davi—zen after zarathustra

Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche andBuddhismAuthor(s): Bret W. DavisReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 28 (AUTUMN 2004), pp. 89-138Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717843 .Accessed: 13/06/2012 14:28

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Zen After Zarathustra:

The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism

Bret W. Davis

Is

Nietzsche's affirmation of the world and oneself as "the will to power?and nothing besides"1 the path to a self-overcoming of nihilism; or is it, as

Heidegger contends, the "ultimate entanglement in nihilism"?2 Is Buddhism the

purest expression of a "passive nihilism," as Nietzsche claims; or does it teach a radical "middle path" that twists free of both the life of the will to power and a pessimistic negation of the will to live? Does the Buddhist path go so far as to intimate a great affirmation of living otherwise than willing?

From the outset, one thing does seem certain: venturing out to sail on the

"open sea" (GS 343) of Nietzsche's thought, we confront Buddhism as one of the most interesting and challenging "foreign perspectives" from which to

"question one's own."3 And yet, rather than let his exposure to this other tradi tion call into question his own philosophy of the will to power, Nietzsche him self more often used his interpretation of Buddhism as a "rhetorical instrument"4 for his critique of Christianity, crediting the former religion in the end only with the dubious honor of representing a more honest expression of a more advanced

stage of nihilism. Recent studies on this theme often begin by emphasizing Nietzsche's limited knowledge, his misunderstanding, and the distortions involved in his appropriation of Buddhism. Many then go on to develop what Robert Morrison has called the "ironic affinities" between Nietzsche and a Buddhism correctly understood.5 Although Morrison and others have pursued these affinities with respect to the Theravada tradition, profounder resonances

may in fact be found with the Mahayana tradition, of which Nietzsche remained

unfortunately ignorant.6 Nishitani Keiji, deeply versed in and influenced by both Nietzsche's philos

ophy and Zen Buddhist thought, has been the major precursor in sounding out such resonances. In a book that focuses on the "self-overcoming of nihilism" in

Nietzsche's thought, Nishitani writes: "Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcom

ing of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to

Mahayana."7 Nishitani, however, in the end goes beyond marking ironic affini ties and develops a "sympathetic critique" of Nietzsche from the standpoint of Zen. A few lines down from the above passage, he writes: "What is clear,

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 28, 2004

Copyright ?2004 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

89

90 Bret W. Davis

however, is that there is in Mahayana a standpoint that cannot yet be reached even by a [i.e., Nietzsche's] nihilism that overcomes nihilism, even though the latter may reach in that direction" (SN 185/180 tm).

In pursuing both this proximity and this difference, in this essay I shall repeat

edly return to Nishitani's interpretation of Nietzsche as well as to his own devel

opment of a philosophy of Zen. Nishitani's style, however, is to go with a thinker as far as he can in order to finally pass through and beyond him. When he runs

up against the limits of a sympathetic interpretation, he marks these limits and

then moves on. Hence, Nishitani is scarcely concerned with critically working

through the details of Nietzsche's own evaluation of Buddhism; nor does he pay much attention to the cruder formulations of the will to power in Nietzsche's

thought.8 If we, for our part, are to cultivate a more explicit Auseinandersetzung between Nietzsche and Buddhism, we need to step back and work through both

of these challenging aspects of Nietzsche's thought more patiently. There are

indeed profound points of resonance between Nietzsche and Buddhism, Zen in

particular; but there are also points of genuine confrontation that call for care

ful elucidation and reflection.9 I shall begin to develop this Auseinandersetzung by explicating and then criti

cally responding to Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism. Later, I shall back up and

begin again by developing and then responding to a Buddhist critique of Nietzsche.

Only in this manner, by working from both sides, can we flush out and pursue the more difficult questions regarding irreducible differences and ironic affinities. One

guiding thread that I shall follow through this dialogical confrontation is the ques tion of the relation between nihilism and will. The ultimate issue at hand, as sug

gested in my opening questions, is whether all attempts to get beyond the will only succeed in sublimating and exacerbating the nihilism of "life turned against itself," or, on the other hand, whether any willful attempt to "overcome nihilism" only hin

ders the "step back" through a releasement (Gelassenheit) of willing toward a way of being other than the very duality of will and will-lessness.

My contention, in short, is that ultimately the Auseinandersetzung comes down to the question of the will, that is to say, to a confrontation between Nietzsche's

radical affirmation and Buddhism's radical negation of the will. The question of

the depth and limits of the ironic affinities between the two boils down to the ques tion of whether and to what extent Zarathustra's "self-overcoming of the will to

power" meets up with Zen's reaffirmation of life after the "great death" of cutting off the roots of willing.

Nietzsche Contra Buddhism as Will-less Nihilism

Nietzsche once wrote in his notebooks: "I could become the Buddha of Europe:

yet this would of course be a counterpart [Gegenbild] to the Indian Buddha."10

Zen After Zarathustra 91

In order to fully appreciate Nietzsche's complex view of Buddhism, it is neces

sary to understand both sides of this remarkable statement.

On the one hand, Nietzsche held many aspects of Buddhism in high regard, and one can recognize many commonalities in their philosophies. Both argue the

ubiquity of becoming and the composition and dissolution of all entities, against the metaphysical and theological beliefs in an enduring and substantial self. Both trace the latter error to a "faith in grammar" and the "seduction of language" which posits a unified and enduring subject, where in fact "the doer" is "merely a fiction added to the deed" (GM 1.13), or where a name points only to an imper manent composition of "aggregates" (P. khandha).n Both see the path to wis dom in not flinching from peering into the abysses of life and death. Buddhism often serves in this regard as a foil for Nietzsche's critique of Christianity. "Buddhism," Nietzsche writes, "is a hundred times more realistic than

Christianity"; it is "the only genuinely positivistic religion in history," which has no need of the "concept of God" and which speaks of the "struggle against suf fering" rather than the "struggle against sin." Hence, "the self-deception of moral

concepts lies far behind" Buddhism; indeed Nietzsche sometimes even credits it with standing "beyond good and evil" (A 20).

Christianity, by contrast, posits its morality of evil and sin as weapons with which to usurp the power of the strong; it is said to be, in short, a religion of ressentiment. In the "slave morality" of the "priests," as opposed to the "mas ter morality" of the warriors, an "ascetic ideal" that denies the instincts of life is posited due to a lack of strength to withstand open competition. Nietzsche's

genealogy of morality aims to reveal the hypocrisies of the priests by exposing their own subterranean quest for power and revenge. "As is well known," writes

Nietzsche, "the priests are the most evil enemies?but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence [Ohnmacht] that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions" (GM 1.7).

Buddhism is said to teach freedom from ressentiment and hate. Quoting The

Dhammapada's lines, "Not by enmity is enmity ended; but by friendliness is enmity ended," Nietzsche compares Buddhism with his own struggle to free himself from

"vengefulness and rancor" (EH 1:6).12 And yet, here Nietzsche asserts a crucial dif ference between two types of freedom from ressentiment, namely, between that which springs from strength and that which springs from weakness. The unhealthy affects of ressentiment, such as anger and "impotent lust for revenge," as well as the fact of the "natural inclination of the sick" toward these reactions, "was com

prehended by that profound physiologist, the Buddha" (ibid.). The Buddha's pre scription was not a moral one, for emotions such as righteous indignation would

only "burn one up faster." But this obsession with "physiological hygiene" is in the

end, according to Nietzsche, a sign of weakness. A strong freedom from ressenti

ment, on the other hand, would no longer aver from these feelings because they are

"harmful," but rather because they are seen as "beneath one."

92 Bret W. Davis

Likewise, Buddhism's stance beyond good and evil, Nietzsche argues, was

not achieved by the strength to affirm life, with all its negative and painful ("evil") sides as necessary counterparts to its good and pleasurable moments, but rather by an overly cultured and hypersensitive affectivity that has learned to treat the passions "hygienically." In contrast to Christianity, which out of "an

overpowering desire to inflict pain" needed "barbaric concepts and values to

become master over barbarians," Buddhism, according to Nietzsche, "is a reli

gion for late men, for gracious and gentle races who have become overspiritual and excessively susceptible to pain (Europe is far from ripe for it); it is a way of leading them back to peace and cheerfulness.... Buddhism is a religion for the end and the weariness of civilization" (A 22).

Nietzsche asserts that "among the nihilistic religions, one must always clearly distinguish the Christian from the Buddhist." While the latter is said to

be the "expression of a fine evening, a perfect sweetness and mildness," the former is "a degeneracy movement" founded on "a rancor against everything well-constituted and dominant" (WP 154). Whereas Christians still covertly attempt to assert themselves against the strong (and still cling to otherworldly salvation from the sorrows of this world) by projecting a "kingdom of God," Buddhists have resigned themselves to their own impotence and seek merely to conserve their remaining strength by way of a kind of "hedonism of the

weary" (WP 155). Nietzsche thus understands Buddhism as a "passive nihilism," a sign of

"decline and recession of the power of the spirit," as opposed to "active

nihilism," which represents rather a sign of "increased power of the spirit" (WP 22,23). The active nihilist would not just passively resign himself to the "deval uation of the highest values," but would aggressively embody the turning of the

Christian "will to truth" on itself, thus effecting a rebound from the ideal of "God is truth" to the "fanatical faith that 'All is false.'" At one point Nietzsche calls this rebound a "Buddhism of action" (WP 1). While he no doubt in part has the

Russian nihilists in mind here, Nietzsche certainly recognizes himself and his own project in this turning of Western metaphysics and morality on itself, and

he seeks to lead this movement through a "self-overcoming of nihilism."

At one point in his notebooks Nietzsche goes so far as to refer to himself as

"the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself" (WP Preface

3). In a published text, however, Nietzsche looks forward to "he" who is

"younger, 'heavier with future', and stronger than I," who will be able to over

come "great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism," and usher in "the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his

hope to man." Nietzsche defers to his projected figure "Zarathustra" as "this

Antichrist and antinihilist [i.e., anti-Buddhist]; this victor over God and noth

ingness [i.e., nirvana]" (GM 11.24).


Nietzsche's appraisal of Buddhism can thus be summarized as follows: Buddhism would represent a more advanced stage of nihilism than nineteenth

century Europe, which had yet to recognize the "death of God," much less to

enlighten all the shadows of his corpse in the grammar of our language and in the truths of our science. Nietzsche suggests, then, that "a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable" ( WP132) as a pessimistic type of philosophy to be used as a "hammer" to sound out false ideals in the twilight hours of Western civiliza tion. This is the reason for Nietzsche characterizing himself as "the Buddha of

Europe"; for it is necessary to pass through this European Buddhism as a kind of catharsis if we are to once again learn to remain faithful to the earth, to become

capable of affirming life to the extreme of willing its eternal recurrence. A European Buddhism would be the abyss into we must descend, the dark

est night before the dawn, or, to adapt H?lderlin's language, the "danger" where alone the "saving power" of the will to power could grow in strength. The

"European Buddha" would, therefore, be only a transitional mask for Nietzsche, one still turned toward the negative face of existence. In order to effect the turn to a revaluation of the earth?the conversion that would join peak and abyss together so that one could say with Zarathustra: "that which has hitherto been

your ultimate danger has become your ultimate refuge" (Z III. 1)?Nietzsche claims that it is necessary for him to become rather "a counterpart to the Indian Buddha."

Nirvana: The Will to Extinction of Life or Life After the Extinction of Will?

It has been suggested that Nietzsche may have first conceived of the idea of "die

ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen" when reading Hermann Oldenberg's Buddha in 1881,13 and that "Nietzsche's notations on Zarathustra make reference to spe cific pages in Oldenberg's book in the context of the Recurrence."14 Be that as it may, decisive differences must be pointed out in this regard. Not only is the notion of the eternal return of "the same" foreign to Buddhist thought; more sig nificantly, it is precisely releasement from the wheel of samsara that is the

expressed goal of Buddhist practice, and not the affirmation of its eternal revo lution. The crucial question will be how to interpret this release. Is the release

ment or liberation of nirvana to be understood as a mere negative "freedom from" (a Gelassenheit von) involvements in the karmic world of samsara; or would extinguishing the will of the ego also positively free one for a nonegois tic engagement in (a Sicheinlassen auf) the world reaffirmed? For Nietzsche, in any case, the very idea that one could attain releasement from the cycle of

willful karma, the very idea that "the will would become not-willing [Nicht Wollen]" is but an illusory "fable song of madness" (Z 11.20 tm).

94 Bret W. Davis

In one of his notes Nietzsche introduces his "most abysmal thought" as fol lows: "existence, as it is, without meaning or aim, yet inescapably recurring

without any finale in nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence'.... This is the most extreme form of nihilism. . . . The European form of Buddhism" (WP 55 tm). The European Buddha would apparently preach an eternally recurring samsara with no possibility for nirvana?and this would indeed be a "strange form of Buddhism"!15 Nietzsche, it would seem, seeks to affirm precisely that which Buddhism seeks to deny. The Buddha would be the preacher of the extinction of the cyclical life of suffering, whereas Nietzsche's Zarathustra would be "the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle" (Zill 13.1).

In his speech on "the preachers of death," Zarathustra alludes to three of "the four sights" that set the young Siddhartha out on his path of renunciation of the life of sensual pleasure and social power. "They encounter a sick man or an old

man or a corpse, and immediately they say, 'Life is refuted'. But only they them selves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence" (Z 19). Nietzsche suggests that he too peers deeply into the suffering face of life, but with different eyes, eyes that are able to interpret life's meaninglessness dif

ferently, eyes that are able to lay their own will into life and justify its suffering. Zarathustra summons those "who give themselves their own will and reject all

resignation [Ergebung]" (Zill 5.3). But are we left with only this either/or choice between "will" and "resignation"? Is there a "middle path" beyond this duality?

Nietzsche passes over in silence the fourth sight, that of the wandering men dicant who seeks a way through and beyond suffering. Or perhaps this "renouncer" is the one in Nietzsche's story who says, "Life is only suffering," and to whom Zarathustra responds: "see to it, then, that you cease! See to it, then, that the life which is only suffering ceases!" (ZI 9). But the "middle path" (Sk. madhyam? pratipad) discovered by the Buddha was not simply that of asce tic renunciation, and we need to ask whether what gets "extinguished" in nir vana is not life as such, but rather the life of cyclical birth and death of the ego, the nihilistic "willful" life of samsara. Everything thus depends on how one

understands nirvana. Is nirvana a simple nullification of life; is it a "negative theological" projection of a Hinterwelt; or might it be an existential death that

gives new life, a conversion to a way of being-in-the-world radically other than will to power?

Let us begin by recounting the Four Noble Truths. The first tells us that samsaric life is pervaded by "suffering" or "existential unsatisfactoriness"

(P. dukkha). The second names the proximal cause of this suffering as "thirst" or "craving" (P. tanh?; Sk. trisna). The third claims that the cessation of suf

fering can be brought about by the "complete cessation of that very thirst, giv ing it up, renouncing it, emancipating oneself from it, detaching oneself from it."16 The cutting off of all craving is nirvana, liberation from samsara, the wheel of "willful existence." The fourth truth indicates the Noble Eightfold Path that


leads to this cessation of craving. Let us note here that the sixth aspect of this

path is called "right effort" (P. samm? v?y?ma), a kind of "energetic will"17 to

cut off unwholesome states of mind and to cultivate wholesome ones. This "ener

getic will," which aims at a complete cessation of the will of "craving," can in one sense be understood as a kind of transitional "will not to will." As Morrison has pointed out, there are texts that speak of "abandoning tanh? by means of

tanh?," and of an "appropriate desire [P. chanda]" to be employed in the over

coming of the desire that leads to suffering.18 Nietzsche would interject here that, insofar as "willing" characterizes the

whole of existence, not only is nirvana a nihilistic nothingness, but the "right effort" to attain the total cessation of willing is the self-contradictory "will to

nothingness." According to Nietzsche, the "ascetic ideal" of this will to not will is a self-contradictory phenomenon of "life against life." As life is nothing other than the will to power, the negation of will by the "renouncer," like that of the "ascetic priest," can only be apparent (GM III. 13). Nietzsche's genealogy of

morals attempts to uncover the weakness of will that has degenerated into self

denial, and which now threatens to lead to a passive nihilism or what he calls a

"Buddhism for Europeans" (GM Preface 5). In conclusion to his genealogy of morals he writes:

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself?all this

means?let us dare to grasp it?a will to nothingness, an aversion [Widerwillen] to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! (GM III.28)

Does the characterization of samsara as willful craving, together with the goal of nirvana as the extinguishing this craving, mean that Buddhism is founded on a self-contradictory ascetic ideal, a will to extinction?

Is there a positive notion of action or of "will" in Buddhism? On the one hand, it is possible to show that just as Buddhism acknowledges an array of relative

joys and pleasures within the realm of dukkha, so too does it recognize produc tive uses of tanh?.19 Craving can be turned against itself. But this is precisely the contradiction that Nietzsche criticizes. The deeper question is whether there is in Buddhism a positive notion of action as such, an affirmation or reaffirma tion of the activity of life for its own sake. Does Buddhism harbor the possibil ity of a radical transformation of action such that it is no longer determined by "will"? Already in Theravada Buddhism we find indications in this regard.

Walpola Rahula remarks: "An Arahant, though he acts, does not accumulate

karma, because he is free from the false idea of self, free from 'thirst' for con

tinuity and becoming-For him there is no rebirth."20 And yet, is action here

96 Bret W. Davis

still thought of as something essentially negative, something despite which the Arahant is able to proceed toward the final peaceful extinction of parinirv?na? In Nietzsche words, does one here need "to perform even good actions only for the time being, merely as a means?namely, as a means to emancipation from all actions" (WP 155)? In response to Nietzsche's critique of passive nihilism, it would not be enough, then, to recuperate a positive sense of will as "right effort," if this effort is merely an unfortunately necessary means (a necessary evil) on the way to the extinction of action altogether.

But this apparently either/or choice?between "affirmation of life as the will to power" and "negation of the will as annihilation of life as such"?assumes that life is and could only ever be defined by the will to power. Might nirvana be understood as a great negation that makes possible a reaffirmation of another

way of being-in-the-world? Is there a notion of enlightened action that not only "does not accumulate karma," but which reaffirms the world of becoming in its own right? Is the possibility of affirming life's activities restricted in Buddhism to their use as a means to their ultimate negation; or is there a "lion's roar" of

the Buddha that says No to (the) life (of will) so that it can one day awaken chil

dren of tender Yeses to (the) life (of non-willing)? Such a reaffirmation of life would depend on an interpretation of nirvana in

a "positive" sense, or at least in a sense other than that of sheer annihilation. Nietzsche's critique assumes that life as such is will to power, and hence that

the goal of nirvana could only be an expression of a passive nihilism, a nega tion of existence as such or a paradoxical "will to nothingness." But the Buddha in fact rejects both the doctrine of annihilationism (P. ucchedavadd) and the

craving for non-existence (P. vibhava-tanha). His rejection of these nihilistic

interpretations of existence and nirvana suggests that nirvana must have a "pos itive" sense, that there would be a reaffirmation of life after the extinction of

craving. The early Buddhist texts, however, offered relatively few explicit indi

cations in this regard, and this reticence to give a positive determination to nir vana allowed earlier generations of Western scholars to misinterpret nirvana as

a pessimistic doctrine of annihilation.21 In playing one teaching or "expedient means" off another in an attempt to

point toward "that" which is neither a "reified something" nor a "nihilistic noth

ing," the historical Buddha perhaps weighted his teaching of nirvana in the direc

tion of countering the Atman metaphysics of his day. However, while his silence

in response to requests for a positive depiction of nirvana effectively thwarted

the reifying tendency of language and the metaphysical inclination of specula tion, it also leaves the door open to the misunderstanding of nirvana as a doc

trine of annihilationism. The few indications in the early Buddhist texts of a

positive sense of nirvana, as, for example, an "unconditioned realm," are there

fore highly significant. In a famous passage from the Ud?nay we read: "O

bhikkhus, there is the unborn, ungrown, and unconditioned. Were there not the


unborn, ungrown, and unconditioned, there would be no escape for the born,

grown and conditioned."22 The characterization of nirvana as a "domain" or "realm" (Sk. ?yatana or

dh?tu)23 that is "unconditioned" (Sk. asamskrta) is a striking claim; for accord

ing to the Buddha's ontological middle path between "eternalism" (Sk. s?s

vatav?da) and "annihilationism" (Sk. ucchedav?da), beings do in fact exist, but

only as mutually "conditioned" phenomena in a world of "dependent co

origination" (Sk. prat?tyasamutp?da), and not as unconditioned substances with their "own being" (Sk. svabh?va). The assertion of nirvana as an "unconditioned realm" thus might be (and has been) seen as a relapse back into the metaphysi cal assertion of a transcendent world outside the realm of dependent co

origination. Initially the appellation "unconditioned" (or unborn and undying, that is, untouched by the samsaric wheel of birth-and-death) was often reserved for the Dharma, the Buddhist Law that teaches that all is conditioned; in other

words, the only thing "permanent" would be "the law of impermanence." But

Mahayana sutras, with their textual layers of expedient teachings and their ten

dency toward positive expression, boldly assert such notions as an uncondi tioned Buddha basis that sustains from below, an unborn Buddha-nature that dwells within, and a Buddha Land that beckons from the "other shore" beyond the suffering of this world.

The question becomes: Is Mahayana Buddhism able to affirm a life of nir vana only at the cost of positing a metaphysical realm cut off from the physical world of samsara? On the one hand, just as one cannot simply deny the "world

negating" content and tone of many early Buddhist teachings, at least on the sur

face of its texts the Mahayana movement again and again risks falling back into the error of eternalism. And just as he denounces what he sees as a "passive nihilism" in (Theravada) Buddhism, Nietzsche would be quick to criticize the

positive depictions of the "other shore" in Mahayana Buddhism as a nihilistic devaluation of this world. But there are layers of Mahayana teachings, where one "expedient means" (Sk. up?yd) is both undergirded and often undermined

by a deeper teaching; and the deepest of these layers is no doubt that of the enig matic teaching of the "nondual" (Sk. advaya) relation between nirvana and sam

sara, between Boddhisattva wisdom and worldly passions, and between the eternal Buddha Land and the transitory here and now.

The Vimalakirti Sutra tells us that the Buddha Lands are not somewhere else, but rather "the various kinds of living beings are themselves the Buddha Lands of the Bodhisattvas"; it is only that these beings do not yet see the purity of this world due to the impurity of their way of seeing.24 In learning to see that "form is none other than emptiness" and that "emptiness does not represent the extinc tion of form," one ceases to "yearn for nirvana" and to "loath this world," and is able to "enter the gate of nondualism."25 Nagarjuna tersely asserts this doctrine of nondualism when he writes: "The limits (i.e., realm) of nirvana are the limits

98 Bret W. Davis

of samsara. Between the two, also, there is not the slightest difference whatso

ever."26 Jay Garfield gives the following helpful interpretation of these enigmatic yet crucial lines. "To be in samsara is to see things as they appear to deluded con

sciousness and to interact with them accordingly. To be in nirvana, then, is to see

those things as they are?as merely empty, dependent, impermanent, and non

substantial, but not to be somewhere else, seeing something else_Nagarjuna is emphasizing that nirvana is not someplace else. It is a way of being here."27

The way things are here and now, according to Buddhism, is neither existence nor non-existence, but rather the middle way of dependent co-origination. When this dynamic process of interconnected becoming is radically thought through, according to Nagarjuna, there is no (substantial) "thing" that comes into and

goes out of existence. And this means that each and every phenomenal event is marked by?in the words of his famous eightfold negation?"non-origination, non-extinction; non-destruction, non-permanence; non-identity, non-differenti

ation; non-coming (into being), non-going (out of being)."28 The "uncom

pounded" is thus not someplace else, but is this world of non-substantial

becoming seen aright. According to Nagarjuna, the root of samsaric existence is the activity or disposition (Sk. samsk?ra) that compounds phenomena into reified forms, forms that we attach ourselves to and then suffer the loss (of con

trol) of. The "wise one" who sees into this vicious circle, therefore, ceases to

"act" in the sense of "to create compounds." But this cessation is presumably not a cessation of all "activity" as such; indeed, as Garfield puts it, by ceasing the activity of reification "we can achieve. . . a nirvana not found in an escape

from the world but in an enlightened and awakened engagement with it."29 The

right effort to attain nirvana is thus not a will to nothingness, but leads rather to the realization that there is nothing to "attain."30 Thus asamskrta refers not to an eternal realm outside the conditioned world of becoming, but to a more orig inary way of perceiving and dwelling in the world of dependent co-origination.

This nondualism of samsara and nirvana, however, is not a simple identity. It

is neither a dualism (since nirvana is not some other place outside this world), nor is it a sheer nothingness, a negation of existence as such. Yet the world reaf

firmed is not simply the same as the initial world of "attachment" (P./Sk.

up?d?na). Rather, nirvana implies a different way of being-in-i/ns-world. Yet

how can we characterize this difference? Negatively speaking, we may assume

that enlightened action would not be driven by attachment, craving, or, pre

sumably, the will to power. In following the return movement in Buddhism back

toward a reaffirmative characterization of being-in-the-world, we must not loose

sight of the importance of this initial moment of negation. The negation of these modes of "willful" being-in-the-world marks the radical difference between an

enlightened "re-affirmation" and an ignorant craving for and attachment to life.

Nirvana, as a "blowing out of the flame of craving and attachment," demands

first of all a radical negation of the will. A reaffirmation of the world of activity


is made possible, however, only by way of a second?equally necessary?nega tion, namely, a negation of any sublated craving for and attachment to tran

scendent repose in the realm of nirvana. The event of nirvana thus paradoxically completes itself only in a movement through its own negation. Saigusa

Mitsuyoshi writes that this dialectical movement toward reaffirmation through double negation can already be found in the early sutras. The Suttanip?ta, for

instance, often instructs us not only to discard "this world," but also to discard "that world" of the beyond. Saigusa interprets the first negation to signify the

"negative" moment of nirvana, the "going forth" (Jp. os?) from this world of

craving and ignorance, and the second negation to indicate a "positive" moment of "returning" (Jp. genso) to compassionate activity within the world of condi tioned existence. This movement of return, he adds, is not that of a one

dimensional circle, but rather that of a three-dimensional spiral.31 This dynamic dialectic of reaffirmation through double negation is clearly developed in the

Mahayana tradition, as succinctly stated in the key phrase of the Heart Sutra: "form is emptiness; emptiness is form." Phenomenal beings (forms; Sk. rupd) are emptied of any reified substantial essence (Sk. svabh?va); yet emptiness essentially empties itself into and as the eventful suchness of phenomenal be

ings in their dependent co-origination.

The Activity of Life Reaffirmed: The Doing of Non-doing and the Samadhi of Play

Yet how are we to characterize the "activity" of a reaffirmed life? Does the dou ble negation of nirvana lead to a different way of acting in the world, a way that is spontaneous or natural, as opposed to egoistic or willful? The Vimalakirti Sutra points in this direction when it writes that true "quiet sitting," where "you manifest neither body nor will," is not a matter of "sitting in quiet meditation under a tree in the forest," but rather of "not rising out of your samadhi of com

plete cessation and yet showing yourself in the ceremonies of daily life."32 It is the Zen tradition that most clearly and thoroughly develops this Mahayana stress on practice and realization in the very midst of everyday activities. This reaf firmation of everyday activity is enhanced by way of an integration of the this

worldly orientation of pre-Buddhist Chinese thought. The Zen tradition tells us, for example, that "ordinary mind is the Dao."33 Like nirvana, the Dao is most "unattainable" even though it lies directly underfoot; if you direct yourself toward it you go away from it. Here too we find that the radical step back requires a double negation. The modern Zen master Shibayama Zenkei comments on this

phrase: "When we have broken through the barrier where our ordinary mind is not at all ordinary mind, we can for the first time return to our original ordinary mind."34 Likewise, in response to the early Buddhist emphasis on the (first)

100 Bret W.Davis

negation of the profane life of worldly passions, Zen iconoclasm emphasizes the (second) negation of the transcendent realm, instructing us to "kill the Buddha" in order to return "the holy" to the most profane phenomena of this

world, like "three pounds of flax" or even a "shitstick."35 Zen practice, accord

ingly, does not lead to an ascetic rejection of this world or a mystical medita tion on other shores, but to a reaffirmation of the extraordinary ordinariness of

everyday activities such as "carrying water and hauling firewood" or "washing your bowls" after a meal.

The Zen synthesis of Mahayana Buddhism with Chinese thought was medi ated by the practice of using existing terms (mostly Daoist) to translate and inter

pret Buddhist concepts. The most important example of "matching terms" (Ch.

ge-yi) in the present context is that of wu-wei (Jp. mu-i), a word that was already used to connote a positive sense of "non-doing" in classical Chinese thought, and which was subsequently also used to translate asamskrta ("unconditioned") and nirvana. Although the literal meaning of wu-wei is "non-doing" in the sense

of "to do nothing," already in early Chinese ethical and political thought it was

used in a positive sense, as the proper way for a king to rule, namely, not by force of will, but by example of forbearance. Moreover, the "doing" to be refrained from is not any and all activity, but only that artificial activity (Ch. ren

wei; Jp.jin-i) that originates from egoistic desires and revolts against the natu

ral ways of the Dao. The Dao itself "acts by not acting," and human "doing

non-doing" (Ch. wei wu-wei) is accordingly a matter of modeling oneself on the movement of the Dao. This "doing non-doing" is not a mere antihumanistic pas

sivity, for human beings too find their place as one of the "four great things within the realm of being." Stepping back from artificial or willful action, the cosmos falls into order when: "human beings model themselves on the earth; the earth models itself on heaven; heaven models itself on the Dao; and the Dao

models itself on (its own) natural spontaneity."36 Under the influence of this Daoist notion of wu-wei, in the Zen tradition asamskrta?which, as we have

seen, in Mahayana thought already implied the unconditioned (nirvana) in the midst of the conditioned (samsara)?takes on the concrete nuances of "natural and without artifice" (Ch. wuwei-ziran; Jp. mui-jinen), and of dwelling in accord with the natural rhythms and "virtues" (Ch. de) of the Dao.

The modern Zen master Morimoto Seinen explains how the Zen tradition took

up both these Indian and Chinese backgrounds into its contrasting notions of

"conditioned doing" (Sk. samskrta; Ch. you-wei; Jp. u-i) and "unconditioned

non-doing" (Sk. asamskrta; Ch. wu-wei; Jp. mu-i). He writes that the notion of

u-i depicts the world of samsara temporally as the cycle of birth-and-death, and

spatially as the world of conflict, inequality, and rigid discrimination. The world

of mu-i, on the other hand, was initially projected as an image of an ideal world, a transcendent space and eternal time outside this world of death and strife. This


projection, however, ceases to function as an expedient means if we are led to

think that there is no path that could connect this other world to the one in which we dwell. In fact, what Zen teaches is that these realms are not separated, and one can lay hold of mu-i right in the midst of u-i. In this way the awakened per son brings together into one psychological fact the four meanings of the term

mu-i, namely: (1) adding nothing artificial in deference to what is natural; (2) that which does not change and is not subject to birth-and-death (i.e., the tradi tional Buddhist notion of asamskrta as opposed to samskrta); (3) not doing any

thing [willful or artificial] ; and (4) the Daoist political theory of educating others

naturally by example of one's great virtue and lack of egoistic desire (i.e., with out depending on external rules of morality and ritual).37

Nishitani has further developed this multiple Zen perspective of "non-doing" (mu-i) in dialogue with Western philosophers including Nietzsche and

Heidegger. Jan van Bragt, in his translation of Nishitani's Religion and

Nothingness, has skillfully rendered the opposing term u-i (samskrta) here as

"being-at-doing." This being-at-doing, according to Nishitani, is a matter of

karma; in other words, the vicious circle of volitional action and the disposi tions that both result from these willful acts and compel us on to further acts. This existence as being-at-doing has "the character of an inexhaustible task that has been imposed on us, which means that we can maintain our existence in time

only under the form of constantly doing something. Being in time consists essen

tially in being obliged to ceaselessly to be doing something."38 This ceaseless

cycle of compulsory/volitional activity and debt can only come to an end by abandoning "the standpoint of karma," and by a conversion from being-at-doing to non-doing (mu-i).

And yet, as we might expect, Nishitani stresses that this conversion does not settle down on "the field of nirvana," but rather comes full circle in a 360-degree spiraling return to what he calls "the field of samsara-s/ve-nirvana" (RN 275/250). The "great negation" of emptiness or sunyata does not put an end to all activity, but clears the ground for a radically different kind of ceaseless activ

ity, one no longer centered on the ego and producing karmic debt. On the field of samsara-sive-nirvana, "constant doing is constant non-doing," and "all being

at-doing. .. takes the shape of non-doing." Now "all our work takes on the char acter of play," for here "working and playing become manifest fundamentally and at bottom as sheer, elemental doing," or what Buddhism calls "playful samadhi" (Jp. yuge-zammai) (RN 211-79/252-53). Nishitani uses the image of the child to depict the "dharmic naturalness" (Jp. jinen-h?ni) of an innocent

activity that is at once play and elemental earnestness; "for the child is never more earnest than when engaged in play" (RN 281/255). The child at earnest

play serves as an image for the "radical spontaneity" that characterizes life after the extinction of the will.

102 Bret W.Davis

Nishitani on the Limits of Nietzsche's

Self-Overcoming of Nihilism

Does this "playful samadhi" not remind us, however, of Nietzsche's own image of "the child" as the third metamorphosis of the spirit who represents "a new

beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes'" (Z I 1)? In his earlier book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, Nishitani himself

develops one of the most insightful interpretations of Nietzsche's closeness to Zen Buddhism by focusing on Nietzsche's notions of eternal recurrence, amor

fati, and play. The experience of the eternal recurrence of the same, Nishitani points out, threat

ens to crush the will with the weight of fatalistic necessity. Only if the will is strong

enough to affirm life?all of life?unconditionally could it withstand the test of this greatest weight; only then could it undergo a "turn of need" (Wende der Not)

whereby necessity (Notwendigkeit) becomes one with freedom. Here the will turns

into love of fate, and fate is united with the self. Nishitani interprets Nietzsche's

phrase ego fatum to imply that "the world moves at one with the self, and the self moves at one with the world." "This idea," he goes on to say, "could be thought of as close to the Buddhist idea of 'karma'; however, Nietzsche's standpoint is a

fundamentally creative one" (SN 78/50 tm). This "creativity" would mark a deci sive difference, for amor fati would not be a matter of suffering an external com

pulsion, but would mean that the "world appears as the 'playful' activity of will to power and at the same time as fate" (SN 75/48). Commenting on Nietzsche's lines: "Fate, says the grumbler, the fool calls it?play," Nishitani writes: "To immerse oneself in the 'play' of the samsaric world and its groundless activity, and to live it to the utmost, is the 'pantheistic' life" of Nietzsche's new Dionysian "religion." Amor fati would be a matter of joyful participation in the "divine play" (g?ttliches Spiel) of the "worlding of the world." Here both the concepts of "neces

sity" and "will" would be eliminated, suggests Nietzsche at one point ( WP1060), and Nishitani interprets this to imply that "complete fate comes to be, just as it is,

complete freedom," and "effort remains effort and yet becomes effortless" (SN 95/62 tm).

Nishitani concludes that this "turn of need" into amor fati marks the point where one finds "the self-overcoming of nihilism itself in Nietzsche" (SN 103/68). "What

Nietzsche means in speaking of becoming a 'child', and what he calls 'my' inno cence (being without guilt), is participation in the world-play; and this is at once

laughter and 'folly'. When the world and its eternal recurrence become the laugh ter of the soul, not only the spirit of gravity but also nihilism as 'nihility or the

eternal recurrence of what is meaningless' is for the first time shed from the base

of the soul" (SN 103/67 tm). This "laughter," writes Nishitani, is "the most remark

able feature of Nietzsche's 'religion'," and something comparable to it can per

haps be found only in that unique religion that has attained the state of being capable of laughter, namely, Zen Buddhism (SN 101/66).


One could perhaps substitute the name Zarathustra for Yueshan (Jp. Yakusan) as the character in the Zen poem: 'Once, directly above a lonely mountain peak, the clouds parted. Beneath the moon: a cry of laughter" (see SN 102/66-67 tm). Of the many accounts of laughter in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the most striking is no doubt that of the shepherd after he spits out the head of the snake: "No

longer shepherd, no longer human?one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed!" (Z III 2.2). And yet, does

Zarathustra himself ever learn to laugh this radiant, over-human laughter? Nietzsche writes rather that a "thirst" and "yearning [Sehnsucht] for this laugh ter" gnaws on Zarathustra. Could perhaps the future laughter that Zarathustra

yearned for be found echoing from the distant past of the East?39

Nishitani comments on this passage: "Zarathustra's soul thirsts with yearn

ing for this laughter; it is his yearning for the ?bermensch. This is the stand

point of Nietzsche as one who had lived through nihilism; this is the

self-overcoming of nihilism in him" (SN 103/68 tm). The phrase "the self

overcoming of nihilism" occurs in a passage from one of Nietzsche's note

books,40 and is followed with the parenthetical remark: "the attempt to say Yes

to everything that has hitherto been negated." Did Nietzsche attain to this ulti mate Yes-saying standpoint? Did he in fact leave nihilism "behind, outside him

self" (WP Preface 3)? Or is his thought not rather structured by the teleological

projection of the "goal" of the overman who will one day be capable of this Yes

saying? "I tried to affirm it myself?alas!"41 In the first use of the term "will to power," Zarathustra tells us that "a tablet

of the good hangs over every people" as the "tablet of their overcomings" and

the "voice of their will to power." What he laments is the disparate plurality of

goals, values, and peoples: "A thousand goals have there been so far, for there have been a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lack

ing: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal" (ZI 15). In a well-known

passage from his notebooks, Nietzsche writes: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The goal is lacking; the answer to the

"why?" [Warum?] is lacking" (WP 2 tm). But can nihilism be "overcome" by willing new values, by positing new goals?

Ueda Shizuteru, Nishitani's successor in the tradition of the Kyoto School,

suggests rather that nihilism can be left behind, not when a new value or goal is

willed, but when we are able to let ourselves be emptied of this demand for an

answer to the "why," that is, when we learn to live "without why" (ohne Warum), like the rose of Angelus Silesius's poem: "The rose is without why; it blooms

because it blooms."42 Zen goes yet a step further, according to Ueda, in that it leaves behind the very quest for any "because" in answer to a "why," including that of a negative response (the "without why"), and speaks more intimately of

"water, of itself, flowing forth; a flower, of itself, red."43 Ultimately, writes Ueda, Zen does away with even the excessive expression "of itself" (Jp. onozukard), and says simply: "mountain is mountain; water is water," "the flower red; the

104 Bret W.Davis

willow green."44 Ueda writes that where Nietzsche's thought does approach and intimate such a direct and extreme affirmation of life, it is only here and there in those places where he intimates a "dropping off of the will" and a "forgetting of power" in an ekstasis of natural and playful activity.45

Nishitani, who began writing on Nietzsche by comparing him with Meister

Eckhart, in the end credits the latter with having pursued further the limits of the question of the meaning of life. "Where meaning is pushed to its extreme,

meaninglessness shows up. And yet... to say here that life as such is meaning less is to say that life is truly living itself-It is the point that Meister Eckhart calls Leben ohne Warum" (RN 202/180). According to Nishitani, "Nietzsche does not seem to have attained Eckhart's standpoint of an absolute nothingness that takes its stand on the immediacy of everyday life," and this is said to reflect "the difference between a nihility proclaiming that 'God is dead' and an absolute

nothingness reaching a point beyond even 'God' ; or between life forcing its way

through nihility to gush forth and life as absolute death-s/ve-life." If Eckhart more nearly approaches the Zen Buddhist standpoint of suny ata or absolute noth

ingness, "the nihility of Nietzsche's nihilism should be called a standpoint of

relative absolute nothingness" (RN 75/66). If Eckhart was able to "self-overcome" theism more radically still than

Nietzsche could do so with nihilistic atheism, for Nishitani this was possible only because Eckhart in the end speaks of breaking through and standing emp tied of both self-will and the will God (see RN 73/64). For Nishitani, only by letting go of both the assertion of self-will and the dependence on a higher will can we step back through nihilism to a "the field of emptiness" as a groundless ground of earnest play. While Nietzsche's notion of the Unschuld des Werdens

approaches this "pure activity beyond the measure of any teleological gauge," in the end it remains tethered to a "standpoint of will" (see RN 285/258 and

292/265).40 For Nishitani, the problem with the will to power is twofold. To begin with, he

argues that insofar as the will to power ultimately remains "something" external

to the self, that is, "something conceived of in the third person as an 'it', it has yet to shed the character of 'being something', that is, of being a Seiendes" (RN 237/216 tm). What is at stake here is more than a matter of the possible delayed influence of Heidegger's interpretation of "Nietzsche's metaphysics."47 The ques tion of whether the will to power expresses the innermost wellsprings of life goes to the heart of Nishitani's engagement with Nietzsche's thought, an engagement that first took shape in an important essay written in 1938 while Nishitani was, in

fact, in Freiburg attending Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche. This essay, entitled "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," is a remarkable attempt to show

that there is a "dialectic of life," a reaffirmation of human existence made possi ble only by way of its thorough negation, which can be found at work in both

Nietzsche's radical atheism and in Eckhart's radical theism. This essay was later


put at the head of Nishitani's first book, The Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity. "Radical subjectivity," for Nishitani, refers ultimately to "the self-realization of

bottomlessness" (dattei no jikaku),4S that is, the becoming aware of the indeter minable ecstatic openness at the abyssal ground of the self.

Hence, when Nishitani later comes to criticize the will to power as "some

thing" that remains "external" to the self, this means that the self would remain still determined by a reified notion of itself, still driven by a power that remains alien to its most originary wellsprings of activity. As long as the will to power does not "completely lose its connotation of being an other for us" (RN 251 ?234), we remain bound to a determination of a drive, a lust for power, that remains outside the indeterminable freedom and abyssal openness of "radical subjec tivity." Nietzsche, as a matter of fact, writes that even those who command must

obey the will to power, as even the greatest soul cannot help but "risk life for the sake of power" ( II12). The freedom of the self is limited by its inability to step back beneath and beyond its determination by the will to power; what life cannot overcome in the end, apparently, is the determination of life itself as

the will to power. For Nishitani, this means that the standpoint of the will to

power falls short of the ecstatic "non-ego" (Sk. an?tman; Jp. muga) of the "the self that is not a self," the self that is truly itself only in always already standing outside itself in a non-egocentric engagement with others. Nishitani writes that the will to power may depict a "self that is not a self" a self that is driven to

exceed itself, but it does not ultimately express the spontaneous freedom of a

"self 'that is not self (RN 231/216). The self of non-ego would recover itself (its

aboriginal wellsprings of activity) by abandoning its self-centeredness, that is,

by ecstatically standing out into a relation of dependent co-origination with that which and with those who are not itself, but in relation with which and with whom the self ex-sists.

This brings us to the second reason for Nishitani's dissatisfaction with the will to power, which has to do not just with its character as a "something," but with its character as a "will." According to Nishitani, all "standpoints of will" are in the end bound to one type or another of "self-centeredness," be it that of an individual or a collective egoism, or that of a self-will backed up by the will of a personal God (RN 222-23/202-3). Stepping back to the standpoint of non

ego on the "field of sunyata" (Jp. ku no bd) is possible only by breaking through all such transmutations of self-centered willing. Nishitani thus writes that what is "essentially implied in the standpoint of sunyata is an absolute negativity toward 'the will' that underlies every type of self-centeredness. It implies an ori entation directly opposite to that of will" (RN 276/251 tm). By stepping back to this field "beyond all standpoints of any kind related to will," the self as non

ego recovers a "radical spontaneity" together with a "responsibility to every neighbor and every other" that stems from an awareness of the "non-duality of self and other" (RN 281/255).

106 Bret W.Davis

For Nishitani, this aboriginal standpoint is not reached by willfully "tran

scending" nihilism, but by way of what he calls "trans-descendence," that is, by stepping back through the relative nothingness of the field of nihility to the absolute nothingness of the field of sunyata.49 Nietzsche's attempt at a self

overcoming of nihilism, as we have seen, is said to have stopped short at a stand

point of "relative absolute nothingness" (RN 75/66). Nietzsche's nihilism

exposes the will to power underlying our highest values, but it does not break

through beneath even this determination of life to a point where "the radical

autonomy of the self and the radical circuminsessional relation of self and other"

(RN 305/277 tm) flow forth from the same bottomless wellspring of freedom

Mve-responsibility. Nishitani finds the purest expression of this "true freedom that is not simply a matter of the freedom of the will" (RN 314/285) in the Buddhist standpoint of non-ego on the field of sunyata. This is the standpoint of Mahay ana that Nishitani had claimed, already in The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, "cannot yet be reached even by a nihilism that overcomes nihilism, even though the latter may reach in that direction" (SN 185/180 tm).

Buddhism Contra Nietzsche as Will-full Nihilism

I began by explicating Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism as a passive nihilism, and went on to respond to his charges from a (Mahayana Zen) Buddhist per spective. This response, however, has led us beyond a mere "defense" to a stand

point from which it appears that it may, in fact, be Nietzsche who remained unable to finally let nihilism overcome itself. The crux of the matter is the role of the will in nihilism and its overcoming. The role of the will in Nietzsche and Buddhism is the pivotal point of an Auseinandersetzung between the two. But

for Western philosophers, the connection between nihilism and the problem of the will does not first appear when Buddhism is brought into the picture. The will is also the pivotal point in Heidegger's prolonged confrontation with

Nietzsche, and recalling what is at stake for Heidegger can help us to under

stand the contemporary significance of a Buddhist critique of the will.

Nietzsche defines nihilism as a devaluation of our highest values that results

from decadence and weakness of will. Accordingly, he argues that "overcom

ing nihilism" demands a revaluation of all values out of a revitalized strength of will. This is not, however, either the first or the last possible understanding of "nihilism" and its "overcoming." According to Heidegger, thinking in terms

of "values" is itself a symptom of nihilism, insofar as it centers the world on the

perspective of the subject and his evaluating will. Heidegger writes that

"Nietzsche's metaphysics is nihilistic insofar as it is value thinking, and insofar as the latter is grounded in will to power as the principle of all valuation."50

Moreover, the very attempt to "overcome" nihilism is misguided, "not because


it is insuperable, but because all willing-to-overcome is inappropriate to its

essence."51 Attempting to willfully overcome nihilism by means of positing new

values would, then, be like trying to put out a fire with kerosene. In conclusion to his prolonged Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, Heidegger claims that "Nietzsche's metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate

entanglement in nihilism."52 It should be noted, however, that linking nihilism and the problem of the will

is not unique to Heidegger, and in fact Heidegger's post-Nietzschean interpre tation of nihilism in some ways echoes a pre-Nietzschean critique. The first

philosophical development of the idea of nihilism is generally ascribed to Friedrich Jacobi, who in a famous letter criticized Fichte's idealism as falling into nihilism. According to Jacobi, Fichte's absolutization of the ego (the "absolute I" that posits the "not-I") is an inflation of subjectivity that denies the absolute transcendence of God.53 Critically supplementing Heidegger's inter

pretation of nihilism as the rise of willful subjectivity, Michael Allen Gillespie traces the roots of modern nihilism back to the late medieval reinterpretation of

God as absolute and irrational will. He argues that this inflation of God's absolute

power over humans triggered a reactive assertion of human power, which in the end prepares the way for the modern transference of this character of absolute irrational will onto human beings. "Nihilism, as it was originally understood,

was thus not the result of the degeneration of man and his concomitant inabil

ity to sustain a God. It was rather the consequence of the assertion of an absolute human will that renders God superfluous and thus for all intents and purposes dead."54 Gillespie concludes that Nietzsche's proposed "solution to nihilism," in the image of an overman as a figure of maximum will to power, is in fact a "turn to exactly that notion that previously was conceived to be the essence of nihilism."55 We shall later need to question whether this interpretation suffices to account for Nietzsche's complex?and perhaps in the end ambivalent?

image(s) of the overman, but Gillespie's analysis does provide an illuminating historical (and theological) supplement to Heidegger's conjunction of nihilism with the problem of the will.56

Critics of Heidegger's interpretation often, and not without good reason, take issue with his claim that Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics succeeded only in

"inverting" traditional otherworldly doctrines by positing a "metaphysics of the absolute subjectivity of will to power."57 Nietzsche, in fact, breaks with both the

ontology of the "subject" and Schopenhauer's metaphysical claim that the will is the noumenon behind all phenomena. According to Nietzsche's thought, there is no noumenal "Will," but always only ever a multiplicity of "punctuations of will [Willens-Punktationen] that are constantly increasing or losing their power" (WP 715 tm). The competing "wills to power" are always in processes of meta

morphosis, growing and declining in power, shifting in size and transforming in character.

108 Bret W. Davis

Nevertheless, the will to power remains the defining impulse throughout all this transformation and multiplicity, and it is in this sense that Nietzsche writes of the will to power as "the ultimate ground and character of all change" (WP 685) and as "the innermost essence of being" (WP 693). This assertion, that the will to power is the single defining characteristic of all processes of becoming, can also be found in various key passages of Nietzsche's published texts.

Zarathustra proclaims, "Where I found the living, there I found the will to power" ( II12), and in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche ventures further to hypothe size that not only could our "entire instinctive life" be explained as the devel

opment and ramification of the will to power, but also that one could "determine all efficient force univocally as?will to power. The world viewed from the inside... would be will to power and nothing else" (BGE36; see also WP 1067).58

In this sense Nietzsche claims: "the will to power is the ultimate fact [das let

zte Faktum] to which we come down."59 It is also this claim that Heidegger dis

putes when he writes: "What seems certain to Nietzsche is questionable to us."60

Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche leads to his attempt to historically sit uate the pervasiveness of the will to power. For Heidegger, the will to power is indeed "the ultimate fact to which we come down" in a particular epoch of the

history of being, namely, the epoch of the culmination of the metaphysics of

subjectivity, an epoch that in turn prepares for the extreme epoch of nihilism and the technological "will to will" (der Wille zum Willen). Heidegger's own

later thought attempts to anticipate a turn (Kehre) from this extreme assertion of will to a Gelassenheit, a releasement from the will that would allow humans to engage themselves (sich einlassen) with beings in a way that "lets them be." This "letting be" would neither set human beings up as "masters of the earth"

(see WP 958), nor would it indicate a mere passivity (a weakness or deference of will), but would intimate a kind of "active engagement" radically other than the will to power.61

As we have seen, Zen Buddhism also intimates a way of being-in-the-world other than willing in its notions of "playful samadhi," "dharmic naturalness," and "the doing of non-doing." Here too this standpoint is reached only by way of a radical critique of the will. I shall now consider the question of how and to

what extent this Buddhism critique would apply to Nietzsche's notion of the will to power. To the extent that the will to power could be understood as a form of

tanh?, a critique of the will to power would lie at the very heart of Buddhism.

The second of The Four Noble Truths, we recall, states that tanh? ("craving" or

"thirst") is the root cause of "suffering." Craving in Buddhism is broken down into three aspects, k?ma-tanh? or "the

craving for sensual pleasure," bhava-tanh? or "the craving for continuing exis tence or becoming," and vibhava-tanha or "the craving for non-existence."

While frustration of the craving for pleasure may be the most immediately appar ent cause of instances of suffering, the "affective ground" that pervades the


whole of samsaric existence is perhaps best understood as bhava-tanh? or "the

craving for existence." As Morrison argues, bhava-tanh?, as "'thirsting' after

any form of being or experience or object," underlies k?ma-tanh? as thirsting after specific sensual experiences, and vibhava-tanh? could be understood to be

the outcome of continual frustration of the first two aspects of craving. Tanh?

as such, then, is not any particular craving, but rather a "voluntaristic metaphor" that "attempts to capture the most pervasive affective characteristic of samsaric

existence."62

Tanh?, in fact, is one of several "voluntaristic metaphors" that characterize

samsaric existence for Buddhism, another of which is "karma." Karma origi

nally meant literally "action" or "doing," but in the Buddhist context it comes

to take on the specific meaning of "volitional action" that stems from craving, that is, action that centers on and supports the persistence of the ego. The Buddha

states: "it is volition (cetano) that I call karma. Having willed, one acts through

body, speech and mind."63 Thus, although strictly speaking the Buddhist ontol

ogy of dependent co-origination does not admit of a "first cause" (a more spe cific sense of craving is, in fact, listed as one of the links in the twelvefold wheel

of causation), it can be said that willful craving is "the most palpable and imme

diate cause, the 'principal thing' and the 'all pervading thing'" that sustains and

pervades the wheel of samsara. "According to the Buddha's analysis," writes

Walpola Rahula, "all the troubles and strife in the world, from little personal

quarrels in families to great wars between nations and countries, arise out of this

selfish 'thirst.'"64 Nishitani interprets and develops the Buddhist critique of the will as the "infi

nite drive" of "self-will" that manifestly surfaces in the modern predicament of

nihilism. Nishitani also traces the modern problem of the will in part back to the monotheistic attempt to overcome the problem of egoistic will by positing a

transcendent Ego and Will of God. He argues (in a manner not unrelated to

Nietzsche's critique of the hypocrisies of the ascetic priest's feigned deference of will) that here "self-centeredness appears once again, only this time on a

higher plane: as the will of self backed up by the will of God" (RN 223/203). The "death of God" at the hands of modern secularism leaves us, according to

Nishitani, in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, freedom from religious

teleology (i.e., from time structured according to the will of God) allows humans to recover their autonomy, to become "autotelic." On the other hand, the self

centered autonomy of the will is not yet a true autonomy, but ultimately finds itself subject to an aimless "infinite drive." In a time of secularism, writes

Nishitani, "every function of life, as something that is autotelic and therefore

aimless, is given over to the unrestricted pursuit of itself. It is here that the infi nite drive, or what may be termed 'self-will', is to be seen" (RN 2591236).

The volitional "autonomy" of the ego is only apparent insofar as it remains driven by its passions. Here we find that, just as the "passivity" of a submission

110 Bret W. Davis

to the will of God conceals a sublated self-will, the apparent "autonomy" of sec ularism conceals a tendency toward a reversion to "animality." This ironic loss of autonomy is compounded by the phenomenon of the "controller becoming the controlled" (RN 95/84) in the complete mechanization of (human) nature.

While science and technology are developed under the auspices of increasing human freedom and power over nature, at "the extreme of the freedom of the self in controlling the laws of nature, man shows the countertendency to forfeit his human nature and to mechanize it." Hence, one finds a double loss of auton

omy in an extreme age of secularism. Human self-assertion over against God and nature leads to a situation where the "emergence of the mechanization of human life and the transformation of man into a completely non-rational sub

ject in pursuit of his desires are fundamentally bound up with one another" (RN 98/87). In this manner, Nishitani understands the historical emergence of nihilism as a failed assertion of human autonomy that succumbs to the infinite drive of self-will.

Nishitani interprets this paradoxical symbiosis of assertion and loss of will in terms of a "demythologized" notion of karma. Behind the scientific rationality and technological will of modern human being, Nishitani writes, lurks the same "infinite drive" that the ancient Buddhist doctrine of karma sought to expose.65 In the great yet ambivalent conversion of secularization, writes Nishitani, "at the bottom of the elevation of human reason to independence, we find hidden an important event: the 'being' of human being becomes a matter of will" (RN 258/235 tm). Yet the standpoint of secularism still conceals the character of this will as an infinite drive. Here the notion of karma can help, for the standpoint of karma "implies this self-awareness" (RN 260/237).

Karma, writes Nishitani, is a matter of "being-at-doing" (Jp. u-i; Sk. samskrta), a self-willing that is conditioned ("willed") by the dispositions created by past acts, and which continually creates more "debts" in its attempt to pay off old ones.

Critically appropriating Heidegger's early phenomenological analysis of being in-the-world by way of linking the Buddhist notion of karma with Heidegger's own later critique of the nihilistic "will to will," Nishitani describes how our

everyday karmic Dasein remains tethered to itself, "tying itself up with its own

rope," even as it steps out into the world. Our everyday Dasein "endlessly stands outside itself," and yet at the same time, in this everyday mode of ek-stasis, "remains shut up perpetually within itself, never radically departing from its own

home-ground" (RN264/240 tm). Nishitani interprets "the darkness of ignorance" (Jp. mumy?; Sk. avidy?)?which is generally understood alongside tanh? to be the root cause of suffering in Buddhism?as this "radical self-enclosure, the self centeredness that is the wellspring of endless karmic activity" (RN 266/242 tm).

The notion of karma, as we have seen, can also help us to understand how exis tence as will is strung between voluntarism and fatalism. "The karma that relates to something by lusting after it is at once voluntary and compulsory" (RN


271/246). One passage of Religion and Nothingness seems to imply that we

should finally understand the ambiguity of Nietzsche's amor fati in this sense.

"While the present karma is here the free work of the self, it appears at the same

time to be possessed of the character of fate. Fate arises to awareness in unison

with that freedom. Here the present karma reaches awareness under its form of

infinity as infinite drive, in its 'willful' essence" (RN 271/246). Whereas in The

Self Overcoming of Nihilism, Nishitani characterized Nietzsche's amor fati as a

standpoint where the "world appears as the 'playful' activity of the will to power and at the same time as fate," and claims that this goes beyond the Buddhist idea

of karma in that amor fati depicts a fundamentally creative standpoint (SN

75-79/48-50), now Nishitani concludes that Nietzsche's standpoint falls short

of undergoing the conversion to the freedom made possible on the field of sun

yata, insofar as the idea of eternal recurrence does not allow for the creation of

something absolutely new. Nietzsche's radical nihilism would stop short at an

"ecstatic transcendence to nihility," at an awareness of a "free karma," but this

union of freedom and infinite drive would not yet be a "true freedom or creativ

ity" (RN 270/246). The doctrine of the will to power would be a step on the path back through nihilism, but it would stop short at exposing the problem of the will as infinite drive, just as the awareness of karmic voluntarism/fatalism in

Buddhism only prepares us for the ultimate task of cutting the roots of craving. Nishitani's thought thus combines an analysis of the modern problem of

nihilism with a Buddhist critique of the will, and his profound appreciation of

Nietzsche's thought, in the end, cannot evade a confrontation over the question of the will to power. Nishitani, however, having remarked on what he sees as

the limits of Nietzsche's thought in Religion and Nothingness, never returns to a detailed encounter with Nietzsche after this point, being less interested in com

ing to terms with a particular thinker than with following the matter of his own

increasingly Zen-inspired philosophy. He did reportedly admit in conversation with Graham Parkes that "the parallels between Nietzsche's thinking and his own run farther than he was prepared to allow in Religion and Nothingness"66 Yet, even if the will to power can be wholly reduced to the notion of an "infi nite drive" nor more than to the "metaphysical subjectivism" of Heidegger's cri

tique, we need to ask whether a decisive gap remains between Nishitani's

standpoint of Zen and Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power over the ques tion of egoism.

Before we begin to explore this question, we need to give consideration to the fact that Nietzsche explicitly denies that his notion of the will to power could be understood as a mere "craving" (Begierde) or "drive" (Trieb). According to

Nietzsche, it was Schopenhauer's "basic misunderstanding of the will" to think that "craving, instinct, drive were the essence of will." In fact, this understand

ing is said to betray a great "symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the will: for the will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and

112 Bret W.Davis

appoints to them their way and measure" (WP 84). The will, according to

Zarathustra, is not the will to exist, or the will to live, but the will to power, "the will to be master" ( II12).67 And yet, this will to expand one's power is, in fact, also implied in the Buddhist notion of craving. Walpola Rahula explains that "the terms 'thirst', 'volition', 'mental volition' and 'karma' all denote the same

thing: they denote the desire, the will to be, to exist, to re-exist, to become more and more, to grow more and more, to accumulate more and more. "68

And a stan

dard Buddhist dictionary in Japan defines bhava-tanh?, not merely as the will to exist, but as "the will to expand the ego."69 Hence, the Buddhist critique of

craving is also aimed at the lust for egoistic expansion, and not just at the blind will to live.

The "ego" as a given substantial entity, to be sure, exists for Nietzsche no more than it does for Buddhism. There is neither such a thing as "will" or a sub stance called "ego" for Nietzsche (see BGE 16-17; WP 488); indeed Nietzsche states his "hypothesis" as "the subject as multiplicity." Nevertheless, the "only force that exists" in the organization and dispersion of this multiplicity "is of the same kind as that of will: a commanding of other subjects, which thereupon change" (WP 490). Hence, while on the one hand Nietzsche claims that "will

ing seems to me to be above all something complicated," on the other hand he claims that the will is "above all an affect, and specifically the affect of the com mand" (BGE 19). While "our body is but a social structure composed of many souls," the ego is constructed by subjecting weaker "under-souls" or "under

wills" to a stronger ruling will (ibid.). There is no substantial unchanging ego or "will," but rather a movement between organization and disintegration. "The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order

among them result in a 'weak will' ; their coordination under a single predomi nant impulse results in a 'strong will'" (WP 46). In short, while for Nietzsche there is no ego as a given, there is the task of constructing an ego, of organiz ing the plurality of disparate impulses by submitting them to the rule of a com

manding will to power. Buddhism, on the other hand, speaks directly against the willful construction

of an ego, and indeed sees the task to be that of uprooting the ruling will behind this construction. In the Dhammapada we are instructed to "cut off the love of the ego with your own hands,"70 and nirvana is attained at the point where one can exclaim: "Now I see you, O builder of this house [of the ego], all of your rafters are broken, your ridgepole is shattered. Never again need you build a house for me. My mind... has achieved the extinction of craving."71 We have seen above that the "non-ego" that appears after this disintegration of the will ful ego is not a matter of sheer extinction, but is, in Nishitani's words, "the self that is not a self." Such a non-ego would no longer be centered on its self

interests, but would be capable of compassionate altruism, of giving without return. But for Nietzsche such a disintegration of the ego is a matter of a deca


dent "disintegration of the instincts," and decadence paves the road to nihilism.

"An 'altruistic' morality?a morality in which self-interest wilts away?remains a bad sign under all circumstances" (A 35). To overcome nihilism one must

indeed first "become an annihilator and break values," but this only in order to

clear the ground for the willing of a new organization for the ego and its world. "There are yet many houses to be built!?Thus spoke Zarathustra" (ZU 12).

In Nietzsche's affirmation of the egoism of the will to power, then, we run up

against a formidable limit to the search for "ironic affinities" with Buddhism, and any postmodern or comparative attempt to skip lightly over such passages as the following threatens not only to forgo a critical confrontation with his

thought, but to drain from it its shock and its force. "The 'ego' subdues and kills," writes Nietzsche, "it operates like an organic cell: it is a robber and is violent. It wants to regenerate itself?pregnancy. It wants to give birth to its god and see

all mankind at its feet" (WP 768). The "noble soul," he tells us, "accepts this fact of egoism without any question mark." "At the risk of displeasing innocent ears I propose: egoism belongs to the nature of the noble soul?I mean that unshakable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other beings must be subordi nate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves" (BGE 265). "Here we must rad

ically think matters through to the ground, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and

weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildness, exploitation. . . . [Life] simply is will to power" (?G?259tm).

If this is das letzte Faktum to which Nietzsche's thought comes down, then what would be an inalterable reality for him is akin to the alterable condition of existence for Buddhism?the willful nihilism of samsara. The will to power, as an egoistic force that expands the domain of the ego by subjugating others to its

rule, is the root that needs to be cut in order to make possible a fundamental con version of life to a radically other way of being-in-the-world. The radical step back to this other, more originary way of being is thought of in Buddhism not

only as a recovery of a natural spontaneity, but also as a re-tapping of an abo

riginal wellspring of an active compassion (Sk. karund)72 that is radically other than the will to appropriation, injury, and overpowering what is alien and weaker.

Elevated Egoism and the Ambivalent Self-Overcoming of the Will to Power

To end a confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism by concluding that the former is nothing more than a "willful nihilist," however, would be as rash as it would have been to accept the judgment that Buddhism is nothing more than a

passive nihilism. For not only does Nietzsche's thought experiment call into

114 Bret W. Davis

question the "slanderous intent" that has been "imprinted for ages" on the lan

guage of willful appropriation, but he also tells us that the craving for self

preservation and the ordinary notions of "egoism" and "selfishness" depict only degenerative forms of the will to power. "In ordinary 'egoism' it is precisely the

'non-ego', the profoundly average creature, the species man, who desires to pre serve himself." But this, claims Nietzsche, is precisely a "misunderstanding of

egoism?on the part of common natures who know nothing whatever of the

pleasures of conquest and the insatiability of great love, nor of the overflowing feeling of strength that desires to overpower, to compel to itself, to lay to its heart?the drive of the artist in relation to his material" (WP 873). Similarly, he tells us that only a "sick selfishness" evidences the "thievish greed" that says, "Everything for me." The selfishness that is "whole and holy," on the other hand, is that "gift-giving virtue" that forces "all things to and into yourself that they

may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love" ( 122). Zarathustra's

story begins by relating how he grows weary of his wisdom on his solitary moun

taintop, and, "like a bee that has gathered too much honey," voluntarily goes under to empty his overfull cup, to preach to others the virtue of "becoming sac rifices and gifts yourselves." Does Zarathustra's gift-giving virtue not remind us of the first of the "perfections" of the Bodhisattva, the "perfection of giving" without return? Can Zarathustra's "going under" be compared to the last of the Ten Oxherding Pictures, where, in an outpouring of the emptying of emptiness, the old Zen recluse returns to the marketplace with outstretched hands?

Once again, we encounter a number of ironic affinities. It has sometimes been

pointed out that Nietzsche's emphasis on ̂//-mastery resonates with the words from the Dhammapada: "One may conquer a million men in a single battle; however, the greatest and best warrior conquers himself."73 Walter Kaufmann, who stresses the element of self-mastery in Nietzsche's philosophy, alludes to section 33 of the Dao De Jing (where we find the lines: "He who conquers oth ers has power; but he who conquers himself is [truly] strong") in connection with a passage where Nietzsche writes: "I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to

rule?and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inner

weakness."74

Yet to simply end our discussion here by rounding out the differences once

again into ironic affinities would be equally premature. What the confrontation with a Buddhist critique of the will can help us to do, however, is to return to

the movement of Nietzsche's thought with a sharpened sense for the following question: Does the affirmation of the will to power as a fundamental drive to

overpower, subdue, and appropriate others, represent only one aspect, one step on Nietzsche's path of self-overcoming? "Those were steps for me," writes

Nietzsche, "and I have climbed over them: to that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on them" (TI 142). Indeed, many of the


strongest assertions of the egoism of the will to power can be found, as we have

seen, beginning with Beyond Good and Evil, the text with which Nietzsche later

tells us that he began "the No-saying part of his task" (EH III 7.1). The Yes-saying part, he tells us, had been solved in his most important book,

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first of Zarathustra's speeches tells of the "three

metamorphoses of the spirit": the camel, the lion, and the child. Is it possible to

confine Nietzsche's assertions of the crude egoism of the will to power to the "lion stage" of his thought? Karl L?with, for example, has suggested that we

read Nietzsche's thought as a movement from a Du sollst to an Ich will and

finally to the Ich bin of the "cosmic child" at play.75 The final transformation in

Nietzsche's thought is said to be from the will to power to amor fati, a "lieben" that is "nicht mehr ein Wollen," but rather "eine nichts mehr wollende Willigkeit, in der sich das Wollen als solches aufhebt."76 Charles Scott finds in the text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra "a movement in the power of the idea of will to power toward an anticipated organization that is beyond the will-to-power dis

course."77 Is it possible, then, to speak of a movement in Nietzsche's thought that leads to a self-overcoming of the will to power?

In its most radical possibility this movement of self-overcoming would not

just lead to a dialectical Aufhebung of the will to power, but would be more akin to a Derridian deconstruction of the very regime of the language of will, that is to say, an overturning within and then breaking free of the binary opposition between assertion and denial of will.78 One could read Nietzsche's assertion of the doctrine of the will to power as an inversion of the binary opposition that

posits will-lessness as the ideal. Nietzsche's genealogies would reveal that this traditional ethical ideal is in fact constructed upon that which it seeks to demo nize and exclude, the will to power. Yet the path of Nietzsche's thought would not stop at this inversion of the traditional hierarchy, for, as Heidegger points out, a mere countermovement necessarily remains, "as does everything 'anti',

held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves."79 Heidegger him self acknowledges that in the final step of Nietzsche's thought?purportedly undertaken only during his last creative year (1888), just before his descent into madness?his "overturning" (Umdrehung) of Platonism became for him a

"twisting free" (Herausdrehung).80 Perhaps, then, just as Nietzsche's thought would in the end twist free of the opposition between the "true" and the "appar ent" worlds (see 77 4),81 so too would he move beyond both the simple denial and the simple affirmation of the will to power.

For Nietzsche, the epitome of the philosophy of the denial of will is Schopen hauer; and therefore the first move of his thought, his inversion of the opposi tion, would be to deify what Schopenhauer demonizes. In a note that retraces the path of his own thought, Nietzsche writes: "Schopenhauer's interpretation of the 'in itself as will was an essential step; but he did not understand how to

deify this will." Nietzsche's second step of twisting free, however, would be

116 Bret W. Davis

intimated in the final line of this note: "He [Schopenhauer] failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different [unendliche Arten des

Anders-sein-k?nnens], even of being god" (WP 1005). Would not this "infinite

variety of ways of being different" include not just a deification of will but also

ways of being other than willing? The question of whether and how far this movement of twisting free of the

will to power was carried out in Nietzsche's thought is perhaps best pursued not in the largely No-saying writings of his last productive year, but in his most far

reaching and Yes-saying book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We do indeed find in this text that the idea of the will to power is developed in connection with the idea of "self-overcoming." Life confides its secret as: "I am that which must

always overcome itself" ( II 12). And yet, when this self-overcoming is

explained in terms of "life sacrificing itself?for power," is it not explained on

the basis of the will to power? Does Nietzsche leave open the possibility of a

movement from the subjective to the objective genitive in the phrase "the self

overcoming of the will to power"? Must life ceaselessly overcome itself because

it is in essence the will to power; or, might the will to power itself in the end be overcome because life is in essence s elf-ove rooming?

In the chapter "On Those Who are Sublime" ( II13)?which immediately follows the chapter "On Self-Overcoming," where the notion of will to power is first developed in detail?Zarathustra urges "an ascetic of the spirit" to over

come even his sublimity. "If he grew tired of his sublimity, this sublime one,

only then would his beauty commence." I shall consider later Nietzsche's

intensely ambivalent attitude toward asceticism, but let us note here that the ascetic has not simply strayed in a wrong direction; he must rather push forward on his path of self-overcoming. Here we find another version of the three meta

morphoses of the spirit at work, with the image of the "bull" now at the pivotal middle position. The ascetic of the spirit stands there "decked out with ugly truths," and "many thorns too adorned him?though I saw no rose. ... As yet

he has not learned laughter or beauty.... Contempt is still in his eyes, and nau

sea hides around his mouth." Zarathustra ends his description here and gives his

advise: "He should act like a bull, and his happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth." Perhaps not unlike certain images of the

Buddha, this transformed ascetic spirit would wander alone like a rhinoceros, or like "a bull among men, a noble hero (paravamv?ra). . . a conqueror

(vijit?vin)."*2 But while Nietzsche's bull, in bellowing his "praise of everything

earthly," would already have moved beyond the "lions roar" (another Buddhist

image) that annihilates, it would not yet be the final Yes-saying form of the spirit:

Though I love the bull's neck on him, I also want to see the eyes of the angel. He

must still unlearn even his heroic will; he shall be elevated [ein Gehobener] for me, not merely sublime [ein Erhabener]: the ether itself should elevate him, the

will-less one [den Willenlosen] ! ... To stand with relaxed muscles and unhar


ne s s ed will: that is most difficult for all of you sublime ones. . . . When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible?such descent I call beauty.... And there is no one from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are pow erful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest. ... Of all evil I deem you

capable: therefore I want the good from you_For this is this soul's secret: only when the hero has abandoned her, she is approached, in a dream,?by the over

hero. (ZII13 tm, emphasis added)

This "soul's secret" of the "overhero" (der ?ber-Held), who has relaxed or even

unlearned his heroic will out of an abundance of strength, is surely one of the

high points of Zarathustra's teaching. The ultimate image of the overman would not be that of the "blond beast" of heroic will, who revolts against a "slave moral

ity" of pity with a resurrected "master morality" of violent conquest, but would be the "overhero" with the "generosity of the great-souled" (Gro?mut des

Gro?gesinnten), or what Nietzsche calls elsewhere "the Roman Caesar with Christ's soul" (WP 983).

Nietzsche's subsequent No-saying books, such as the Genealogy of Morals, would then need to be read as fishhooks intended for "those who, prompted by strength, would offer me their hands for destroying" (EH III 7.1 ). But after hav

ing lured a few camels out into the desert, and after these had become lions and had conquered the dragon of the "Thou shalt" by roaring "I will," the ground would be cleared for the appearance of the "child." "The child is innocence and

forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first moment, a

sacred 'Yes'" (ZI 1). But would this child be beyond the "I will" of the lion? Would the child's play no longer be driven by the will to power? Nietzsche's

answer, at least the answer we find in the text at this point, is no. The sacred "Yes" of the new game of creation, we are told, would be the dawn of yet another will to power: "the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world" (ibid.).

In the end of the book, Zarathustra pronounces: "Well then! The lion came,

my children are near, Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my

morning, my day is breaking" ( IV 20). The world would now be conquered by Zarathustra's will; his children would spread his word. Are we readers, then, to become the new generation of camels who would bear his new tablet of val ues that dictates "Thou shalt remain faithful to the earth," to the earth interpreted as "the eternal recurrence of the will to power"? Here we come upon an ambiva lence that appears to run right through the heart of Zarathustra's teaching.

In the end of the first part of the book, Zarathustra urges his disciples to "go away from me and resist Zarathustra! . . . One repays a teacher badly if one

always remains a pupil_Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you" (ZI 22). But here is the ambiva lence: Does Zarathustra want to give birth to children who are free of his will, to a plurality of perspectives that are not yoked under his one goal? Or, in the

118 Bret W.Davis

manner of Hegel's dialectic of master and slave, does he want not just meek sub

mission, but the submission of "free and independent" wills? Does Zarathustra

seek genuinely independent companions, or is he content with the thought: "it

turned out that he could not find them [companions], unless he first created them

himself" (Z III 3)? What does it mean that Zarathustra wants to one day dig up "the trees of my garden" (his children) and "place each by itself, so that it may learn solitude and defiance," if in the end this expulsion from the nest is neces

sary only "so that he [the child] may one day become my companion and a fel

low creator and fellow celebrant of Zarathustra?one who writes my will on my tablets" (ibid.)? Does Nietzsche recognize this tension when he narrates that

Zarathustra, "chained to the love for my [Zarathustra' s] children," was "cook

ing in his own juice"? The question, then, is whether the "elevated egoism" of Nietzsche's overhero

would tolerate a plurality of perspectives out of a released willingness to let them

be, or out of a strength of will that is capable of throwing its ring around a thou

sand counter-wills. Nietzsche writes in an earlier text that we can "measure the

health of a society and of individuals according to the number of parasites they can tolerate" (M 202). But, in the context of his developed philosophy of the

will to power, would this tolerance merely be a test of the strength of the com

manding will? Just as the "greater the dominating power of a will, the more free

dom may the passions be allowed" in the "great man" who knows how to "press these magnificent monsters into service" (WP 933), so too the great society could

strengthen itself by tolerating a measure of free protest. The limits of the strength of the ruling will, however, would also be the limits of its tolerance. And since

all wills have their limits, just as "the great egoism of our dominating will

requires that we shut our eyes to ourselves" (WP 426), so too would the domi

nating will of a society, in order to secure and promote its dominion, ultimately need to ignore or extinguish perspectives that defy appropriation. Nietzsche's

elevated egoism appears to remain ambivalently torn between a more subtle sub

jugation of other perspectives83 and an engagement with them that would let

their irreducible and unappropriable otherness be.

This ambivalence infects the doctrine of "perspectivism" itself. On the one

hand, Nietzsche's perspectivism is explicitly aligned with egoism. "Egoism is

the law of perspective applied to feelings" (GS 162). It is our needs and drives

that interpret the world, and since "every drive is a kind of lust to rule... each

one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm" (WP 481). The ruling drive organizes the constellation of the ego, which seeks to compel all other egos to accept its own perspectival interpreta tion of the world.84 On the other hand, however, "perspectivism" expresses an

awareness of the finite limits of one's standpoint, and thus implies an openness to infinite other points of view. Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly derides "the ridicu

lous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that per


spectives are permitted only from this corner." Rather, he claims, "the world has

become 'infinite' for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possi

bility that it may include infinite interpretations" (GS 374). In this sense, per

spectivism demands an infinite openness to other interpretations, and Nietzsche

accordingly expresses a "profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world," and even a "fascination for the opposite way of

thinking" (WP 410 tm). Yet, once again, we are told that "interpretation is itself a means of becom

ing master of something" (WP 643), and that the "organic process" of the will to power demands that other perspectives be brought under the command of a

ruling will, lest a fascination for plurality lead to a decadent fall into disorgan ization. When a will to power is not strong enough to command, it must obey; and if no will is strong enough to organize the ego or society at large, then for Nietzsche this would signal a slide into decadence and ultimately into nihilism.

Perspectivism thus serves both to legitimate and to disrupt egoism, and the

images of elevated egoism we are left with remain internally torn between a fas cination with, and a drive to appropriate, other points of view. In the end, the movement of Nietzsche's thought appears to leave us teetering on the ambiva lent axis of the "self-overcoming of the will to power."

Reorientations of Asceticism: A Gymnastics of the Will or Its Great Death?

We can bring the Auseinandersetzung between Nietzsche and Zen Buddhism to a sharp focus by comparing the role that asceticism plays in the two. Neither the Buddhist path nor Nietzsche's Denkweg simply denies a role to asceticism; what

they do?each in its own way?is to radically rethink and reorient it. The "middle way" of Buddhism, of course, explicitly rejects the ascetic self

mortification of the flesh along with the opposite extreme of indulgence of the senses. "As a blade of grass when wrongly handled cuts the hand," we are told, "so also asceticism when wrongly tried leads to hell."85 When rightly employed, this passage already suggests, ascetic practices can be harnessed for the much

more difficult path to the extinction of craving, including the perverse cravings for non-existence and self-mutilation. The "middle way" of Buddhism is thus

hardly intended to be a simple piecemeal negotiation or a hedonistic avoidance of extremes; it is rather a radical passage through an uprooting of craving toward an awakening to a world beyond the dualistic extremes of eternalism and anni hilationism. In Zen, this movement is depicted as passing through a "great nega tion" to a "great affirmation."

Nietzsche is both fascinated and disgusted by what he calls the "ascetic ideal." In the "ascetic priest" he discovers that human being is both "the sick animal"

120 Bret W.Davis

and "the great experimenter with himself" (GM III. 13). What repulses Nietzsche is the "devious paths to tyranny over the healthy" that the "will to power of the

weakest" takes, in particular the invention of an "inverted world" and the prop agation of a self-contradictory "will to nothingness." But Nietzsche credits the ascetic priest with carrying out the "tremendous historical mission" of "altering the direction of ressentiment" that is, of redirecting the search for someone or

something to blame for suffering inward by means of such "paradoxical and

paralogical concepts" as "guilt" and "sin." In this manner, the ascetic priest was

able to "exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming" (GM III. 16). Nietzsche finds this self

overcoming at work even in the ascetic priest's apparent denial of life. "The No he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of tender Yeses; even

when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction?the

very wound itself afterward compels him to live" (GM III. 13). Nietzsche finds his own historical mission in the self-overcoming?not in the

simple eradication?of the ascetic ideal. He seeks to reinvert the world, to make the will honest again. Instead of feigning a denial of the will to power, he pro poses that it be trained. Nietzsche proposes "to make asceticism once again nat ural: in place of the purpose of denial, the purpose of strengthening; a

gymnastics of the will" (WP 915 tm). This "education of will power" would redirect traditional ascetic disciplines, such as fasting and even monastic retreat, as "a detachment from the tyranny of stimuli and influences that condemns us to spend our strength in nothing but reactions and does not permit their accu

mulation to the point of spontaneous activity" (WP 916). Nietzsche not only understands his role in history but also his personal his

tory of isolation and sickness in terms of a naturalized asceticism. In the Epilogue to his last published book (in sections largely reprinted from the 1886 Preface to what Nietzsche called "the most personal of all my books," The Gay Science),

Nietzsche tells us that "only great pain is the liberator of the spirit," for it forces us philosophers to "descend into our ultimate depths":

Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against [this great pain], equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, evens the score with

his torturer by the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Nothing, into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction:

out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a dif

ferent person, with a few more question marks?above all, with the will to ques tion more persistently, more deeply, severely, harshly, wickedly, and quietly than

has ever been questioned on this earth before_What is strangest is this: after

ward one has a different taste?a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of

the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin, more

ticklish and mischievous, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender

tongue for all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence

in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been

before. (NCW Epilogue 1-2 tm)


This is a striking account of descending into the depths of the soul, sometimes

pressing the limits of one's will, sometimes abandoning oneself to a silent res

ignation, and finally of reemerging from these abysses with a different taste, a

"subtle innocence" that has perhaps begun to twist free of the dualism of will and resignation. In some respects, it reads like an account of the struggles of a

Zen iconoclast in the making. Yet, there remains at least one crucial distinc tion?a difference that, perhaps, makes all the difference.

Nietzsche tells us in this context that he owes to his long sickness "a higher health?one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill if (ibid., empha sis added). It is here that we find a decisive divergence from the path of Zen

Buddhism; for the Zen masters would urge us to proceed "one step forward"86

beyond the tip of this hundred-foot gymnastics pole: Kill the ego?let even its

solitary accomplishments of strength die into the ten directions of the world! Zen urges one to proceed through "the great doubt" (Jp. daigi) to the experience of what it calls "the great death" (Jp. daishi). Only then would it be possible to

speak of a new life and a "new taste," in this case the "one taste" (Jp. ichimi) of the nonduality of subject and object, self and other. A Zen saying puts this move

ment through existential death as follows: "First of all?the great death; after

cutting off completely?once again coming back to life."87 Only after becom

ing "a person of the great death" (Jp. daishitei no hito) would it be possible to

speak of the dawn of a new life of activity.88 Only by way of an utter "self abandonment and throwing away one's life" (Jp. h?shin shamei) could one dis cover that "the sword of death is at the same time a sword of life."89

Shibayama tells us that "the secret of Zen lies in this really throwing oneself

away."90 "Throwing down" (Jp. h?ge)9X a term often used in modern times to translate "Gelassenheit," refers to casting off not only all attachment to the ego and its possessions but also all "attachment to Buddhist teachings" (Jp. h?sh?), including any attachment to "emptiness" or to "the non-possession of a single thing" (Jp. muichimotsu); one must let go of both the will to being and the will to nothingness. In letting go completely, one dies into life. The Japanese Zen

master Shid? Bunan writes in a famous passage: "Become a dead person while

alive; die completely; then do what you will [omohimama ni sum]; all your acts are then good."92 When the ego has died completely, then "do what you will," for then?playing on the translation I have given here?one's acts would in fact no longer be oriented by a "will," but would express a way of being radically other than willing.

Nishitani interprets nihilism as "the great ball of doubt" (Jp. daigidan) of the modern age. Paralleling its role in Zen practice, this great doubt has the posi tive potential to lead us to a deeper "investigation of the self" (Jp. kojikyumei). This investigation reveals first of all that we are accustomed to living on what Nishitani calls the "field of consciousness" or the "field of possession/being." Drawing on the dual meaning of the character for "being" (Ch. you; Jp. w), which

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can mean both "existence" and "having" or "possession," Nishitani depicts life on this field in the following manner: "By 'having' something outside the self, one seeks to secure one's 'being' ; one is held by what one holds, in other words,

'possession' and 'existence' are bound together in a fundamental will [konpon iyoku] as a basic state of mind." In the crisis of nihilism one finds this existence of possessing and being possessed by beings slipping away, and the abyss of the "field of nihility" opens up around one. Here arises the final temptation of the

will, namely, that of the nihilists who attach themselves to this experience of

nihility and to acts of annihilation. Still here a "deep trace of the fundamental will" can be found. It is only by "cutting the root" of this fundamental will alto

gether that one could step back beyond nihilism.93

Having passed through the great negation on the field of nihility, Nishitani

writes, on the field of sunyata we experience a reaffirmation of being, where "true emptiness is one with marvelous being" (Jp. shink? my?u). Passing through absolute nullification (Nichtung; Jp. muka) is said to lead to an originary reaf firmation of the self and of being (Ichtung; Jp. ukd) (RN140/123). For Nishitani, then, nihilism is a crisis both in the sense of the greatest danger, the reduction of human being to the infinite drive of will, and in sense of the greatest possi bility; for here the roots of the "fundamental will" lie exposed. By cutting these

roots, a conversion to the standpoint of sunyata is possible, for "the standpoint of sunyata is first established at a bottomless place that exceeds by way of

absolute negation all standpoints of any kind related to will" (RN 216/251 tm). Nishitani never succumbed to the temptation to read Nietzsche's idea of the

will to power as a simple affirmation of a biological drive or a simple "lust for the power of authority" (kenryoku-yoku).94 In fact, he never loses his apprecia tion for a positive sense of the will to power as a potentially creative life-force that wells up after a great negation.95 Even in Religion and Nothingness,

Nishitani affirms that "for Nietzsche, it was the will to power that appeared in the conversion from a great death to a great life" (RN 254/232 tm). In the end, however, the radicality of both Nietzsche's negation and his reaffirmation of life

is said to remain limited insofar as the "standpoint of will" is not cast off. This

"cutting the roots of the will" is what ultimately would distinguish Nishitani's

"standpoint of Zen" from Nietzsche's philosophy of the will power. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the idea that one could attain release from

the cycle of karma?from "the punishment called existence, that existence must

eternally become deed and guilt again"?by way of a radical conversion

whereby "the will would become not-willing [Nicht-Wollen]" is but a great "fable song of madness" ( II 20 tm). In his own story of Zarathustra's dream,

where the "soul's secret" of the overhero, "the will-less one" who approaches

only after the heroic will is unlearned, perhaps Nietzsche himself comes close to adding a verse to this fable song of madness. But Zarathustra recoils: "I flew too far into the future: dread overcame me" ( II14). Perhaps out of an inabil


ity to let the will to power overcome itself, or perhaps in the spirit of a "flight back into the land of education" (ibid.), that is, into the No-saying task of speak

ing to his contemporaries, Nietzsche tends to speak of self-overcoming rather as a gymnastic training of the will to power.

In one of his notes opposing Schopenhauer's philosophy of the denial of will, Nietzsche writes: "I assess a person by the quantum of power and abundance of his will: not by its enfeeblement and extinction; I regard a philosophy which

teaches denial of the will as a teaching of defamation and slander?I assess the

power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage" (WP 382 tm). It is by cultivating "an abundance of con

trary drives and impulses within himself" that the human being is said to have

distinguished itself from the animals, and "thanks to this synthesis [of contrary drives], he is master of the earth." "The highest human being," we are told in this context, "would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured" (WP 966).

Nietzsche's gymnastics of the will thus coaches us to seek out the greatest test of strength, for whatever does not kill us will make us stronger. He finds the

ultimate test in his experiments with nihilism and ultimately in his experience of the eternal recurrence?both of which, we recall, he connects with his idea of "the European form of Buddhism":

Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must

halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. This experimental philosophy wants

rather to cross over to the opposite of this?to a Dionysian Yes-saying to the world

as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection?it wants the eternal circu

lation:?the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The high est state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to

existence?my formula for this is amor fati. (WP 1041 tm)

The question is whether this "love of fate" twists free of the will to interpretive power over the play of multiple perspectives, or whether it is the triumph of the will to power that has learned even to "will backwards," to say to everything: you are thus only because thus I will you to be. The thought of eternal recurrence

arrives as the greatest weight and challenge to the will; the will is confronted by the "it was" as that which finally resists its command. The fragment and riddle of the past escapes the will's power?unless the "creative will" learns how to say, "But thus I willed it" ( II 20). The vision of the eternal recurrence itself turns into the answer to this dilemma, for the past is now also the future, and all things past, present, and future are "knotted together so firmly" that to will the present moment is to will all of existence, again and again (see III 2.2).

The experience of the eternal recurrence can be borne only if the will to power is transformed into a love of fate. But is this love the shattering transformation of the will to power or is it its consummation? It would appear to be the latter inso

124 Bret W.Davis

far as: "To impose upon becoming the character of being?that is the supreme will to power.... That everything recurs is the most extreme approximation of a world

of becoming to a world of being" (WP6?1 tm). Why does Nietzsche, the philoso pher of becoming, feel compelled to once again approximate a world of being? It is not without reason that Heidegger suggests that what is revealed here is

Nietzsche's own "form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge."96 Would not a philosophy of impermanence (Jp.

mujo) without return?perhaps together with an attunement to the "pathos of

things" (Jp. mono no aware) that compassionately embraces the beauty of flow ers that fall and smiles that fade, never to return exactly the same?express an even greater willingness to radically affirm this world of becoming? Yet such releasement into the stream of impermanence would lie beyond the capacity of an

experimental philosophy of strength; this test would demand more than any gym nastics of the will to power could prepare one for.

Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power, as we have seen, runs up against its ambivalent limits time and again, and just as one may find passages in his

diatribes against traditional morality that seem to call for a reactive violent self

assertion, it is also possible to find elsewhere passages that read like an "unsung precursor of Heidegger's Gelassenheit."91 In the end, as I have suggested, the movement of his thought teeters on the ambivalent axis of "the self-overcom

ing of 'the will to power." Perhaps Nietzsche's own awareness of this unresolved tension in his thought explains his projection of a future overman who would have successfully overcome this ambivalence. Perhaps the overman would be able to resolve the tensions in Nietzsche's philosophy of the self-overcoming of the will to power.

Wolfgang M?ller-Lauter has argued, however, that Nietzsche's philosophy in the end leaves us with an insurmountable contradiction between two mutually incompatible images of the overman. These two images, of the "strong man" and the "wise man," are said to reflect two opposing tendencies in Nietzsche's

thought as a whole. On the one hand, we find "portrayals according to which man's greatness consists in the absolutization of his perspective." The "most

powerful man," writes Nietzsche, "would have to be the most evil, in as much as he carries his ideal against the ideals of other men and remakes them in his own image" (WP 1026). On the other hand, M?ller-Lauter points out, Nietzsche also characterizes the great man "as the one who withdraws from no possible

knowledge. ... He should learn to see in various kinds of perspectives, with more and more eyes, omitting nothing ever known, even the most contradictory

things."98 This tension between "the fixation of a perspective in exclusive oppo sition to other perspectives and the opening up to the multiplicity of possible

perspectives"99 is reproduced in the two ways of understanding Nietzsche's

"unrestricted Yes" to the eternal recurrence of the same. Does this unrestricted

Yes, this amor fati, indicate that the wise man has learned to bless every moment


and everything for its own sake? Or does it mean that the strong man succeeds

in interpreting all existence, including that of the nauseating last man, as nec

essary for the "high point of the series," the moment of his own affirmation? "For the sake of this moment I endure recurrence," writes Nietzsche in his note

books.100 Does the unrestrictedness of the Yes mean that the strong man "must tolerate no counter-ideals," or that the wise man would unreservedly recognize "the independent claims of other ideals"?101 M?ller-Lauter argues that Nietzsche anticipated a synthesis of the two when,

for example, he wrote: "The wise man and the animal will draw closer and pro duce a new type" But how, M?ller-Lauter asks, "could such an approximation be possible without reducing wisdom or animality, whereas the growth of both is supposed to be indispensable for the increase of power?" He claims that "Nietzsche gives no convincing answer to this question," and he rejects even

attempts to resolve this tension dialectically by positing a temporal succession:

How shall the one who selects and rejects, breeds and destroys, possibly be the same as the one who unconditionally affirms everything that is, was, and will be,

without condemning everything?... Each of the two types of overman must with

his consistent self-realization destroy what is peculiar to the other.... The effort

to construe a transition between the two types in the form of an historical sequence also fails. It is impossible to speak of the wise man emerging from the violent one without assuming an incomprehensible qualitative leap.102

As I have suggested above, were one to search for such a qualitative leap, or a

twisting free, in Nietzsche's thought, one would need to pursue the most radi cal trajectory in the movement of the "the self-overcoming of the will to power."

A Zen Overman as a Master of Service or Another Fable Song of Madness?

Having already explored the question of whether and to what extent intimations of a twisting free of the contradiction between strength and wisdom can be found in Nietzsche's thought, we may now consider the following question: Does the "sudden awakening" (Ch. dunwu; Jp. tongo)?which would spontaneously arrive at the end of arduous and paradoxical disciplines of "willing not to will" and "letting the will overcome itself"?indicate an alternative "qualitative leap" in Zen Buddhism? The Zen masters do indeed seem to suggest that strength and

wisdom can be reconciled, and that a dynamic nondualism between autonomous

mastery and compassionate servitude can be thought outside the horizon of a contest of wills. Let us look at several interconnected expressions of this play between extremes.

One the one hand, we find in Zen expressions of a nonduality of self and world that exceed even those of Nietzsche's elevated egoism and love of fate. In The

126 Bret W.Davis

Blue Cliff Record we read: "When you have not penetrated it, it is like silver mountains and iron cliffs. When you have penetrated it, you find that you your selves are originally the silver mountains and iron cliffs." Indeed, you are said to be able to exclaim: "I alone am holy throughout heaven and earth."103 D?gen

writes of "setting the self out in array and making that the whole world," for "I am being-time" and the entire world of phenomena is manifested in "the exhaus tive exertion of my power \jinriki]"m Linji teaches: "If you become a master

wherever you are, every place you are will be true."105 But what does it mean in Zen to be a "master" or "host" (Ch. zhu; Jp. shu)!

To begin with, it does indeed imply that one is not passively "tossed around"

(Jp. furimawasareru) by other "perspectives," neither by the manipulations of other egos nor even by the "words and letters" of the Zen teachings them selves.106 On the other hand, the freedom of the "master" here is evidently not that of one who has strengthened the power of his ego to the point where it

expands to aggressively incorporate the whole world into its domain, but rather

that of one who has undergone the great death of the ego and is able to freely interact with others by ek-statically opening himself or herself to their presence.

D?gen writes that "practice that confirms things by taking the self to them is

illusion; for things to come forward and practice and confirm the self is enlight enment." Thus, according to D?gen, although "to study the Buddha way is to

study the self," "to study the self is to forget the self and be enlightened by the

myriad things of the world."107

Only through this experience of releasement from the ego do we find that,

just like us, "pine trees are time, and so are bamboo trees."108 Only by "exhaust

ing one's power" is it possible to ek-statically stand out into the world such that one can?in Bash?'s words?"from the pine tree learn of the pine tree; and from the bamboo of the bamboo." Only through the "great death" of the willful ego could one say: "Heaven and earth and I have the same root; all things and I are

of the same body." Yet, the Zen masters warn that to stop at a static experience of undifferentiated identity would be to fall into a one-sided "bad equality" (Jp.

akuby?d?). Nanquan (Jp. Nansen) rebukes a monk who had quoted the above

phrase by pointing to a flower in the garden and saying: "People these days see

this flower as though they were in a dream."109 The world is both one and many, both unified in a co-originating whole and differentiated into discrete singular moments of being-time. The self is both inseparably related to and irreducibly different from other selves.

Against the tendency to reify and isolate separate entities and egos, the Huayan

philosophers spoke of the mutual containment (Ch. xiang-ji; Jp. sosoku) and the

mutual interp?n?tration (Ch. xiang-ru; Jp. s?nyi?) of all phenomena in the world

of dependent co-origination.110 At its highest stage of teaching, Huayan philos ophy speaks of the "mutual free circulation between master and attendant,"111 where each and every phenomenon is capable of freely moving between the


"master" perspective and the supporting position of "attendant." In the Japanese tea ceremony, when both the host and the guest share equally in the communi

cation of no-mind (Jp. mushin), one speaks of "the tea of no host and no guest" (Jp. muhinju no cha). Linji reminds us, however, not to fall into the illusion of an abstract equality; even in a "dharma battle" between monks where both shout in unison, "host and guest are clearly distinguished" (Ch. binzhu-liran; Jp. hinju rekinen).112 It would not do, for example, for a teacher to defer completely to

his or her students, even though this mutually determined relation is malleable and at times, and certainly over time, reversible.

What happens, then, when two "masters" meet? Here we discover those remarkable stories of give and take, of "letting go" and "gathering in," that is, of the free circulation between acting as "guest" and as "host." In The Blue Cliff Record we find the following story:

Yangshan Huiji asked Sansheng Huir?n, "What is your name?"

Sansheng said, "Huiji!" "Huiji!" replied Yangshan, "that's my name."

"Well then," said Sansheng, "my name is Huir?n."

Yangshan roared with laughter.113

In his interpretation of this story, Nishitani writes that the I-Thou relationship evidenced here demands, on the one hand, that the I and the Thou are thought of as absolutely independent, each an irreplaceable singularity, and, on the other

hand, that both the I and the Thou are, because of their relationship to each other, at the same time absolutely relative. The interpersonal relation of nonduality

implies that "self and other are not one, and not two."114 Elsewhere Nishitani uses

the metaphor of two adjoining rooms that share a wall. Insofar as a "boundary" implies both discontinuity and continuity, the wall both irreducibly separates the two rooms as singular individuals and yet links them together as inseparable neighbors. The task of community is neither to lock oneself up in one's own room nor to try to completely knock down the walls of individuality and invade some one else's space. It is rather a matter of letting the walls of the ego become, to the

right degree, "transparent" (Jp. tornei), in the sense of allowing a freer commu

nication between selves of interconnected yet irreducible difference.115

Drawing on Huayan philosophy, Nishitani writes of the "circuminsessional"

(Jp. egoteki) relation between dependently co-originating phenomena, where each is at once autonomous and subordinate in relation to others (i.e., is both "master" and "attendant") (see RN 166-67/148). When a relation of "circum insessional interp?n?tration" (egoteki s?ny?) is realized, "absolute opposition is at the same time absolute harmony." Such harmony takes place among persons when "the other is at the center of the individual, and where the existence of each one is 'other-centered.'"116 This would not mean, we are told, that the indi vidual would give up his or her freedom, for at the standpoint of sunyata true freedom is not a matter of the freedom of the will (RN 314/285).

128 Bret W.Davis

Hence, the true "master," according to Zen, would no longer be caught in a willful struggle for power over the servant, but would freely become a master in and of servitude. Nishitani writes that true "autonomy," or "being one's own

master," comes about together with "becoming a thing and a means for all other

things" (RN305/276). He quotes the following passage from Hakuin in this con text: "You must resolve to withdraw yourself this very day, to reduce yourself to the level of a footman or a lackey, and yet bring your mind-master to firm and sure resolution." In contrast to the egoistic self-centeredness found at "the stand

point of karma" and accompanying all other "standpoints of will" (7W283/257), Nishitani writes: "True self-centeredness is a selfless self-centeredness: the self centeredness of a 'self that is not a self. It consists of . . . 'circuminsessional

interp?n?tration' on the field of sunyata. The gathering together of the being of all things at the home-ground of the being of the self can only come about in unison with the subordination of the being of the self to the being of all things at their home-ground" (RN 274/249). Beyond all standpoints of will, the radi cal step back to the field of sunyata would open up the possibility of a mutual

interp?n?tration of "absolute subordination and absolute autonomy" (RN 304/275). Would this nonduality of autonomous mastery and subordinate servi tude indicate a direction for transforming and reconciling the two incompatible images of Nietzsche's overman?117

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche rejects the modern idea of "progress" in human

development "toward something better or stronger or higher." On the contrary, he claims, a "kind of overman" is "constantly encountered in the most widely different places on earth and in the greatest variety of cultures" (A 4 tm). Regrettably, Nietzsche was not exposed to any accounts of the benevolent sever

ity, the playful antics and roaring laughter of the Zen masters. Let us, however, end with the question of how he might have responded to the characters in these stories. Would he have found in their great reaffirmation of life a synthesis of the strong and wise overmen? Would he have seen in their vitality and com

passion an overflowing beyond power and pity? Might he have learned from them a path of twisting free from the contradictions that frustrate the self

overcoming of the will to power? Or would he have persisted in his original sus

picion of "a Buddhist negation of the will" (BT1) as the danger par excellence to an artistic affirmation of life? Might he have found in Zen a different art of

living beyond the will to power? Or would its radical path of cutting off the very roots of the will?giving rise, as it does, to such paradoxical expressions as the

"doing of non-doing" and the "nonduality of mastery and servitude"?be

rejected as yet another verse in the so-called "fable song of madness"?

Department of Japanese Philosophy Kyoto University


Notes 1. WP 1067; see BGE 36; II12; WP 685; and WP 693. References to Nietzsche's published

works will be given in the text according to standard abbreviations, with part number given in roman numerals and/or section number in Arabic numbers. Although I have in all cases consulted the original German text, in general I have adopted the translations by Walter Kaufman in The

Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982) and Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1968), and by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale in The Will to Power

(New York: Random House, 1967). I have marked "tm" in cases where I have modified the

translation. A word here on my use of the Nachla?: I am concerned neither with "lumping" all of

Nietzsche's texts under a single proper name nor with "splitting" the "real Nietzsche" off from the

"less refined" notebooks and fragments. My concern is rather with thinking through the play and

strife among certain predominant perspectives and movements that can be found throughout both the published texts and unpublished notes. The severest limitation of the notes is that we do not

know how they would have eventually been situated and organized, that is, what role of

perspective and voice they would have played in a finished text. In fact, as one of those fragments tells us, Nietzsche claimed to "hold in reserve many types of philosophy which need to be

taught"?including that of a pessimistic type of "European Buddhism" (WP 132). Derrida has

compellingly argued that Nietzsche was "one of the few great thinkers who multiplied his names

and played with signatures, identities, and masks." (Jacques Derrida, "Interpreting Signatures

(Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions," in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida

Encounter, ed. Diana P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer [Albany: SUNY Press, 1989], 67.) Nietzsche is indeed a thinker of multiple perspectives, and I shall be concerned with the tensions

between several of these. On the other hand, one must not pass over that particularly predominant voice in his text that speaks of the will to power as a subordination of the multitude of perspectives under the strength of a ruling one, or over that "mask" which speaks of the creation (not the given existence) of a puppeteer behind the masks. Indeed, in the above-quoted fragment that speaks of

the need to employ various philosophies, Nietzsche subordinates this thought under that of the

"development of strength of the will, an art that permits us to wear masks" in order to prepare for "the legislators of the future, the masters of the earth." It is this philosophy of the will to power as a drive toward organization under a focal perspective from which others can be commanded

that many contemporary philosophers of difference do not critically encounter, or at least tend to

downplay, in their otherwise fecund repetitions of Nietzschean themes. It is also this philosophy of the will that the perspective of Buddhism allows us to critically reconsider. The Buddhist

perspective shall also let us return to Heidegger's critique of "the fundamental attunement," if not

the metaphysics, of the will to power in a new light. 2. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, 5th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1989), 340; Nietzsche

Volume TV: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 203.

3. On Nietzsche's hermeneutical strategy of using foreign perspectives to critically question the Western tradition, see Eberhard Scheiffele, "Questioning One's 'Own' from the Perspective of

the Foreign," trans. Graham Parkes, in Nietzsche and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 31^17.

4. See Mervyn Sprung, "Nietzsche's Trans-European Eye," in Nietzsche and Asian Thought, 76-90. Sprung concludes that "Nietzsche's trans-European eye was more European than 'trans'"

(83). 5. Robert Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Ironic Affinities (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1997); see Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a

Comparative Study (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981). Alluding to various points of similarity with

Mahayana thought, Nitta Akira, in his book Y?roppa no Budda: Niiche no Toi [The European Buddha: Nietzsche's question] (Matsudo: Ris?sha, 1998), goes so far as to suggest that "ironically, Nietzsche's criticism of Buddhism in fact led him into the nearest proximity to Buddhism" (31).

130 Bret W.Davis

In his emphasis on points of resonance, however, Nitta neglects the tension between an affirmation

of the will to power and a Buddhist critique of the will.

6. Mistry argues that connecting Nietzsche's thought with the Mahayana tradition "poses the

danger of involving Nietzsche in the kind of idealism he vociferously rejected" (Nietzsche and

Buddhism, 141), but he himself finds it necessary on occasion to have recourse to Nagarjuna's

thought in order to counter Nietzsche's critique of the life-negating impulse of (Theravada) Buddhism. Graham Parkes comments on Mistry's book in this regard: "The detachment of the

arhant who has attained nirvana issues in a condition that is insufficiently o/the world?albeit still

in it?to be comparable with the results of fully living out the Nietzschean program. [Mistry]

occasionally tries to close the gap by invoking the later Buddhist (Mah?y?na) denial that nirvana

is different from the world of everyday life; but that denial is precisely the distinguishing feature

of Mah?y?na Buddhism, which thus makes for a more fruitful comparison with Nietzsche than

does the earlier tradition." ("Nietzsche and East Asian Thought: Influences, Impacts, and

Resonances," in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M.

Higgins [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 373.) For some interesting examples of

such comparison, see the chapters by Glen T. Martin, ?k?chi Ry?gi, Arifuku K?gaku, and Sonoda

Muneto in Parkes's collection Nietzsche and Asian Thought. 7. Nishitani Keiji, Nihirizumu [Nihilism], in Nishitani Keiji Chosakush? [The collected works

of Nishitani Keiji] (Tokyo: S?bunsha, 1986), 8:185; translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko

Aihara as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 180. References to this

work will be cited in the text as SN, with the page number from the original followed by the page number from the translation. I will mark "tm" in cases where I have modified the translation.

8. ?k?chi Ry?gi, taking his impetus in part from Nishitani, develops a sympathetic, yet in the

end critical, interpretation of Nietzsche from the perspective of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism.

Ok?chi claims that Nietzsche comes into proximity to Buddhism in "the last phase of his thought

experiment" where he appears to succeed in the venture of "overcoming nihilism through nihilism

itself." Ok?chi goes on to argue, however, that Nietzsche's attempt to attain to a standpoint of amor fati beyond all revengefulness remained limited on account of his attachment to the doctrine

of the will to power. (Ry?gi Ok?chi, "Nietzsches amor fati im Lichte von Karma des

Buddhismus," in Nietzsche-Studien 1 [1972]: 42, 80ff.) Ok?chi works out his interpretation in

greater detail in his book Niiche to Bukky?: Kongenteki Nihirizumu no Mondai [Nietzsche and

Buddhism: The problem of radical nihilism] (Kyoto: H?z?kan, 1983). 9. On the one hand, it is far too limited an approach to "evaluate the Buddha by way of

Nietzsche," to "attempt to understand the Buddha's teachings in the light of Nietzsche's philosophy," and then to simply conclude that "Nietzsche and the Buddha are thinkers who stand in direct

opposition to one another." (Yuda Yutaka, Budda vs. Niiche [Buddha vs. Nietzsche] [Tokyo:

Dait?shuppansha, 2001], 2,5, and 220.) While certain passages and moments of Nietzsche's text can

indeed be employed to support such a clear-cut antithesis, the movement of Nietzsche's thought and

the complexities of his view of Buddhism do not allow us to rest assured with this "faith in opposite values" (BGE 2). On the other hand, however, to anyone who would gloss over the confrontation

altogether by paying exclusive attention either to the errors in Nietzsche's understanding of

Buddhism or to the ironic affinities between his thought and Buddhism correctly understood, Nietzsche would likely direct us to the following aphorism: "Against mediators. . . . Seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes" (GS 228).

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), Division 7, vol. 1, p. 111.

11. The following abbreviations will be used in reference to Buddhist terminology: P. = Pali; Sk. = Sanskrit; Ch. = Chinese; and Jp.

= Japanese. Diacritical marks have been kept to a minimum

and eliminated in cases where the term is commonly used in English publications (samsara,

nirvana, Mahayana, Theravada, samadhi, sunyata, etc.). Note that, for the sake of consistency, I


have also reduced or eliminated diacritical marks in citations from translations and secondary sources. Chinese and Japanese names will be written in the original order of family name followed

by given name, except in citations of works in Western languages that list the given name first.

12. See the following section of Ecce Homo (EH 17), where Nietzsche attempts to distinguish his own "war against Christianity" from the spirit of revenge. Ok?chi, however, questions the

impulse of Nietzsche's own "anti-" against all forms of "transcendence." "Does it come from his

'ressentiment' against the 'proponents of another world' [die 'Hinterweiter']! Against the

'shadow of God'? From an imprisonment in 'his' Christianity?" ("Nietzsches amor fati im Lichte

von Karma des Buddhismus," 91.) My own concern lies more with the question: Does Nietzsche's

persistent assertion of the will to power in some sense remain a "reaction" against certain

excessive malformations of an ascetic denial of the will?

13. Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha: Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (Berlin, 1881).

Sprung tells us that the volume of this book presently in Nietzsche's library appears never to have

been opened, but he also warns that we should bear in mind the possibility that this copy is not

the one Nietzsche actually possessed. ("Nietzsche's Trans-European Eye," 82.) 14. Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 14CM2. Mistry attempts to "demonstrate that

Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence represents the reverse of the Buddhist perspective essentially only in one sense, namely, that of the 'finality' in recurrence." (Ibid., 196.) This is, however, a decisive

"only," one with ramifications that color the entire conception of the recurrence.

15. See Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 153.

16. From the Dhammacakkappavattana-sutta, as translated in Walpola Rahula, What the

Buddha Taught, rev. ed. (Bedford: Gordon Fraser, 1967), 93.

17. See Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 48.

18. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 142ff.

19. Morrison finds an ironic affinity between "skillful and unskillful tanh?" in Buddhism, and

"generative and degenerative will to power" in Nietzsche's thought. (Nietzsche and Buddhism, 152.) But this comparison reaches its limits with the fundamental disagreement between Nietzsche's

radical affirmation of the will to power (his generative accounts are of strong will) and the Buddhist

aim of provisionally using tanh? to cut off the roots of tanh?. The goal of the extinction of tanh? is

in fact a particularly prominent theme in Theravada Buddhism, and while Morrison does find

resources in the Pali cannon for claiming that "perhaps it is only a certain aspect of striving that is

quenched in nirvana" (ibid., 153), it is fair to say that this radically other kind of striving is more

explicitly developed in the Mahayana tradition. D. T. Suzuki, while perhaps unfairly restrictive in his

view of Theravada, writes in one text that Mahayana even uncovers a deeper, positive notion of

tanh?. Suzuki writes: "the destruction of desires or cravings (tanh?nam khayam) so much

emphasized in the teaching of earlier Buddhism is not to be understood negativistically. The

Buddhist training consists in transforming trisn? (tanh?) into karun?, ego-centered love into

something universal, eros into agape. . . . Let tanh? be destroyed but we must not forget that it has

another root which reaches the very ground of being." When we are released from the hold of a

restrictive sense of tanh?, that is, from tanh? that has fallen into the "thrall of egoistic impulses" and

turned into "the most ungovernable and insatiable upholder of power," then this energetic impulse returns to its "primal nature" as mah?karun? or "absolute compassion." (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki,

Mysticism Christian and Buddhist [Mine?la, N.Y.: Dover, 2002], 73 and 127.) We need to bear in

mind, however, that the radical reaffirmation of life in Zen Buddhism?a complete conversion that

makes possible even such occasional iconoclastic statements as "Buddha is trisn?" (see ibid., 125)? is predicated on a radical negation, a "great death" of (egoistic) trisn?.

20. Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 32.

21. For a good general account of the misinterpretation and appropriation of Buddhism in this manner by nineteenth-century philosophers, see Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness:

Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David Streit and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University

132 Bret W.Davis

of North Carolina Press, 2003). Nietzsche's annihilationist view of nirvana, and his pessimistic

interpretation of Buddhism in general, was most likely influenced by passages like the following from Carl F. Koeppen's Die Religion des Buddha (Berlin, 1857-59): "The ethics of Buddhism is

negative: it is. . . a morality of renunciation and self-abnegation, not striving and creating; it

teaches suffering and endurance, not action and work. . . . Furthermore, it is also essentially

negative because it is otherworldly and transcendent and because the real world, the earth with

what it bears, is of no value to it." (Quoted in Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 113.) Curiously,

although Nietzsche apparently closely read Oldenberg's Buddha, he seems to have ignored its

rejection of the interpretation of nirvana as annihilation as "wholly missing the main drift of [the] Buddha and the ancient order of his disciples." (Quoted in Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism,

54-55.) The fact that Nietzsche frequently refers to Buddhism and Schopenhauer in one breath

gives indication of the influence this self-proclaimed pessimist exerted on Nietzsche's

interpretation. It is significant to note, however, that he ignores even Schopenhauer's hints of a

positive interpretation of nirvana. These hints are, to be sure, few and remained undeveloped; but

they are given prominent place in Schopenhauer's texts, for example, in the closing lines of the

main text of his magnum opus: "[We] freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns

and galaxies, is?nothing." (Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1

[Stuttgart: Suhrkamp, 1986], 558; The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 411-12, emphasis added.) If we were to completely give up the will,

Schopenhauer claims, "all the signs would change," and that which we can now only refer to

negatively as a "nothing" would show itself as that which truly exists. (Ibid., p. 556/410.) 22. Quoted in Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 37.

23. See Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought (London: Routledge, 2000), 49ff. Williams argues that there is no positive (or negative) ontological commitment implied in this language of "domain" or "realm," but rather only an affirmation of the perceptual condition necessary for the

event of nirvana to take place. (Ibid., p. 52.) 24. The Vimalakirti Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press,

1997), 26, 29-30.

25. Ibid., 106-7, 110.

26. Kenneth K. Inada, N?g?rjuna: A Translation of his M?lamadhyamakak?rik? with an

Introductory Essay (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1993), 158.

27. Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: N?g?rjuna's

M?lamadhyamakak?rik? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 332.

28. Inada, N?g?rjuna, 39.

29. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 341. See also Inada, N?g?rjuna, 160ff.

30. See The Vimalakirti Sutra, 92.

31. Nakamura Hajime and Saigusa Mitsuyoshi, Baudda?Bukky? [Bauddha?Buddhism]

(Tokyo: Sh?gakkan, 1996), 208-10.

32. The vimalakirti Sutra, 37.

33. The Gateless Gate (Ch. Wumenkuan; Jp. Mumonkan), Case 19. References to this k?an

collection and to The Blue Cliff Record (Ch. Piyenlu; Jp. Hekiganroku) will be to case numbers.

I have referred to the following editions of the originals. Mumonkan, ed. Nishimura Eshin (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1994); Hekiganroku, 3 vols., ed. Iriya Yoshitaka et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992).

34. Zenkei Shibayama, The Gateless Gate: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, trans. Sumiko

Kudo (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 142.

35. Upon arriving in China, the Bodhidharma is said to have responded to an emperor's

question "What is the first principle of the holy teachings?" by bluntly stating: "Vast openness


without anything holy." (The Blue Cliff Record, Case 1.) Linji most strikingly expresses the Zen

negation of otherworldly salvation as follows: "If you love what is holy and hate what is ordinary,

you float and sink in the sea of birth and death." Or again: "You seek the Buddha and you seek

the Dharma. You seek liberation; you seek to leave the triple world. You fools, where do you want

to go when you leave the triple world?" More provocatively still, he condemns all "seeking outside": "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet the Patriarchs, kill the Patriarchs."

(Rinzairoku, ed. Iriya Yoshitani [Tokyo: Iwanami, 1989], 52, 96-97, 101; The Recorded Sayings

of Linji, trans. J. C. Cleary, in Three Chan [Zen] Classics [Berkeley: Numata Center, 1999], 21,

33-34, translation modified). For the responses of "three pounds of flax" and "a shitstick" to the

question "What is Buddha?" see The Gateless Gate, Cases 18 and 21.

36. Dao De Jing, chap. 25; see Lao-tzu: The Way and Its Virtue, trans. Toshihiko Izutsu

(Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2001), 72-73, translation modified. For occurrences of the

expression wu-wei, see chaps. 2, 3, 43, 48, and 64.

37. "Mu-i no Gogi ni tsuite" [On the meaning of the term mu-i], Morimoto Seinen-r?shi, vol.

1 Gorokuhen, ed. Yamada Kunio (Kyoto: T?eisha, 1997), 46-68.

38. Nishitani Keiji, Sh?ky? to wa Nanika [What is religion?], Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, vol.

10, p. 262; translated by Jan Van Bragt as Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1982), 238-39. References to this work will be cited in the text as

RN, with the page number from the original followed by the page number from the translation. I

will mark "tm" in cases where I have modified the translation.

39. See "Hi' to 'K?sh?': Tsuaratosutora wa kaku Katatta to Zen" ["Compassion" and

"laughter": Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Zen], in Ohashi Ry?suke, Hi no Gensh?ron Josetsu:

Nihontetsugaku no Roku Teeze yori [Prolegomenon to a phenomenology of compassion: From six

theses of Japanese philosophy] (Tokyo: S?bunsha, 1998), 161-77.

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe, ed. Nietzsche Archive (Leipzig: 1894-1912), vol. 16, p. 422. Nishitani refers to this note in SN 98/64.

41. Grossoktavausgabe, vol. 7, p. 359; quoted in Wolfgang M?ller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His

Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent

(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 82.

42. Angelus Silesius, S?mtliche Poetische Werke, vol. 3 (Cherubinischer Wandersmann), 3rd

ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1949), 39.

43. This line is from the verse appended to the ninth of Kuoan's "Ten Oxherding Pictures."

(See Ueda Shizuteru and Yanagida Seizan, J?gy?zu: Jiko no Gensh?gaku [The ten oxherding

pictures: Phenomenology of the self] [Tokyo: Chikuma, 1992], 247.) Tsujimura K?ichi, who

translated this text into German, relates Heidegger's interest in this line, which is said to have

reminded him of Angelus Silesius's poem. (See Ueda's foreword in ibid., 19.) Tsujimura and

Hartmut Buchner translate the line as follows. "Grenzenlos flie?t der Flu?, wie er flie?t. Rot bl?t

die Blume, wie sie bl?ht." (Der Ochs und Sein Hirte [Pfullingen: Neske, 1958], 45.) Heidegger suggests that humans too "first truly are when in their own way they are like the rose?without

why." (Der Satz vom Grund, 7th ed. [Pfullingen: Neske, 1992], 73.) 44. See Ueda, J?gy?zu: Jiko no Gensh?gaku, 116-18.

45. Ibid., 146; also see Shizuteru Ueda, "Das absolute Nichts im Zen, bei Eckhart und bei

Nietzsche," in Die Philosophie der Kyoto-Schule: Texte und Einf?hrung, ed. Ry?suke Ohashi

(Munich: Alber, 1990), 497.

46. Abe Masao also questions whether the will to power truly expresses the innocence of

becoming. In Zen, he writes, "the innocence of becoming and true naturalness are realized only in

[what Linji calls] 'the place where the seeking mind ceases,'" but the will to power would seem

rather to express the "fundamental form of the 'seeking mind' itself." ("Zen and Nietzsche," in

Masao Abe, Zen, and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur [Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 1985], 149-50.)

134 Bret W.Davis

47. There is some debate on the timing and extent of Heidegger's influence on Nishitani's

increasingly critical interpretation of Nietzsche. Nishitani studied with Heidegger from 1937 to

1939, during which time Heidegger was lecturing on Nietzsche, but before he had yet fully worked

out his critique of "Nietzsche's nihilism." Parkes suggests that, while Nishitani's 1949 The Self

Overcoming of Nihilism "remains independent of the Heideggerian interpretation," the 1961

Religion and Nothingness shows signs of a "delayed influence." (See Parkes's comments in The Self

Overcoming of Nihilism, xxii and 196.) Kashima T?ru argues (purportedly against Parkes) that

Nishitani had not digested Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche while he was in Freiburg, for Heidegger had not yet at that time developed his interpretation of Nietzsche's relation to nihilism, and that even

Religion and Nothingness shows only in a few parts some external signs of influence. ("Nishitani

Keiji to Haideggaa: Niiche-kaishaku wo megutte" [Nishitani Keiji and Heidegger: On their

interpretations of Nietzsche], in "Taiwa" ni tatsu Heideggaa [Heidegger in "dialogue"], ed.

Haideggaa Kenky?kai [Matsudo: Ris?sha, 2000], 231. In this article Kashima sees a contradiction

in the fact that Nishitani finds links with Mahayana Buddhism at times in Nietzsche and other times

in Heidegger, despite Heidegger's own critical stance toward Nietzsche. He attributes this

inconsistency to Nishitani's alleged desire to overcome the modern Japanese Heimatlosigkeit, a

desire to return to his native tradition that supposedly led him at times to appropriate incompatible

foreign philosophies. [See ibid., 229.] This critique, however, does justice neither to Nishitani's

critical engagement with both Nietzsche and Heidegger nor to his style of deliberately working

through apparently contradictory standpoints in order to point out deeper points of contact. The

nuances of Nishitani's "return to the East," it should also be noted, can be simply conflated with the

uncritical currents of reactionary Japanism no more than his intense study of Western philosophy can

be conflated with the lack of self-reflection on the part of some Japanese specialists in Western

philosophy.) Nishitani's student and Heidegger scholar Tsujimura K?ichi, on the other hand, writes

that Nishitani basically agreed with Heidegger's interpretation of the will to power as "the will to

will," and that their interpretations of the eternal recurrence were also "remarkably similar."

("Nishitani-sensei to Haideggaa: Gendai Nihirizumu no Mondai wo megutte" [Professor Nishitani and Heidegger: On the modern problem of nihilism], in J?i ni okeru K?, ed. Ueda Shizuteru [Tokyo: S?bunsha, 1992], 165.) Nishitani himself remarks in a 1976 conversation with Abe Masao that he in

general agrees with the latter's characterization of the will to power as a self-reflexive will to will

that does not reach reality itself, and with Heidegger's linking of the will to power with the eternal recurrence. Nishitani goes on in this context, however, to propound his understanding of the eternal recurrence as a "standpoint of great negation" (i.e., the eternal recurrence of meaninglessness), while

the will to power expresses a standpoint of reaffirmation. Ultimately, however, he states that amor

fati is the encompassing affirmative word of Nietzsche's thought. ("Taidan: Sekai-aku to

Nihirizumu" [Conversation on world-evil and nihilism], in Abe Masao, Kyogi to Kyomu [Falsity and

nihility] [Kyoto: H?z?kan, 2000], 192-93.) This sympathetic attention to the idea of amor fati runs

through all of Nishitani's engagements with Nietzsche's thought, and it is here that one can mark one

of the most significant points of distance from Heidegger's critical interpretation. Moreover, as I

demonstrate here, Nishitani's increasingly critical view of the will to power was by no means simply

imported from Heidegger, but was developed primarily from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism.

48. Nishitani Keiji Chosakush?, 1:3.

49. For an interpretation of Nishitani's thought that focuses on the idea of "trans-descendence"

and what I call his "topology of the step back," see my "Nishitani Keiji ni okeru Taiho':

Nihirizumu wo t?shite Zettaiteki-Shigan he" [The "step back" in Nishitani Keiji: Through nihilism to the absolute near-side], in "K?ngen" he no Tankyu: Kindai Nihon no Sh?ky? Shis? no

Yamanami [The search for "grounds": The range of religious thought in modern Japan], ed.

Hosoya Masashi (Kyoto: K?y? Shob?, 2000), 71-91. An essay in English on this topic is in

preparation and will appear in an upcoming issue of Synthesis Philosophica as "The Step Back

Through Nihilism: The Radical Orientation of Nishitani Keiji's Philosophy of Zen."


50. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:342; Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume IV: Nihilism, 204.

51. Ibid., 389/243.

52. Ibid., 340/203.

53. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis Werke (Leipzig, 1816), 3:49; see Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65-66.

54. Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, 256.

55. Ibid., XX.

56. Gillespie agrees with Heidegger that in response to nihilism what is called for is a "step back from willing," but he criticizes Heidegger for not having investigated the origins of nihilism in the late medieval theological voluntarism, and even claims that Heidegger falls back into the same trap of attempting to overcome human will by hypostatizing a will of Being. (See ibid., xxii.) I have argued elsewhere that Heidegger's critique of the will is far more complex and that, despite certain problematic residues and moments of relapse, an attempt to twist free from the very "horizon of the will" is at the heart of his path of thinking. See my Heidegger and the Will: On the

Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). 57. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:200; Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume IV: Nihilism, 147.

58. Wolfgang M?ller-Lauter writes that Nietzsche is not envisioning in such statements a

"metaphysical root," but rather a reciprocal relation between a plurality of "wills to power." When Nietzsche speaks of "the will to power," M?ller-Lauter concludes, this refers to the "sole quality" common to what is different quantitatively. See his Nietzsche, 133ff.

59. Grossoktavausgabe, 4:327.

60. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:114; Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume IV: Nihilism, 73.

61. For a detailed interpretation of Heidegger's thought from the perspective of the problem of the will and the possibility of non-willing, see my Heidegger and the Will.

62. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 138-39.

63. From the Anguttara-nik?ya; quoted in Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 22. 64. Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 29-30.

65. Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, 11:168.

66. Parkes, "Nietzsche and East Asian Thought: Influences, Impacts, and Resonances," 381. 67. It should be noted that Schopenhauer's view of the will in this regard is closer to Nietzsche

than the latter is willing to admit. For Schopenhauer, the will-to-live does not merely seek to

persist, but struggles "in order to appear in a higher grade that is so much the more powerful." (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1:216; The World as Will and Representation, 1:146.)

68. Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 31, emphasis added. 69. Iwanami Bukky?jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1989), 53.

70. The Dhammapada, trans. Ananda Maitreya (Berkeley: Paralax, 1995), 77. 71. Ibid., 42.

72. D. T. Suzuki writes that "with the human passions, the first work is to destroy the root of

ignorance and egoism. When this is thoroughly accomplished, the Buddha-nature which consists in praj?? and karun? will start its native operation. The principle of Suchness is not static, it is full of dynamic forces." (Mysticism Christian and Buddhist, 74.)

73. The Dhammapada, 29.

74. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 252.

75. Karl L?with, S?mtliche Schriften, vol. 6, Nietzsche (Stuttgart: J. . Metzlersche, 1987), 128. 76. Ibid., 201. A decade later, however, L?with concludes that Nietzsche "undoubtedly

achieved the metamorphosis from the Christian 'Thou shalt' to the modern will', but hardly the crucial transformation from the will' to the am' of the cosmic child." (Ibid., 426.)

77. Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 29.

136 Bret W.Davis

78. Derrida explains the "double gesture" involved in his deconstructive writing as follows. "On

the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. . . . [On] the other hand?to remain in this

phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this

double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval

between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new 'concept', a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime." (Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 41-^2.)

79. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio

Klostermann, 1977), 217; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William

Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 61.

80. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:233; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume I: The Will to Power as

Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, 1979), 202.

81. Heidegger refers to the final stage in this key text, "How the 'True World' Finally Became

a Fable: The History of an Error," as evidence of Nietzsche's twisting free of Platonism. The

notion of Herausdrehung as a "twisting free" that is "not merely inversion but also displacement" has been developed in this context by John Sallis in his Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 76ff.

82. Quoted from the Suttanip?ta in Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 36. In a letter, Nietzsche expressed his fondness for the image in the Suttanip?ta of the rhinoceros who wanders

alone. (See Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism, 17.) 83. See the following note in this regard. "Every living thing reaches out as far from itself with

its force as it can, and overwhelms what is weaker: thus it takes pleasure in itself. The increasing

'humanizing' of this tendency consists in this, that there is an ever subtler sense of how hard it is

really to incorporate another: while a crude injury done him certainly demonstrates our power over him, it at the same time estranges his will from us even more?and thus makes him less easy to subjugate" (WP 769).

84. Keta Masako focuses on this egocentric aspect of Nietzsche's perspectivism when she

writes that Nishitani's philosophy of "circuminsessional interp?n?tration" is its absolute

antithesis. (See Keta Masako, Nihirizumu no Shisaku [The thought of nihilism] [Tokyo: S?bunsha,

1999], 42-43.) The ambivalence that I am pointing out here in Nietzsche's thought implies,

however, that the relation with Nishitani's thought is also ambivalent.

85. From The Dhammapada, as translated in A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 316.

86. The allusion here is to Case 46 of The Gateless Barrier.

87. In Japanese: daishi ichiban zetsugo futatabi sosei. See Kusumoto Buny?, Zengony?mon

[Introduction to Zen terms] [Tokyo: Daih?rinkaku, 1982), 104.

88. See The Blue Cliff Record, Case 41.

89. See Nishitani Keiji Chosakush?, ll:236ff.; Nishitani Keiji, "Science and Zen," in The

Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School, ed. Frederick Frank (New York: Crossroad,

1982), 122ff.

90. Shibayama, The Gateless Barrier, 26.

91. See Kusumoto, Zengony?mon, 45-47.

92. Shid? Bunan Zenji SM [The collected writings of Zen Master Shid? Bunan], ed. K?da

Rentar? (Tokyo: Shunsh?sha, 1968), 31.

93. Nishitani Keiji Chosakush?, 11:190-91.

94. See Nishitani's comments in a 1949 dialogue with Watsuji Tetsur? and others, reprinted in

Nishitani Keiji Chosakush?, 15:348.

95. See Nishitani Keiji Chosakush?, 1:26; and 15:338.

96. Martin Heidegger, Vortr?ge und Aufs?tze, 7th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1994), 117; Martin

Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell

(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 228.


97. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University Park: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1986), 136. Krell alludes to a passage where Nietzsche writes that "learning to

see" is a matter of "habituating the eye to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer

judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects." While in

"unphilosophical language" we might refer to this as a matter of "strong will-power," in fact, Nietzsche tells us, "the essence of it is precisely not to 'will'" (77 8.6).

98. M?ller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His

Philosophy, 73-75.

99. Ibid., 77.

100. Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe, 2:371; quoted in M?ller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 120.

101. M?ller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 85.

102. Ibid., 99.

103. The Blue Cliff Record, Case 57. This exclamation is traditionally attributed to the Buddha

at the time of his birth. Nishitani relates a personal episode of watching the sunrise from a hotel

balcony and having the "overwhelming experience that the radiance of the sun was focused on me

and that the whole world was opening brightly, concentrated on myself alone." This experience of

"the whole is myself," he goes on to say, should not be misunderstood as in any way excluding an

openness to the fact that a person on the next balcony may be enjoying the same experience. (See Nishitani Keiji, "Encounter with Emptiness," in The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, ed.

Taitetsu Unno [Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989], 2-3.) 104. D?gen, "Uji" [Being-time], Sh?b?genz?, vol. 2, ed. Mizuno Yaoko (Tokyo: Iwanami,

1990), 47, 50, and 54; see The Heart of D?gen's Sh?b?genz?, trans. Norman Waddell and Masao

Abe (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 49, 51, and 54.

105. Rinzairoku, 50-51; see The Recorded Sayings of Linji, 20.

106. Another often-used Zen term for "master" is zhurengong (Jp. shujink?). (See The

Gateless Barrier, Case 12.) In modern Japanese this term is used to refer to the lead character in

a novel or film. Note that the Western term "Zen master" translates a different term that literally means "old teacher" (Jp. r?shi).

107. D?gen, "Genj?k?an" [Manifesting suchness], Sh?b?genz?, vol. 1, ed. Mizuno Yaoko

(Tokyo: Iwanami, 1990), 54; see The Heart of D?gen's Sh?b?genz?, 40-41.

108. D?gen, "Uji," 50; see The Heart of D?gen's Sh?b?genz?, 51.

109. The Blue Cliff Record, Case 40. For Nishitani's comments on this case, see Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, 3:3 Iff.

110. See Kamata Shigeo, Kegongoky?sh? [The five chapters of Huayan] (Tokyo:

Daiz?shuppan, 1979), 246ff.

111. Ch. zhuban juzu yuantong-zizai; Jp. shuban gusoku ents?-jizai. See ibid., 166. 112. Rinzairoku, 22; see The Recorded Sayings of Linji, 13.

113. The Blue Cliff Record, Case 68.

114. Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, 12:277-78 and 285; see Nishitani Keiji, "The I-Thou

Relation in Zen Buddhism," trans. N. A. Waddell, in The Buddha Eye, 49 and 56.

115. Set Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, 13:133 and 141.

116. Nishitani Keiji Chosakushu, 12:285; see Nishitani, "The I-Thou Relation in Zen

Buddhism," 56.

117. Nietzsche himself writes in one place of the need for a schooling of "hard discipline" that

teaches one to "be able to command and also proudly to obey; to stand in the ranks, but also

capable at any time of leading" (WP 912); but this sounds more like a military gymnastics of the

will than a circuminsessional relation of non-egos. Admittedly, Zen too has a history of being used, and abused, for military training, not only in the samurai's Bushid? ethic of premodern times but also during the more recent history of Japanese militarism. Brian Victoria has documented in

detail how the rhetoric of "becoming a master wherever you are" was misused by colonizing

138 Bret W.Davis

soldiers, and how that of "selflessness" was twisted to mean "absolute and unquestioning submission to the will and dictates of the emperor." (See Brian Victoria, Zen at War [New York:

Weatherhill, 1997].) Nishitani himself problematically spoke of "extinguishing the personal self

and serving the public" (messhi-h?k?) during the war, idealistically thinking that the Japanese state could, in turn, undergo "self-negation" and become a compassionate "nation of non-ego."

(On Nishitani's wartime political thought in the context of his philosophical career as a whole, see

my "Sh?ky? kara Seiji he, Seiji kara Sh?ky? he: Nishitani Keiji no Tenkai" [From religion to

politics and back to religion: Nishitani's turn], in Higashiajia to Tetsugaku [East-Asia and

philosophy], ed. Fujita Masakatsu et al. [Kyoto: Nakanishiya, 2002], 347-62.) D. T. Suzuki, whose writings are equally complex and problematic in this regard, wrote in 1938 that "Zen is a

religion of will-power, and will-power is what is urgently needed by the warriors, though it ought to be enlightened by intuition." (Zen and Japanese Culture [New York: Princeton University

Press, 1959], 63.) Later, however, he sometimes stressed the radical "passivity" involved in Zen

as in all "religious experience." (See his "Bukky? Seikatsu to Jud?sei" [Buddhist lifestyle and

passivity] in T?y?teki Ichi [Eastern oneness] [Tokyo: Dait?shuppansha, 1990, 1st ed. 1942], esp.

153ff.) In the end, however, Suzuki problematizes a simple "active/passive" or "self-power/other

power" distinction, and employs the language of "action of non-action" (musa no sa) in a struggle to express an idea of a freedom and responsibility other than that which can be thought in terms

of the will of the ego. (See his Zen no Shis? [Zen thought] [Tokyo; Shunj?sha, 1990,1st ed. 1943],

130ff.) This article was written with the generous support of a research fellowship from the Japan

Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

davi—zen after zarathustra

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