An End to Suffering
Page 36
The Death of God
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 54. Paul Deussen, one of Nietzsche’s closest friends, was one of the most prominent Indologists of his time. But Nietzsche seems to have got much of the information about Buddhism from such books as Carl Friedrich Köppen’s, The Religion of the Buddha, which was also read by Schopenhauer, Wagner and the French historian Hippolyte Taine, whom Nietzsche greatly admired.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 141.
3 Ibid., p. 137.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 219.
5 Quoted in Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 5.
6 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 181.
7 Karl Marx, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 98–137.
8 For a well-informed and insightful discussion of Islamic modernists see Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982. Also see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962.
9 On Vivekananda see Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999, and by the same writer, Europe Reconsidered, Delhi, Oxford University Press, revised edn, 2002; Amiya P. Sen, Swami Vivekananda, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000.
10 Quoted in William Radice (ed.), Swami Vivekananda: The Modernization of Indian Tradition, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 28.
11 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Collected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, vol. 5, p. 27.
The Long Way to the Middle Way
1 Buddhist Birth Stories: Jakata Tales, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, London, George Routledge and Sons, 1925, pp. 163–4.
2 AN, p. 54.
3 MN, p. 340.
4 MN, p. 187.
5 Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 173.
6 MN, p. 335.
7 MN, p. 256.
8 Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, San Francisco, Haselwood Books/City Lights Books, 1970, pp. 202–3. For another view of Ginsberg in India see Gary Snyder, Passage Through India, San Francisco, Grey Fox Press, 1983.
9 Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 180. Also see Sutta Nipata, trans. as Woven Cadences of Early Buddhists, by E. M. Hare, Pali Text Society, London, 1945, pp. 405–24.
10 On the Buddha’s first teachers see MN, pp. 257–9.
11 On meditation see E. Conze, Buddhist Meditation, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997. Also see Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, London, Rider, 1969.
12 MN, p. 259.
13 MN, p. 174.
14 MN, p. 175 and p. 239.
15 MN, p. 340.
A Science of the Mind
1 The Dhammapada, trans. S. Radhakrishnan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1950, p. 110.
2 SN, p. 158.
3 Quoted from William Theodore de Bary (ed.), The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan, New York, Vintage, 1972, p. 100.
4 For a critique of the reductive view of consciousness, see John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, New York, NYRB Books, 1997 and, by the same author, Mind, Language and Society, New York, Basic Books, 1998.
5 SN, p. 595.
6 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett, New York, Dover, 1992, p. 12.
7 Ibid.
8 For more on the Yogachara school, see A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism, 1970, revised edn, Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 2000; Lal Mani Joshi, Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of India, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1977; Jay L. Garfield, Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.
9 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, London, Penguin, 1990. The literature on the links between Buddhism and modern science is growing fast. For an overview see B. Alan Wallace (ed.), Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Turning the Wheel
1 MN, pp. 261–2.
2 See MN, pp. 263–4.
3 SN, p. 1843.
4 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, pp. 106–7.
5 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1958, p. 964.
6 Ibid., p. 565.
7 Ibid., p. 611.
8 MN, pp. 203–4.
9 SN, p. 1843.
10 Quoted in Nanamoli, The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon, Kandy, BPS, 3rd edn, 1992, p. 32.
11 SN, p. 1843.
12 Quoted in Michael Carrithers, The Buddha, Oxford, 1983, p. 61.
13 Erasmus quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 237.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 162–3.
15 On science and meditation see ‘The Colour of Happiness’, New Scientist, 24 May 2003.
16 A. A. Long, and D. N. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers: Vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 155. Martha C. Nussbaum describes the Hellenistic philosophers in ways that make them seem very close to the Buddha. See her The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996. Also see A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, 2nd edn, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986.
17 MN, pp. 1092–3.
18 The Legend of Yasa is told in the Vinaya. See Hajime Nakamura, Gotama Buddha, Tokyo, Kosei, 2000, pp. 276–85.
19 Socrates quoted in Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 29. At the end of the book, Hadot mentions Buddhism and hopes that he has implied that the ‘ancients were closer to the Orient than we are’. For Hadot’s elegant attempt to rescue western philosophy from its academic cloisters see his Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1995.
20 MN, p. 534.
21 Ibid., p. 535.
22 Quoted in Nakamura, Gotama Buddha, p. 286.
23 Ibid., p. 289.
24 Quoted in Stephen Batchelor, The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture, Berkeley, Parallax Press, 1994, p. 38.
Looking for the Self
1 For the exchange between the Buddha and Vacchagotta see SN, p. 1393.
2 René Descartes, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 19.
3 For a detailed exposition of Buddhist theories of the self see S. Hamilton, Identity and Experience: The Constitution of the Human Being According to Early Buddhism, London, Luzac Oriental, 1996; S. Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
4 For a clear account of the five skandhas see Walpole Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, Oxford, Oneworld, rpt. 1997.
5 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 300.
6 Ibid., p. 301.
7 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, vol. 1, London, Chatto and Windus, 1964, p. 58.
8 Ibid., p. 60.
9 Ibid., p. 61.
10 MN, p. 927.
11 The Voice of the Buddha: Lalitavistara Sutra, trans. Gwendoline Bays, 2 VOLs, Berkeley, Dharma Publishing, 1983, pp. 175�
��7.
12 DN, vol. 2, pp. 53–4.
13 Quoted in William S. Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 68.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 112.
15 DN, vol. 2, p. 60.
16 For a modern interpretation of Nagarjuna’s philosophy see Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Centre: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, New York, Riverhead, 2000. Also see J. L. Garfield, Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 503. Among other modern thinkers, Heidegger is said to have found affinities between his ideas and Zen Buddhism. Michel Foucault was deeply interested in Buddhist philosophy and felt that a philosophy of the future could only come out of the non-western world or be ‘born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe’. See his dialogue with a Japanese monk in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.), Religion and Culture, New York, Routledge, 1999. For a feminist view of Buddhism see Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluhacek, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002.
The Fire Sermon
1 SN, p. 1143.
2 For a discussion of the legend of Angulimala see Richard F. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings, London, Athlone Press, 1996.
3 On the role of women in Brahminical patriarchy see Uma Chakravarti, ‘Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm: Towards a New Understanding of Gender Relations in Early Indian history’ in Kumkum Roy (ed.), Women in Early Indian Societies: Readings in Early Indian History, Delhi, Manohar, 2001.
4 SN, p. 222. For a thorough analysis of Buddhist attitudes towards women see Rita M. Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism, Albany, SUNY Press, 1993.
5 MN, p. 267.
A Spiritual Politics
1 SN, p. 176.
2 DN, vol. 2, p. 80.
3 See DN, vol. 3, p. 173.
4 Quoted in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 84.
5 On Buddhism in Thailand and Sri Lanka see S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984; Michael Carrithers, The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka, An Anthropological and Historical Study, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983; Richard F. Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, London, Routledge, 1988; H. L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
6 On Plato’s misadventure in Syracuse see M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity, London, Chatto and Windus, 1968.
7 For Nagarjuna’s advice to the king see Nagarjuna’s Letter, trans. Geshe Lobsang Tharchin and Artemus B. Engle, Dharamshala, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1979.
8 For the story about the king and the Brahmin see DN, vol. 1, p. 173.
9 SN, p. 177.
10 Ibid., p. 278. For a comprehensive study of Buddhist ethics, see D. Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, London, Macmillan, 1992.
Empires and Nations
1 Xenophon, Cyropaedia, trans. W. Miller, Cambridge, Mass., Loeb Classical Library, 1989.
2 On Alexander and the ascetics see Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 2, trans. Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough, New York, Modern Library, 1992, p. 190.
3 A. B. Bosworth presents a chilling account of Alexander’s brutalities in Alexander and the East, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. Also see his Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, London, Penguin, 1973 and Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander, London, Penguin, 1983. Nietzsche denounced Alexander as ‘the coarsened copy and abbreviation of Greek history’.
4 Arrian quoted in Bosworth, Alexander, p. 149.
5 Romila Thapar, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1997, p. 255.
6 Ibid., pp. 252–3.
7 Ibid., p. 339.
8 Shaku Soyen, Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot: Addresses on Religious Subjects, trans. D. T. Suzuki, New York, Weiser, 1971, p. 211. Also see Brian Victoria, Zen at War, New York, Weather-hill, 1998.
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 242.
10 Ernst Jünger quoted in Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, trans. John Shepley, London, Pimlico, 2002. Also see Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hoffmann, London, Allen Lane, 2003.
11 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, London, Papermac, 1991, pp. 21–2.
12 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. A F. Wills, London, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1952, p. 122.
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 238. For a radical Christian critique of modern political arrangements see Reinhold Niehbuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, 1932, rpt. Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. For a philosophical background to the idea of the state see Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1946.
14 The classic description of the rise of individualism in Europe is in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990. Burckhardt had a pessimistic view of the modern individual’s prospects, although he never went as far as his student, Nietzsche. See Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, New York, Pantheon, 1943. Also see ‘Burckhardt and Nietzsche’ in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957.
15 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976. For a stimulating analysis of philosophers conceptualizing a new human being, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962. Also see his introduction to Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1968.
16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, New York, Everyman’s Library, p. 32.
17 Ibid., p. 297.
18 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, p. 3.
19 Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ in The Outlook for Intelligence, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, Princeton, Bollingen, 1989, p. 24. Valéry was only one of the many European intellectuals forced to reconsider nineteenth-century pieties about history and progress. Also see José Ortega y Gasset, History as System, New York, Norton, 1962; Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968; Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision, E. B. Ashton (ed.), New York, New Directions, 1971; E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia, trans. Richard Howard, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998; Robert Musil, Precision and Soul, Burton Pike and David Luft (eds), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990; Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie, London, Routledge, 2001.
20 Sutta Nipata, trans. as Woven Cadences of Early Buddhists, by E. M. Hare, Pali Text Society, London, p. 118.
21 On the fate of Buddhism in China, Tibet and South-east Asia see Holmes Welch, Buddhism Under Mao, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1972; Tsering Shakya, Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947, New York, Penguin, 2000; Palden Gyatso, Fire Under the Snow: Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner, London, Harvill, 1997; François Bizot, The Gate, New York, Knopf, 2003.
22 Nikolai Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. D. Lowrie, London, Student Christian Movem
ent Press, 1935.
23 Václav Havel, Living in Truth, London, Faber, 1987, p. 70.
24 Ibid., pp. 154–5.
25 Nathuram Godse, May It Please Your Honour, Delhi, Surya Bharati Prakashan, 2000.
Western Dharmas
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, p. 142.
2 AN, p. 65.
3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 512.
4 Kerouac quoted in Carole Tonkinson (ed.), Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, New York, Riverhead, 1995, p. 31.
5 Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, New York, Riverhead, 1997. Also see M. Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotheraphy from a Buddhist Perspective, New York, Basic Books, 1995.
Overcoming Nihilism
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York, Viking, 1968, p. 866.
2 Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, p. 142.
3 For Nietzsche on Heraclitus see his little-known essay Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan, Illinois, Regnery, 1962. Also available on http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/ptra.htm.
4 Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, p. 142.
5 For an impressively nuanced view of interdependence in the contemporary world see Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, New York, Vintage, 2001. Also see Wright’s article in the New York Times, 11 September 2003.
The Last Journey
1 DN, vol. 2, pp. 107–8.
2 Ibid., p. 158.
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Originally published in 2004 by Pan Macmillan Ltd, Great Britain Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2004
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “Gridhakura Hill,” from Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg.