This is the view he gives in The Anti-Christ:
I do not want my condemnation of Christianity to lead me to be unfair to a related and - measured by the number of adherents - even more prevalent religion, Buddhism. The two belong together as nihilistic religions - they are religions of decadence -, but there are the most striking differences between them. Critics of Christianity owe scholars of India an enormous debt of gratitude for the fact that these two can now be compared. Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity, - its body has inherited the art of posing problems in a cool and objective manner, it came after a philosophical movement that lasted hundreds of years, the idea of ‘God’ had already been abandoned before Buddhism arrived. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion in history; even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism -) it has stopped saying ‘war against sin’ and instead, giving reality its dues, says ‘war against suffering’. In sharp contrast to Christianity, it has left the self-deception of moral concepts behind, - it stands, as I put it, beyond good and evil. - It is based on two physiological facts that it always keeps in mind: first, an excessively acute sensitivity that is expressed as a refined susceptibility to pain, and second, having lived all too long with concepts and logical procedures, an over-spiritualization that has had the effect of promoting the ‘impersonal’ instincts at the expense of the personal ones (- at least a few of my readers, ‘objective’ types like me, will know both these states from their own experience). These physiological conditions give rise to depression. The Buddha took hygienic measures against this, including: living out in the open, the wandering life, moderation and a careful diet; caution as far as liquor is concerned; caution when it comes to all affects that create bile or raise the blood temperature; no worrying about either yourself or other people. He insists on ideas that produce either calm or amusement - he comes up with methods for phasing out all the others. He sees goodness and kindness as healthy. Prayer is out of the question, as is asceticism; there is no categorical imperative, no compulsion in any form, not even within the monastic community (- which you can always leave -) . All of these would be means of exacerbating that already excessive sensitivity. This is why he does not try to rout out heterodoxy; there is nothing his teachings resist more than feelings of revenge, aversion, ressentiment (- ‘enmity will not bring an end to enmity’: the moving refrain of all Buddhism … ) . And rightly so: these are precisely the affects that would be disastrously unhealthy with respect to the primary, dietetic objective. The Buddha detects a spiritual fatigue that manifests itself in an all-too-great ‘objectivity’ (which is to say an individual’s diminished sense of self-interest, loss of a centre of gravity, loss of ‘egoism’), he combats this by leading even the most spiritual interests directly back to the person. In the Buddha’s teachings, egoism is a duty: the ‘one thing needed’, the ‘how do you get rid of suffering’, regulates and restricts the entire spiritual diet (- we might remember a certain Athenian who also waged war on pure ‘science’, which is to say Socrates, who raised personal egoism to an ethic, even in the realm of problems).
Buddhism presupposes a very mild climate, extremely gentle and liberal customs, the complete absence of militarism, and the existence of higher, even scholarly classes to give focus to the movement. The highest goals are cheerfulness, quiet, and an absence of desire, and these goals are achieved.
