He believed that the Buddha offered a temptation to exhausted Europeans. He considered Buddhism a ‘danger’ partly because he admired it himself. He described the Buddha as a ‘physiologist’, administering to a depressed people, to late human beings…races grown kindly, gentle, over-intellectual who feel pain too easily’. He gave a succinct account of how he thought the Buddha dealt with the spiritual weariness caused by the collapse of old beliefs and the rise of nihilism in his time:
with life in the open air, the wandering life; with moderation and fastidiousness as regards food; with caution towards all emotions which produce gall, which heat the blood; no anxiety, either for oneself or for others. He demands ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness – he devises means for disaccustoming oneself to others. He understands benevolence, being kind, as health-promoting…His teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness, of antipathy, of ressentiment (‘enmity is not ended by enmity’: the moving refrain of the whole of Buddhism…)2
Nietzsche’s own solution to nihilism was the self-creating superman in a meaningless world, who not only lives in but also learns to love a world without value, direction and purpose. He spoke frequently of hardness, loneliness and struggle. From his intimate knowledge of physical and emotional pain, he concluded that life acquired meaning only through the odds it overcame.
This was salutary given the naive assumption Nietzsche struggled against in his time: that man was essentially good, if a bit mediocre, and that his happiness could be guaranteed through an improved state or technological innovation. But, proudly solitary himself, Nietzsche couldn’t see how the superman would live in a human community. If Marx overemphasized the social at the expense of the individual, Nietzsche did the opposite in proposing the superman as release from the soullessness and mediocrity of modern life. And he did not escape the assumptions of his own time.
At one level, the superman merely incarnates the sense of the self and heightened individuality that came to be especially prized after the decline of religion in Europe. In seeking to reach out beyond himself, he also embodies the hubris of modern man: the refusal to accept limits; the attempt to become the God which a great chasm had previously divided from man. Not surprisingly, while spelling out what he meant by self-overcoming, Nietzsche expressed a banal idea of human greatness; the few examples he gave of supermen were Julius Caesar, Borgia and Napoleon.
Though astonishingly prescient, he couldn’t foresee how his own ethic of the superman – overreaching, strenuousness, spirit of sacrifice, contempt for traditional morality – would, in an era where God is dead and everything is permitted, be enlisted in authentically nihilistic ideologies: how Hitler and Stalin would emerge as the real supermen, mobilizing everything – men, labour, natural environments, vast bureaucracies of death and destruction – in order to impose their will upon the earth. He also couldn’t see how technology with its destructive capacities, rather than individuals, would incarnate the will to power that he thought underlay all life, and, as an endless process without clear value, direction or purpose, make nihilism a universal, rather than a western or European, phenomenon.
Just before his collapse, Nietzsche was trying obsessively to undermine what he called man’s ‘erroneous articles of faith’, foremost among which was the notion of a stable and enduring individual identity – the ego that separated itself from the world, analysed and experimented upon it, and reduced it to formulas in a deluded effort to alter it.
In Nietzsche’s Buddhistic vision, ‘death, change, age…growth, that all are becoming’ i.e. in process.3 Since man wanted power and control over the chaos that is both himself and the world, he spun a web of ‘conceptual mummies’. He used reason to posit unity, substance and duration where there is only constant flux and change; these errors helped him make his world intelligible and bearable.
He praised Heraclitus for discovering
the eternal and exclusive process of becoming, the utter evanescence of everything real, which keeps acting and evolving but never is, as Heraclitus teaches us, is a terrible and stunning notion. Its impact is most closely related to the feeling of an earthquake, which makes people relinquish their faith that the earth is firmly grounded. It takes astonishing strength to transpose this reaction into its opposite, into sublime and happy astonishment.3
Nietzsche never ceased to think of the Buddha as a passive nihilist, and so failed to see that the Buddha, far from wallowing in Oriental nothingness, had offered a practical way of achieving such a sublimation: how human beings, beginning with mental skilfulness and meditation, could reach a perception of trishna, the state of endless desire, insecurity and frustration, and control and transmute their basic strivings into a recognition of impermanence. In his freedom from ressentiment, greed and hatred, the Buddha was like the superman who had liberated himself from the ‘morality of custom’ and acquired ‘a power over oneself and over fate’, which has ‘penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct’.
Like Nietzsche, the Buddha too had attempted to reaffirm the natural dignity of human beings without recourse to the ambitious schema of metaphysics, theology, reason or political idealism. Nietzsche himself recognized as much when he wrote:
The spiritual weariness he (the Buddha) discovered and which expressed itself as an excessive ‘objectivity’ (that is to say weakening of individual interest, loss of centre of gravity, of ‘egoism’), he combated by directing even the spiritual interests back to the individual person. In the teaching of the Buddha, egoism becomes a duty: the one thing ‘needful’, the ‘how can you get rid of suffering’ regulates and circumscribes the entire spiritual diet.4
This was the Buddha’s own project of self-overcoming. It was based on his unillusioned insight into what human beings, though bound by society, by impersonal forces they barely understood, could still do: realize within their own being and share with others the conditioned nature and interdependence of things, and the need for an ethical life – all the aspects of the Buddha’s teaching that were not only rediscovered by Buddhists in the West but also echoed by some of the great spiritual and intellectual figures living through the extraordinarily violent century prophesized by Nietzsche.5
The Last Journey
THE BUDDHA LIVED VERY long – about eighty years, at a time when most people died before thirty. He lived carefully – midday siestas, no evening meals. He bathed frequently in hot springs. But towards the end of his life he developed several diseases. He had back pains and stomach upsets. He had exhorted the bhikshus to meditate on the body, its fragile and repellent quality. He felt his own decay acutely, speaking once of how the body was kept going only by being bandaged up. His contemporaries, including his close disciples, died before him. Bimbisara, the king of Magadha, was murdered by his own son. The successor to Prasenajit, the king of Kosala, massacred the Buddha’s clan, the Shakyas, and razed Kapilavastu to the ground.
The Buddha’s farewells have an exhausted quality; they seem to be those of an essentially solitary man who has done, said and seen enough since that night in Bodh Gaya forty-five years earlier when he sat under the pipal tree and felt himself to be possessed of a liberating insight. Yet there is something grandly real and moving about his slow last journey across North India.
For more than twenty years, the Buddha had spent the monsoon months near Shravasti, at a monastery in a park donated to him by his rich lay follower, the merchant Anathapindika. He was there in his last year when the new king of Kosala, the successor to Prasenajit, sacked Kapilavastu. It had been a brutal affair. According to one source, the Shakyas were packed tight in pits dug into the ground and then trampled by elephants. The Buddha is said to have received the news silently.
He then heard that Sariputra, his closest disciple, had died. Sariputra’s younger brother brought to him the dead man’s alms-bowl, robe and some ashes wrapped in the fine cloth monks used as a water strainer.
The Buddha had a small relic shrine
made for these remains. When the rains stopped, he left Shravasti and travelled southwards. He hadn’t gone far when he heard that his other great disciple, Maudgalyayana, had died near Rajagriha, probably killed by mercenaries hired by rival sramanas.
At Rajagriha, he stayed at the hill with the vulture’s ledge that he had visited when he first left home, with the views of the green hills and the small caves, where he had met Bimbisara, meditated and preached, and where his envious cousin Devadutta had hurled the stone that wounded him.
Here the Brahmin minister of the king of Magadha, Ajatashatru, visited the Buddha. The Brahmin told him that Ajatashatru planned to attack the confederation of Vrijji tribes living north of Rajagriha. The Buddha revealed to him what he had said to the Vrijjis about the seven conditions of their well-being: as long as the Vrijjis followed them they were unlikely to be conquered by Ajatashatru.
The minister went away convinced that Ajatashatru would not succeed until he managed to find a way of creating dissent among the tribes. After he had gone, the Buddha gave the same discourse to the monks and added some more conditions that he thought would be vital to the integrity and longevity of the sangha.
He then moved on to the village on the banks of the Ganges, where the ministers of Magadha were building a fortress in preparation for the war against the Vrijjis. He ate with the Brahmin minister who had visited him in Rajagriha, and made a prophecy about the great city, Pataliputra (now Patna), which he thought would emerge there.
He crossed the Ganges and travelled to a village called Kotigama, where he addressed the monks on the four noble truths of suffering. Nearing Vaishali, he stopped in the mango grove of Ambapali, a famous courtesan. Ambapali, whose son had become a bhikshu, heard of his arrival and travelled to see him and to invite him to her house in Vaishali the next day for a meal.
While returning from her successful meeting with the Buddha, she ran into a convoy of eminent citizens from Vaishali who were planning to ask the Buddha to a meal the next day. They asked her to withdraw her invitation, but she refused. The Buddha told the citizens that he had already been invited. At her home, Ambapali prepared a fine meal and donated her grove to the sangha.
The Buddha stayed in this grove for a while. When the rains began that year, he asked the monks accompanying him to find their own retreats. He wished to be alone with Ananda, his attendant, and devote himself to meditation. But soon after arriving in a village called Beluva on the outskirts of Vaishali, he was attacked by a severe sickness.
When he got a little better, he told Ananda that, ‘It would not be fitting for me to attain nirvana without having addressed my attendants, and without having taken leave of the sangha.’ When Ananda replied that he was relieved that the Buddha would attain nirvana only after having determined something about the sangha, the Buddha replied:
Why does the order of Monks expect this of me? I have taught the dharma making no distinctions of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’…(and have) no teacher’s fist (in which certain truths are held back). If there is anyone who thinks: ‘I shall take charge of the order’, or ‘the order is under my leadership’, such a person would have to make arrangements about the order. But the tathagata does not think, ‘I will lead the order’, or ‘The order looks up to me’. When then should the tathagata determine something about the order?
He added:
Ananda, I am now old, worn out, venerable, one who has traversed life’s path, I have reached the term of life, which is eighty. Just as an old cart is made to go by being held together with straps, so the tathagata’s body is kept going by being strapped up. It is only when the tathagata withdraws his attention from outward signs, and by the cessation of certain feelings, enters into the signless concentration of mind, that his body knows comfort.1
He wanted his teaching to lead the sangha. He was clear about what he expected Ananda and the monks to do after his death:
You should live as islands unto yourselves, being your own refuge, seeking no other refuge; with the dharma as an island, with the dharma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge…
He recovered enough from his illness to go begging for alms in Vaishali. He had spent much time in the city and its shrines, and one afternoon, sitting under a mango tree he described them as ‘delightful’ to Ananda, he said that the world was so delightful that one might want to live in it for a century or more.
He asked Ananda to bring the monks living in Vaishali to Beluva. When they had assembled, the Buddha exhorted them to stay faithful to his teachings so that the religious life may last longer and announced that he would die in three months.
He went for alms to Vaishali the next day. He knew that it was his last trip to the city, and while returning from it, he stopped, turned round and gazed nostalgically at the city for a while.
At villages along his way, he gave discourses to monks. He probably wished to die in Shravasti. In a village called Pava, he stopped in the mango grove which belonged to a smith called Cunda. As was customary, the smith insisted on serving him a meal. Suspicious for some reason, the Buddha asked him not to serve one part of food to anyone but himself and throw the remainder into a hole after he had eaten. He thought that no one other than himself could digest it. But he ate it anyway, hoping not to offend his generous host.
Soon after the meal, the Buddha suffered an attack of bloody dysentery. Though exhausted, he insisted on walking on to the town of Kushinagara. He stopped to rest under a tree and asked for water. Ananda said that the nearby stream had been fouled by the passage of ox carts. But the Buddha told him to go and check and when Ananda did so he found the water miraculously clear and pure.
While the Buddha rested under a tree, a man called Pukkusa came along. He turned out to be a follower of Alara Kalama, the very first teacher the Buddha had approached after leaving Kapilavastu. Pukkusa saw the dirty robes the Buddha and Ananda were wearing and sent his servant to fetch a pair of gold-coloured robes, which he promptly presented to the Buddha and Ananda.
They kept walking and at a river called Hiranyavati the Buddha took his last bath. He worried that Cunda might be blamed for poisoning him, and told Ananda to persuade Cunda that his good intentions had earned him much good karma, and save him from guilt and remorse. The Buddha waded through another river and reached the sal grove of Kushinagara. Here he told Ananda that he was suffering, and asked him to prepare a bed with the head to the north. As he lay down on his right side, his feet placed on top of each other, flowers fell from the sal trees.
The Buddha knew he was not going to get up again. He gave his final instructions to Ananda: the monks could visit the four places, where he was born, enlightened, preached his first sermon and attained nirvana. When asked about his funeral arrangements, the Buddha told Ananda not to worry about them but to devote himself to his liberation: he said that believing that laymen and others would take care of his funeral.
Ananda was suddenly full of grief, and began to speak of how much he still had to learn from the Buddha – the man who had been so compassionate to him and who was about to die:
Enough, Ananda, do not weep and wail! Have I not already told you that all things that are pleasant and delightful are changeable, subject to separation and becoming other? So how could it be, Ananda – since whatever is born…is subject to decay – how could it be that it should not pass away?2
Ananda asked him not to pass away in Kushinagara, which he described as a ‘miserable little town of wattle-and-daub, right in the jungle in the back of beyond’. He had hoped, he said, that the Buddha would attain nirvana in one of the big cities, where a funeral in proper style could be held.
The Buddha replied that Kushinagara had been a great city in the past, and then told Ananda to inform its inhabitants of his impending death. The news, spreading fast, brought many more griefstricken people to the grove where the Buddha lay. Careful not to disturb the Buddha, Ananda announced them by their family names as they shuffled past.
A sramana called Subhad
ra also arrived and asked Ananda for a private audience with the Buddha. Ananda refused, but the Buddha overheard him and asked him to let Subhadra in. Subhadra asked him which of the Buddha’s famous contemporaries, the six sramana teachers, had attained enlightenment. The Buddha told him not to worry about such matters and taught him the dharma. Subhadra then became the last man to be accepted into the sangha by the Buddha.
The Buddha again stressed that his teaching, not an individual monk, was going to lead the sangha. Finally, he asked the monks who had assembled around him if they had any ‘doubts or uncertainty about him, the dharma, the sangha, or about the path or the practice’. He told them that they shouldn’t feel remorse afterwards, thinking that they had their teacher before them but failed to ask him face to face.
The monks were silent. The Buddha repeated his words a second and a third time.
Then he said that if the monks respected him too much to speak directly to him, they could put their questions through a fellow monk.
But the monks remained silent. It was late at night when the Buddha spoke to the monks again. ‘All conditioned things,’ he said, ‘are subject to decay – strive on untiringly.’ These were his last words.
When I read the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the account of the Buddha’s last journey, I thought of Gandhi. These two Indians had much in common: middle-caste men from regions peripheral to where they made their name, charismatic public figures who had renounced the calling of their ancestors and stressed individual awareness and self-control at a time of increasing violence.
Their melancholy last days also had much in common. In 1947, a few months before India’s independence, and his own assassination, Gandhi, with a growing sense of futility and helplessness, had moved through parts of the same region where the Buddha had travelled. The Hindu–Muslim animosity against which Gandhi had worked all his life had exploded into savagery as the partition of India approached. Muslims and Hindus murdered and raped each other, not even sparing small children, whom they often hacked to pieces. In Bengal and then Bihar, Gandhi, then a frail man of seventy-seven, walked from village to village, where the bodies lay heaped in burnt houses or in wells, or in bamboo groves awaiting vultures.
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