or becoming fruitful soil.

In the same way, the ideas of Nietzsche and Hanh have an almost symbiotic relationship: we can better understand both by listening to the dialogue between them. Their commonalities include the insight that our experience of reality is illusory and empty, the recognition that life consists of suffering, and a unique synergy between Nietzschean eternal recurrence and Hanh’s concept of interbeing. However, the two have fundamental disagreements on the appropriate response to the suffering and illusions embedded in existence.

Nietzsche on Buddhism

Nietzsche inherited most of his understanding of Buddhism from Schopenhauer, who considered his own philosophy a European relative of Buddhism: “up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism” (17). As one of his students and early disciples, Nietzsche “was predisposed to react to Buddhism in terms of his close reading of Schopenhauer” (Elman). Many Buddhists have disputed Schopenhauer’s comprehension of their religion. It is enough to say Nietzsche’s knowledge of Buddhism is nowhere near complete: it came secondhand from a Western philosopher whose own understanding is questionable. But there is also evidence that Nietzsche scoured the sparse texts he had available, especially the ancient Sanskrit Upanishads, and he referenced complex Buddhist topics with some awareness of the nuance involved (Bilimoria, 363). Ultimately my aim is not to trace the genealogy of Buddhist ideas into Nietzsche’s mind. Instead, I will show that these two ways of thinking have converged on a few key areas without delving into the origins of this convergence.

Emptiness

Nietzsche and Buddha both see the transient, illusory, and contingent nature of our experience. Our lives are composed of a dynamic stream of phenomena that lacks any objective basis. Underneath our perceptions there lies only what the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna called Śūnyatā (emptiness) and what Nietzsche called Abgrund (abyss), a void beyond all human categories and abstractions (Moad). (Nāgārjuna had a fascinating conception of emptiness & nothing that I can’t delve into further here. I highly recommend this essay on Nagarjuna, Nietzsche, and the Strange Looping Trick to learn more.) As Hanh wrote, “emptiness is the ground of everything … This is the true meaning of emptiness. Form does not have a separate existence” (17). Hanh means that all things are “empty of a separate self,” as nothing has an essential core, fundamental reality, or absolute being. Our perceptions are just a migrating flock of fleeting dreams, conceptual constructs, illusions, bubbles, and shadows. Nietzsche writes to the same effect:

Truth is 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 we have forgotten are illusions; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense)

Both authors agree that living experience consists of “hanging in dreams.” We are flung into an empty world, and to provide meaning, we hang amongst a series of dreams. Most humans end up immersing themselves in concepts and frameworks that obscure the emptiness. Hanh and Nietzsche encourage us to dive into the abyss.

Throughout their works, both authors urge the reader to avoid self-deception: “We should not imprison ourselves in concepts” (Hanh, 34). Over a lifetime, we are inculcated into this “habit of believing this to be true or false, of asserting or denying” (Will to Power, 524). One of the symptoms of the self-deceiving habit is the obsession with the self, and the division between the subject and the external world. Here Nietzsche agrees with the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of anatman (lack of self). He writes against the concept of a transcendental ego: “the ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (Will to Power, 481). Surpassing concepts allows us to see the emptiness that permeates life.

Buddhism encourages mindfulness, allowing consciousness to be simply present without engaging in the turbulent label-sticking and concept-making process. The two traditions enrich each other: one may practice meditation as a reliable path into the void while using Nietzsche’s writings as powerful underpinnings for the critical Buddhist concept of emptiness.

Suffering

Furthermore, the first noble truth – that life is suffering – resounds with both Nietzsche and Hanh. Both recognized that suffering is a fundamental feature of human life. And both proposed a similar response: “Don’t throw away your suffering. Touch your suffering. Face it directly, and your joy will become deeper” (Hanh). Nietzsche appreciated that the Buddha did not try to give suffering some artificial moral origin:

“Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, ‘I suffer’”

Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 23

The Buddha did not try to attach to suffering a glorious and anesthetic story, to affix melodic bells and jangles that might alleviate the pain. For example, the Buddha did not claim that suffering was a consequence of the first sin and the subsequent fall from grace. Instead the Buddha simply described the suffering.

Nietzsche and Buddha both refuse to accept the opulent walled garden of paradise. They venture out to understand suffering, to describe it with honesty and courage, and then to respond to it. Of course, their shared courses eventually diverge, as Buddha sets out upon the Eightfold Path and Nietzsche trailblazes his life-affirming philosophy. But they both begin with the same foundation: the integrity of honestly describing the suffering inherent to the human condition.

Interbeing

Finally, the two agree on interbeing. Hanh begins his discussion of interbeing with this simple declaration: “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper” (3). The paper is composed of tree pulp, trees arise from a complex interplay of water and carbon, and this cycle relies upon rain from the clouds. The clouds, the tree bark, the rays of the sun, the nutrients that fed the tree, even the axe used to cut the trees – these are all ghosts that metaphorically and literally reside within the paper. As Hanh wrote, “this sheet of paper is, because everything else is…as thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it” (4).

The ever-poetic Nietzsche saw this interbeing as well. He wrote constant praise of the person “whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him” (Zarathustra, 16). The Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva and the Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch both witness the interbeing of all things and forget the self. Furthermore, Nietzsche mirrored Hanh’s description of interbeing:

“Observe,” continued I, “This Moment! From the gateway, This Moment, there runs a long eternal lane backwards: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by? …. And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draws all coming things after it?” (Zarathustra, 126).

And this idea is not isolated in Nietzsche’s thought, but reinforced throughout the ouvre. Zarathustra later repeated the sentiment that all things inter-are:

“Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; eternally builds itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence.”

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 171

One could be forgiven for assuming that these words were written by a Zen monk.

Interbeing tells us that the separateness of each component of the universe is only a superficial judgement – a product of our habitual categorization. When we look deeper, beyond good and evil, we see that all things inter-are: they all rely upon one another for their existence and are built from one another. Science makes this interbeing more literal and visible: our bodies are made from the remnants of star corpses. Our cars run on compressed dinosaur bones. The water we drink has circled the world countless times, taking up residence in dinosaurs, trees, humans, mushrooms, clouds, pipes, rivers, and every other place we can imagine.

But Nietzsche takes interbeing one step further, beyond description and into the realm of values. For each “individual” thing is connected to all other things, and the entire universe combines into each moment, then when you say yes to one moment you say yes to all moments. If “all things are chained and entwined together,”^[1] then we affirm the entire chain when we affirm a single link; we affirm even the process that forged the chain. When a climber reaches a summit and is overwhelmed by sublime beauty and joy, she affirms not only that moment, but everything else inextricably connected to it: epochs of geology that molded the mountain, the childhood that shaped her personhood and led her to climb, the trillions of organisms that lived, suffered, died, and eventually decomposed into the soil she walked upon. From Hanh’s premise of interbeing, Nietzsche develops eternal recurrence: when we fully embrace a single moment, we embrace all eternity, and everything contained in it.

Disagreements

Ultimately this sweet resonance between the philosopher and the monk cannot last. Nietzsche decides that the fundamental disagreements are too much to bear, declaring that “I could become the Buddha of Europe, though frankly I would be the antipode of the Indian Buddha” (Panaïoti). While he agrees that our experiences are just illusory projections of the mind, Nietzsche disagrees on the response to this emptiness. The Buddha offers a path to enlightenment, a state of awareness that transcends the void:

“the state where creations (phenomenal illusions) cease to arise through their understanding of extinction and creation. All, now having their mind silenced, awakened to the wisdom-sea of prajna on the nature of the void (as it is within the silent void that the inherent Self-Wisdom manifests).” (Vajrasamadhi Sutra)

Nietzsche seeks no such transcendence. Instead, he proposes immanence, the affirmation of the illusory and the void: his philosophy is “inverted Platonism: the further it is from actual reality, the purer, more beautiful, and better it becomes. Living in illusion as the ideal” (Conway, 404). We can see the pinnacles of this life-embracing immanence in myth, metaphor, and the artistic play of the creative. This illusion should be conscious, beautiful, and intentional, a myth that wraps every piece of existence into its narrative and does not negate even the tiniest fragment. Art, for example, is the cult of the beautiful illusion that allows us to endure the “the insight into the general untruth and falsity of things now given us by science” (Gay Science, 107). On this point Hanh and Nietzsche are far from the same page. Nietzsche has wandered away from Buddhist meditative clarity and into the ecstatic illusion.

On suffering, as well, the two start to diverge at the same crossroads, between transcendence (moving beyond suffering) and immanence (embracing suffering). Buddhism encourages us to surpass our desires to move beyond dukkha, as the third noble truth is the “cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it” (Laumakis, 48). On the other hand, Nietzsche encourages us to affirm all aspects of the human condition, including and especially suffering. He issues an injunction that seems to be aimed directly at Siddhartha Guatama:

“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, ‘Life is refuted.’ But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1).

While Nietzsche loves Buddhism for treating suffering with honest rather than moralizing tendencies, he argues that the Buddha did not go far enough. We should not just observe the monster of suffering but embrace it: we should face the “great challenge of looking at this monstrous world with an unswerving gaze and declaring it ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘evil’” (Loy, 37). This is the concept of amor fati: love of one’s fate, despite its tragedies.

Nietzsche condemns Buddhism as merely the “consolation of weary spirits longing for a dreamless sleep” (in nirvana) rather than a courageous re-affirmation of existence. When we disengage from our cravings, he argues, we disengage from life itself. He encourages us to become more attached to reality, condemning detachment as life-negating and vitality-draining. Instead of escaping suffering we should double down on it.

However, many thinkers argue that Nietzsche misunderstands Buddhism (Loy; Moad; Hongladarom; Bilimoria). First, dukkha does not just mean the experience of suffering, but the existential incompleteness and anguish that come from spiritual ignorance. From a Nietzschean perspective, this incompleteness might be interpreted the inability or unwillingness to embrace suffering, and Buddhism could be re-evaluated as a method of embracing suffering. This seems to reconcile the two views. Second, Buddhism does not promote inaction or detachment in response to suffering – after all, the Buddha continued teaching and living an active life for 45 years after enlightenment. His life of teaching, giving, and serving was not an attempt to fulfill an obligation, but a set of actions naturally done by an enlightened Buddhist who is overflowing into the world (Moad). In the same way, Nietzsche advocates overflowing rather than ethics: “senselessness and ugliness seem as it were licensed, in consequence of the overflowing plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which can convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard” (The Gay Science, 370). This reconciliation seems incomplete, but perhaps it shows that Nietzsche cannot entirely repudiate Buddhism while remaining internally consistent.

Through the dialectic between the philosopher and the Zen monk we can improve our understanding of both thinkers. The simple focus of Hanh’s writings offers a clear lens through which to view the dense, stylistic, and polemical prose of Nietzsche. Both thinkers are seeking a vision of great health that allows one to deal with the emptiness and suffering of existence, although they have substantial disagreements about the path to this ideal state. While they may not be two branches of the same tree, they are certainly trees growing towards the same sun – philosophies with common goals and roots. Both are seeking an outlook that leads to the “most profound enjoyment of the moment” (The Gay Science, 302). This dialogue between Nietzsche and Hanh allows us to explore the conceptual landscape between the two without losing sight of nuance. Both the crashing cataract and the serene estuary are necessary for the river to traverse a complex topography.

Works Cited

Vajrasamadhi Sutra (The Diamond-Absorption Sutra). Trans. into Chinese by Anonym, Northern Liang Dynasty, China; into English by Robert E. Buswell. 4 Jun 2019. <http://www.buddhasutra.com/files/vajrasamadhi_sutra.htm>

Graham, Parkes. Nietzsche and Early Buddhism. Philosophy East and West. Vol. 50, no. 2, 2000, pp. 254–267. Print.

Elman, Benjamin A. Nietzsche and Buddhism. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 44, No. 4. (Oct. – Dec., 1983), pp. 671-686. Print.

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Hạnh, Thich Nhất. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy & Liberation: The Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Other Basic Buddhist Teachings. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Print.

Loy, David. Beyond good and evil? A Buddhist critique of Nietzsche. Asian Philosophy Vol. 6, No. 1, March 1996. Print. Pg. 37-58.

Kamiya, Gary. “Bookend; Falling Out with Superman.” The New York Times. 23 Jan 2000. Web. Accessed 2 Jun 2019.

Laumakis, Stephen J. An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Feb 21, 2008. Print.

Moad, Omar. Dukkha, Inaction, and Nirvana: Suffering, Weariness, and Death? A look at Nietzsche’s Criticisms of Buddhist Philosophy. The Philosopher, Volume LXXXXII, No. 1. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Anti-Christ. R. J. Hollingdale (Trans and Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin), No. 20. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Random House, Vintage Books: New York, Mar 1974. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Schopenhauer as Educator. Chicago: Regenery, 1965. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Chicago: Regenery, 1965. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Taylor Carman. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. Harper Perennial, 2010. Print.

Panaïoti, Antoine. Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Print.

Hongladarom, S. (2011). The Overman and the Arahant : Models of Human Perfection in Nietzsche and Buddhism. Asian Philosophy, 21(1), 53–69.

Bilimoria, P. (2008). Nietzsche as “Europe’s Buddha” and “Asia’s superman.” Sophia, 47(3), 359–376. Print.

1. Thus Spake Zarathustra, pg. 333: “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.” ↑