Nietzsche and the Buddha

Daniel Chapelle

Nietzsche and the Buddha

Different Lives, Same Ideas

(How Nietzsche May Yet Become
the West’s Own Buddha)

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chapelle, Daniel, author.
Title: Nietzsche and the Buddha: different lives, same ideas (how Nietzsche may yet become the west’s own Buddha) / Daniel Chapelle.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2020.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021572 | ISBN 978-1-4331-6660-0 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-6661-7 (ebook pdf) ISBN 978-1-4331-6662-4 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-6663-1 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Gautama Buddha. | Buddhism—Doctrines. | Buddhist philosophy. | Philosophy and religion. | Philosophy, Comparative.
Classification: LCC B3318.B83 C43 | DDC 193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021572
DOI 10.3726/b15279

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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About the author

DANIEL CHAPELLE received his doctorate from the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas. His research focuses primarily on psychology with a dual focus on philosophy and clinal psychology. His past publications include Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis and The Soul In Everyday Life.

About the book

This book examines Nietzsche’s claim that he could be the “Buddha of the West.” A close reading of his texts shows substantial similarities with the Buddha’s teachings, suggesting a potential basis and a potentially promising future for a Western Buddhism that would be based on Nietzsche’s philosophy. The book first provides a brief comparative biography of Nietzsche and the Buddha and then a review of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path and of what there is in Nietzsche’s writings that is his equivalent to those teachings.

While the West often looks to neuroscience to validate the Buddhist teachings and practices, this book suggests it would be better to study Nietzsche’s thought to discover not only validation for Buddhist teachings but the very foundation of a “Buddhism” that is of the West, by the West, and for the West.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

30.Acknowledgments

30.Preface

30.Introduction

Chapter 1. Buddha and Nietzsche in Their Own Time and World

Chapter 2. First Noble Truth: Unhappiness (Dukkha)

Chapter 3. Second Noble Truth: The Origin and Nature of Unhappiness

Chapter 4. Third Noble Truth: Ending Unhappiness

Chapter 5. Fourth Noble Truth: The Path to Cheerfulness

Chapter 6. Right View

Chapter 7. Right Intention

Chapter 8. Right Speech

Chapter 9. Right Conduct

Chapter 10. Right Livelihood←vii | viii→

Chapter 11. Right Effort

Chapter 12. Right Mindfulness

Chapter 13. Right Concentration

Chapter 14. Unsentimental Compassion

30.Conclusion: Western Buddhism After Nietzsche?

30.References

30.Index←viii | ix→

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Paolo D’Iorio for permission to cite from Friedrich Nietzsche, Digitale Kritische Gesamtaufgabe Werke und Briefe (Digital critical edition of the complete works and letters), based on the critical text by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, edited by Paolo D’Iorio, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2009, www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB. The translations are mine. The way source locations are indicated is explained in note 1 of the Preface.←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

Preface

“My time hasn’t come yet. Some people are born posthumously.”

Nietzsche

“I could become the Buddha of Europe,” Nietzsche writes, “except that I would be the opposite of the Indian Buddha.”¹ This is one of those fantastic sounding claims for which he is famous, or infamous. Do we have to take him seriously? Yes.

The first half of his proposition, that he “could become the Buddha of Europe,” is, to the likely surprise of many, substantially true. The second half is not true, because he is not at all the “opposite of the Indian Buddha,” as he thinks he is. He is, instead, far more in agreement with the Buddha than he and most of his readers realize. To look closely into these matters is this book’s objective.

The Buddha’s teachings are most commonly presented through what are known in English as the Four Noble Truths or insights and the Noble Eightfold Path of practices for living by those insights. He teaches these from the days of his enlightenment in his mid-thirties until his death forty-five years later, at age eighty.

This book reviews those four “truths” or insights and the eight practical teachings and compares them, one-by-one and side-by-side, with what←xi | xii→ there is in Nietzsche’s writings that is his equivalent to them. This shows that for seven out of the eight teachings from the Eightfold Path, including the Four Noble Truths, which together form the first of these eight, there are unmistakable, clear, substantial, and convincing parallels in Nietzsche’s writings. Only for the last of the eight Buddhist teachings about the Path is there no clear equivalent in Nietzsche, even though here as well there are significant hints.

He says of his writings that it will take a century and more before they will be understood. That is no exaggeration, and merely another example of the hyperbole and seeming grandiosity that are so characteristic of his style and that rub so many people the wrong way. Contrary to initial appearances his assessment of the impact of his writings may well be that rarest of things, a Nietzschean understatement.←xii | xiii→

There has in recent history been an emerging academic interest in the theme of Nietzsche-and-Buddhism, but that interest has so far tended to be limited to a small and exclusive, sometimes almost exclusionary, world of specialized scholars who write for specialized academic readers with a focus on comparative philosophy and cross-cultural philosophy.2 The book at hand puts forward its own observations and ideas about the theme of Nietzsche-and-Buddhism but it does so for a broader audience. It is meant for a wider range of academic readers and for the serious general reader with an interest in the history and especially the potential future of Western thought and culture.

But the notion of Nietzsche as “the Buddha of Europe” is here not only about Nietzsche as a unique historical figure and as a philosopher-psychologist who can be set apart from his fellow Europeans. That is because he is not only a phenomenon in the history of Western thought, a sort of isolated mutation or, as some might argue, a freak occurrence. He is also, as he understands better than most of his readers, an evolutionary phenomenon of that same history of ideas. He is, as he realizes full well, a Western philosophical inevitability, an inescapable necessity in the history of European thought.

As we will see, Nietzsche does not always and from the beginning go about thinking his Nietzschean thoughts strictly on his own steam. Instead, the core thought in Nietzsche comes to him, rather than Nietzsche coming up with it. Nietzschean thought has and shapes him, rather than he it. It is as if he is chosen to think the thought—but chosen without having a choice about being chosen to have to think the thought.