Spiritual Virility in Buddhism
Julius Evola
It is the fate of almost all religions to become, so to say, denatured: as they
spread and develop, they gradually recede from their original spirit, and their
more popular and spurious elements, their less severe and essential features,
those furthest removed from the metaphysical plane come to the fore. While
hardly any of the major historical religions have escaped this fate, it would seem
that it is particularly true of Buddhism. We need only consider the prevalent
notion of the teaching of the prince of the Sakyas that has been formed not only
in the West by those who profess admiration for Buddhism, but also for many
centuries past in many strata of the peoples of the East.
The terms in which the 2500th anniversary of the death of the Buddha has
been commemorated this year, and the way the message that the Buddhist
religion should have for the modern world has been spoken of, afford evidence
of this.
Someone has recently been able to say: “There is no other alternative: the
world today must choose between the H-bomb and the message of the
Buddha”—thus identifying that message with pacifism and humanitarianism.
The Western friends of Buddhism have been almost unanimous in appraising it
as a sentimental doctrine of love and universal compassion, a doctrine composed
of democracy and tolerance, to be admired also for its freedom from dogma,
rites, sacraments; almost a sort of secular religion.
It is true that these distortions appeared quite early in the history of Buddhism.
But though it may seem audacious on our part, we have no hesitation in saying
that this is a falsification of the message of the Buddha, a degenerated version
suited not to virile men, standing with head erect, but to men lying prostrate in
search of escape and spiritual alleviation, for whom the law and discipline of a
positive religion are too severe.
If we accept the interpretations referred to, Buddhism in its real essence would
be a system of ethics rather than a religion in the strict meaning of the term. This
character, which some historians of religion had stressed in an attempt to charge
Buddhism with supposed inferiority as compared to theistic and dogmatic
religions, is today claimed by others as a merit, their claim being based on a
misapprehension of a different, but not less serious kind. If Buddhism, taken in
its original forms, cannot be called a “religion,” this depends on the fact that it is
not below but above the plane of all that can be legitimately defined as
“religion,” especially theistic religion.
The doctrine of awakening and enlightenment, the essential core of Buddhism, has nothing “religious” about it,
because it is preeminently of an “initiatic” or esoteric character, and as such is
accessible only to a few elect. It therefore represents not a “broad way” open to
all (as in more than one of its aspects, almost in its very name, Mahayana) but a
“straight and narrow path” reserved for a minority. This is already made clear by
the accounts given in the Canon of the first moment of the enlightenment of the
Buddha. When Prince Siddhartha had the revelation of the truth and of the way,
the dhamma, he resolved not to spread it, believing it to be inaccessible to the
masses, to ignoble natures immersed in samsara. And so, from the way the story
is told, it would seem that only through the mythical intercession of certain
divinities the Buddha was induced to change his mind and to consent at last to
communicate the possibility of the Great Liberation and the path to attain it.
It is known that in the beginning the Order of the Arya, the noble “sons of the
son of the Sakyas,” was restricted, even if not by extrinsic limits. Thus for
instance, the Buddha objected to the admission of women. And those who like to
see in the attitude of the Buddha towards the conception of caste and the
exclusiveness of the Brahmanas, evidence of an egalitarian and universalist
spirit, are much mistaken. They confuse that which lies beneath the differences
and limits proper to every sound hierarchy (as is the case with democratic
egalitarianism, whether social or spiritual) with that which lies above such
differentiated structures, as in the case of the truly awakened Buddhist and of the
initiate in general. The comparison drawn between the Awakened One and a
flower that rises miraculously from a heap of dung is very eloquent on this
point, even if it be not edifying to those who indulge in a democratic and
humanitarian interpretation of Buddhism. Considered in the framework of the
Hindu situation of his day, the Buddha was a revolutionary only in so much as
he opposed to the fictitious and obsolete dignities—corresponding no longer to
real qualifications—true dignity, to be shown in each case by works and
effective superiority. Thus, for instance, he maintained the designation of
Brahmana, but opposed the type of the real Brahmana to that of the false one.
If in the case of Buddhism one can speak of universalism, this is the universalism
of the summits, not the promiscuous one at the base.
The reduction of Buddhism to mere moral teachings appears as the height of
absurdity to anyone who remembers the canonical parable of the raft. In no
spiritual tradition more than in Buddhism is the purely instrumental and
provisional character of morality, of sila, so strongly stressed. As is known, the
whole body of moral rules, with good and evil, dhamma and adhamma, was
compared by the Buddha to a raft that is built for crossing a river, but which it
would be ridiculous to drag along once the crossing has been made.
Contrary to the view, whether philosophical or religious, which ascribes to moral rules an
intrinsic, autonomous value (a typical instance of this is the so-called “absolute
morality” of Kant’s categorical imperative) the Buddha ascribed to his attitudes
of right conduct a purely instrumental value, the value of means justified only in
view of a certain aim and therefore only sub conditione. But this end, as are the
higher grades of Buddhist ascesis and contemplation, is beyond morality, nor
can it be measured by the religious conception of “holiness.” As Milarepa was to
say: “In my youth I committed some black deeds, in my maturity some white
ones; but now I have rejected all distinctions of black and white.”
Thus, the fact that some of the rules of the sila may perhaps correspond to
what the moralists desire, should mislead no one. The spirit inspiring the action
in the two cases differs fundamentally. This holds good also for that which the
“spiritualists” admire so much in Buddhism: the ethics of love, of compassion,
of harmlessness. He who follows the path of awakening cultivates these mental
attitudes only as the means to free himself from the bonds of ignorance, of the
samsaric ego; not out of sentimental altruism. A conception such as the Western
one, expressed by the words “God is love,” and the consequent absolutization of
this sentiment, would be an absurdity for the authentic Buddhist doctrine. Love
and compassion are mere details of the opus remotionis, whose aim is a
liberation, an enlargement or opening of the soul which can favor, in some cases,
the “rupture of the level” and the sudden flash of illumination. Thus, not only is
the famous series of the four brahmavihara-bhavana or appamanna, which
includes love and compassion, technically and practically equivalent to the
several states of a purely “dry” intellectual contemplation, leading to the same
goal (the four jhana and the arupa-jhana), but even in the series of
brahmavihara-bhavana, the last stage, upekkha, is impassibility, the disincarnate
neutrality of a soul that has become free from all sentimentality, from both the
bonds of the “I” and the “thou” and shines as a pure light in an ontological
super-individual essentiality expressed also in the symbol of the “void,” sunna or
sunnyata.
We are not the only ones who have noted that this concept of the void is not
only affirmed by the Mahayana, but is found already clearly stated in the Canon
of early Buddhism. The work proper to Mahayana has been rather that of making
this concept the object of a paradoxical philosophical elaboration (paradoxical
because this idea corresponds to an absolutely super-rational level detached from
philosophy), to which Mahayana added a popular soteriological religion which
carried the misdirected interpretation of the precept of compassion to a form
that, inter alia, leads to a flagrant contradiction in this form of later Buddhism.
In fact, on the one hand, the precept of compassion and love for all beings is
announced to such a degree that the Mahayanic Bodhisattva vows that he will
not enter nirvana until all living creatures have been redeemed; while on the
other hand, according to the Mahayana doctrine of the universal “void,” all these
beings are non-existent, so many illusions, mere apparitions of the cosmic dream
generated by ignorance.
This nonsensical contradiction alone should suggest that
to the precept spoken of, and also to the doctrine of universal illusion, a meaning
must be given that differs widely from the exoteric, literal, and popular one
attributed to them. Both should be understood on a purely pragmatic plane.
In some aspects of the Mahayana, in which alone the esoteric doctrine of the
“awakening” has been replaced by a “religion,” and also in other currents, the
essential core of Buddhism has been enveloped by philosophical, mythological,
and ritualistic dross and superstructures. When considered in relation to them,
so-called “Zen Buddhism” stands for a return to the origins, a reaction in all
respects similar to that of early Buddhism itself to degraded Brahmanism. Now,
Zen throws into clear relief the essential value of illumination, its transcendence
of all that which, in several cases, may favor it—and at the same time its
immanence, that is to say the fact that the state of enlightenment and nirvana
does not mean a state of evanescent ecstasy, an escape, so to say, of which
compassion is only a pale reflex accompanied by horror of all that is action and
affirmation. It is instead a higher form of freedom, a higher dimension. For him
who holds fast to it there is no action that cannot be performed, and all bonds are
loosened. This is the right interpretation of the doctrine of the void, of the non ego, and also of the Mahayanic conception of the identity of nirvana and
samsara in a third principle higher than either, and anterior to both.
This should be recalled to those who accept unilaterally the theory of harmlessness, of the
timorous respect of all forms of life. As a matter of fact, Zen Buddhism could be
called the doctrine of the Samurai, i.e., of the Japanese nobility
who are certainly not noted for their abhorrence of arms and bloodshed. The fact is that
all this wisdom turns on one pivot alone: the severance of the bond of the ego,
the destruction of ignorance, the awakening. When the bond of the ego is
severed, all restrictions cease. The fruit the doctrine will bear depends on the
human soil on which its seed falls. The humanitarian, pacifist, vegetarian image
of the Buddhist is a distortion, and in any case its acceptance is not compulsory.
Samurais and kamikazes may equally well be Buddhists. In a book in which a
Buddhist chaplain describes the days of the Japanese put to death by the
Americans, we see how these men died without conversion or repentance, in a
perfect state of Buddhist grace; men who, if they were not “war criminals” as the
victors claimed, were as generals, officials, and politicians certainly not delicate,
shy flowers of the field.
Those who have experienced that fundamental inner transformation, that
“rupture of the level” which is the essential feature of Buddhist realization, are in
possession of an unshakeable calm, an “incomparable certainty” which not even
the age of the H-bomb and of all the other devilry of the modern world can
disturb. This calm can be preserved above all tragedies and all destructions, even
when man’s human and ephemeral aspect is involved. Now, it is in this direction
rather than in any other that we find the message Buddhism may have for our
time.
At the conclusion of one of our works, in which we tried to reconstruct
the essence of the Buddhist doctrine, we pointed to the dual possibilities it
offers. The first is that of a clear and virile askesis which creates in man firmness
and serenity, samatha, by means of a carefully constructed mental practice
which allows the detachment and strengthening of a principle that transcends the
purely human, irrational, emotional, and, in general, samsaric substance of our
being. In no other tradition are these practices taught in such a clear, thorough,
we might say scientific form, free from specific religious or ethical implications.
What here is of particular importance is the style of the clear vision, yatha
bhutam, which is that of a superior realism, the vision exactly corresponding
with reality. A goodly number of gifted men can still make an “immanent” use
of Buddhist teachings thus understood. We may even find in them the corrective
of the prevalent trends of our day: the religion of life, of struggle, of
“becoming,” the union with irrational, instinctive, and sub-personal forces that
urge man ever onwards in a “flight towards” (Bernanos), destroying in him all
centrality, all real constancy. In an age like ours, samsaric as no other has ever
been, the Buddhist system of free and virile askesis as preparation for
ultramundane realization might serve to create limits, to provide inner means of
defense, to keep at bay the anguish or the rapture felt by those who cling
convulsively to the illusory mortal Ego. To repeat, this is not to be understood as
an escape, but as a means for assuring a serene and superior security and liberty.
And in view of the times that are approaching, perhaps we have never needed
men educated along these lines as much as we do now.
But in the Canons we find juxtaposed to the use of such disciplines for life,
the use of them for carrying us “beyond life.” It is here that Buddhism presents
itself as the doctrine of awakening, identical with a strict doctrine of initiation,
which as such is timeless (akalika), not tied down to historic contingencies,
superior to all faiths and all systems of mere devotion. It is not easy for the
Westerner to realize what the real purpose of Buddhism is on this level. The
ideal here is absolute unconditional being, the attainment of absolute
transcendence. By now the puerile idea of those who identify nirvana with
“nothingness,” or regression into the unconsciousness of a trance caused by the
distressing knowledge that “life is suffering,” has been to a large extent
discarded. Also, the teaching that “life is suffering” belongs only to the exoteric
aspect of Buddhism. The deeper meaning of the term dukkha is “commotion,”
agitation rather than “suffering”: the condition that the arya, the “noble son,”
rejects is that of universal impermanence, of the transitory—a state that should
therefore be essentially understood in ontological terms, and whose emotional
significance is quite secondary. Its counterpart is thirst, tanha; and the
extinction, the nirvana in question, is not destruction in general but precisely and
only the destruction of what in our being is thirst, insatiable longing, fever, and
attachment, in all its many forms and ramifications. Beyond all this lies
awakening and enlightenment, the samadhi which leads to the unconditioned,
the immortal.
Perhaps the antithesis between the initiatic notion of “awakening” and the
religious and more especially Christian notion of “salvation” or “redemption”
has not yet been adequately stressed. The religious conception is based on the
assumption that man is a being existentially detached from the sacred and the
supernatural. Because of his ontological status as creature, or as the result of
original sin, he belongs to the natural order. Only by the intervention of a
transcendent power, or on the assumption of man’s “conversion,” or by his faith
and his renunciation of his own will, only by Divine action, can he be “saved”
and attain to life in “paradise.”
The implications of the concept of “awakening” are entirely different; man is
not a fallen or guilty being, nor is he a creature separated by an ontological gulf
from a Creator. He is a being who has fallen into a state of sleep, of intoxication,
and of “ignorance.” His natural status is that of a Buddha. It is for him to acquire
consciousness of this by “awakening.” In opposition to the ideas of conversion,
redemption, and action of grace, the principal theme is the destruction of
“ignorance” (avijja). Decisive here is a fact of an essentially “noetic” or
intellectual, and not emotional, nature. This confers an indisputable aristocratic
character on the doctrine of Buddhism. It ignores the “sin” complex, self abasement, and self-mortification. Its askesis is clear and “dry”; it is alien to the features of auto-sadism or masochism which are always present in the forms of the asceticism better known to the West, and which have often given rise among Westerners to anti-ascetic prejudice and a distorted exaltation of life.
This character of loftiness, which is founded in Buddhist ontology, is matched
by the Buddhist doctrine of autonomy: man is the free master of his own destiny.
He alone is responsible for what he is. Thus, in conformity with his vocation, he
can affirm the state he is in, or he can change it. There are no penalties and no
rewards; therefore, there is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear. The only
thing that must be taken into consideration is the objective, unsentimental, extra moral connection of cause and effect. If a Buddha sets himself free, it is by his own efforts alone. On the path leading to awakening, no external aid is to be sought. This conception, on which the traditional Hindu notion of karma was
already founded, is particularly stressed by Buddhism. The historical Buddha, as
is well known, did not present himself as a divine savior, but as a man who, after
attaining enlightenment and the Great Liberation by himself, indicates the path
to those having a like vocation. All this refers to early Buddhism. With
Mahayanic Buddhism in its prevailing and popular aspects, we descend once
more to the level of the soteriological religions; innumerable Bodhisattvas and
Buddhas busy themselves to insure the salvation and happiness of all living
beings.
Again, if we turn to the terminus ad quem, to the ultimate ideal of Buddhism,
the break with religious conceptions is a clear one, and it is difficult for
Westerners to fully grasp. In the West we are accustomed to consider paradise as
a religious ideal, the survival of the believer in heaven, and only a few mystics
speak of the unitive life, of union with Being. But the Buddhist doctrine looks on
all this as trivial and leaves it behind. Its horizon is that of the traditional Hindu
metaphysics, which considers the divine worlds as themselves belonging to
samsara, and immortality not as the perpetuation of individuality but as the
realization of the Unconditioned.
Nor is Being the supreme point, that beyond
which nothing other is conceivable. Being is matched by Non-Being, and the
Unconditioned is that which is superior and anterior to both. In a well-known
passage the Buddha rejects and condemns one by one all the identifications:
identification with the body, with the elements, with the Ego, with the cosmos,
with the divine hierarchies, even with the God of Being, that is to say with
Brahma. In a speech which is Michaelangelesque in its grandeur, identification
with the God of Being, which is equivalent to the unio mystica, the ultimate limit
of religious rapture, is rejected in terms that see it almost as a diabolical
temptation, for it would represent a limit to the great Liberation, to the
attainment of the Unconditioned.
He who has a knowledge of these dimensions of the Buddhist experience,
dimensions that appear clearly in the canonical texts, what can he think of those
who consider Buddhism to be not even a religion but a system of sickly
sentimental secular morality, consisting of humanitarianism and indiscriminate
love, the pale evanescent wisdom of those who have recognized that the “world
is suffering”? Undoubtedly, the metaphysical dimensions of Buddhism just
discussed can only be understood, let alone reached, by very few. But this is
indeed the ultimate background of the whole system. The canonical saying goes:
“All the waters of the ocean have but one flavor, that of salt; so the sense of the
whole of the Law is only one, that of liberation.”
For the ultimate, the great nirvana, or more correctly, the “void,” the sunna, the Buddha uses the method of
the so-called “negative theology”; it is unnamable, indefinable,
incomprehensible to the human mind; one can only say what it is not, not what it
is, for one cannot even apply to it the category of Being. But how to ignore what
may be called the traces, the marks of Him who has no marks? Because “the lord
of men and gods” was called the perfect “awakened One.” As “unconquered and
intact beings,” similar to “lofty Overmen,” appear those who have travelled
along this path ; like lions in whom both anguish and terror are dead.
They see the past, they see the heavens and the infernal regions, they know this world
and the world beyond, the kingdom of death and the kingdom free from death,
the temporal and the eternal.
They are “like tigers, like bulls in a mountain
cave” though they appear as “beings free from vanity, who have appeared in the
world for the good of many, for the health of many, for compassion of the world,
for the good, the profit, and the health of men and gods.”
“I have passed beyond the brambles of opinions, I have acquired power over myself, I have reached the
path, I possess the knowledge, I have none who guide me,” says the Awakened
One of Himself. He is the “daring One who never hesitates, the sure guide, free
from passion, bright as the sunlight, free from pride, heroic”; he is the “One who
knows, who is dazzled by no fevers, overcome by no troubles, tempted by no
victories, stained by no stains”; He is “the great being who lives apart, freed
from all ties, no longer slave to any servitude”; He is the “worthy One who
keeps watch over Himself, of steady step, ready for the announcement,”
“inclined to none and disinclined towards none, sublime in soul, powerful,
impassible”; He is “the One whom no thirst burns, no smoke dims, and no mist
wets; a spirit who honors sacrifice and who rises up majestically as does no
other.”
Passions, pride, falsehood have fallen away from Him like mustard
seeds from the point of a needle. Beyond good, beyond evil, he has cast off both
chains, and detached from both pain and pleasure he is purified. Since He
knows, He no longer inquires: “How so?” He has reached the bottom of the
element free from death. He has left the human bond and the divine bond and
has freed Himself from all bonds; no one in the world can conquer Him, who has
for his domain the infinite and whose path is known neither by the gods nor by
angels, nor by ordinary men.
Notwithstanding the hyperbolical element in some of these attributes, an ideal
type takes definite shape from them against a background of grandeur and
spiritual virility which it would be hard to find in any other tradition, in
comparison to which the religious value of “sanctity” is pale and flaccid. Judged
by this standard, far from being a doctrine accessible to all, a doctrine that makes
things easy for the “spiritualists” because it has no dogma and no rites and is free
from exclusivities, the Buddhist path of awakening is a narrow one reserved for
those who possess an exceptional vocation and qualifications. In following it, it
may be said that the saying of the Katha Upanishad is also applicable: it is like
walking on a razor’s edge without help, either human or divine.
It is agreed that wisdom of this kind cannot be “popularized.” Indeed, it
should not even be indiscriminately communicated, for it is not without risk.
The Canon itself speaks of the consequences of the doctrine if wrongly interpreted: it
is like one who, having seized a serpent in the wrong way, sees it pounce on
him, causing death or mortal pain. The doctrine stands out and remains a
summit, bearing witness to what a superior humanity could conceive. As to the
forms in which Buddhism has become a religion sui generis, and, worse still, as
to those forms in which it is conceived and appreciated as a democratizing
humanitarian morality, they should be rightly considered as an unmitigated
contamination of the truth.
East & West, vol. 7, no. 7 (January 1957): pp. 319–27