[Vkowefek]

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, 'Life is refuted'. But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence.

He praised Buddhism for setting out to treat 'suffering'as opposed to 'sin', but believed the treatment itself represented a surrender of life To me, Nietzsche here only shows himself to be a worldly intellectual attached to many things, without any experience of the spiritual path & fruit. For a Buddha, it is not expected a worldling would understand the vision of unsatisfactoriness and the fruits of renunciation.

Like many, Nietzsche saw the phenomenology of things but not their unsatisfactoriness.

This is very common, where the perception of the subjectiveness and impermanence of phenomena does not give rise to the vision of unsatisfactoriness.

For example, it is common today amongst many Buddhists to classify the Three Characteristics as anicca, anatta & dukkha (rather than anicca, dukkha & anatta). This is due to the vision (Dhamma-Eye) of unsatisfactoriness not arising.

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. The Dhammapada states: "Nirvana is the highest happiness". The Dhammapada states: "One gives up a lesser happiness to obtain a higher happiness". Nietzsche was mistaken because he was commenting about things he never experienced. The Buddha said his (higher) teaching had one sole purpose, namely, the unshakeable freedom (happiness) of mind.

For example, even if Nietzsche understood the proper meaning of "non-existence" (which he probably did not), as one who had never experienced the mental state of "non-existence" or "non-being", he was not qualified to comment on it.

Buddha's experience was one of seeing the unsatisfactoriness of the worldly condition, which resulted is his mind withdrawing inward & naturally developing (peaceful; blissful) samadhi and then, later, insight into emptiness. But Nietzsche seemed to comment on the 'top of the tree' without understanding how it is formed by its roots, trunk, nutrients, etc.

'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. If the author, above, struggles to understand the simplicity of Buddhism, then how can it be expected Nietzsche would understand?

The 1st Noble Truth cited by the author is not a "central" Buddhist passage. The 1st Noble Truth is simply the diagnosis of the different kinds of suffering and forms part of a four part formula that explains: (1) what suffering is; (2) how suffering arises; (3) what the end of suffering is; and (4) the means by which suffering is ended.

When a woman gives "birth" to a child and then must look after the child when the child has no mental/physical autonomy, this would certainly entail "suffering" on most occassions. As for the rest of the 1st Noble Truth, it is self-explanatory.

As for the 'three flavours' of suffering mentioned by the author, the interpretation is dubious.

In summary, the 1st Noble Truth is summarised by the Buddha's summary of it: "in short, the five aggregates of grasping are dukkha". The Buddha, in his enlightenment, discovered it is not really birth, sickness, death, separation, etc, which are suffering but it is grasping which is suffering.

This summary is the same as sankhara-dukkha, which means "suffering due to mental concocting"

Regards