Dear friends,
It seems to me that most of the westerners are still too conditioned by their Judeo-Christian culture (even if they come from atheist families) to grasp the authentic thought of the Buddha. They see it as a morality of resignation, and in so doing make true Nietzsche’s critics. I mean that Buddhism in the West appears as a form of nihilism following the ‘death of God’ (i.e. the weakening of the Christian faith). The fact that there are Jewish and Christian religious fanatics is not proof of a return to biblical values but, on the contrary, an unleashing of violence and desperate hatred. In this context, I think it is important to show that the Buddha’s thought is not a ‘passive nihilism’ (Nietzsche’s expression) but, on the contrary, the path of noble beings (arya magga).
An important point that needs to be made clear, it seems to me, is the following: The aim of the Buddha’s teaching is not “to be reborn no more”, because if that were the case, it would be no different from Hinduism. The aim of the Buddha’s teaching is the cessation of dukkha. No longer being reborn is a consequence of the cessation of dukkha. The perfect awakened one, Buddha or Arahant, have achieved this goal in this life. In other words, life is not an obstacle to liberation, but on the contrary the path that leads to it. There’s nothing incomplete about the Buddha’s state when he was alive. The nibbāna without residue, i.e. the state of the perfect awakened one after his death, adds nothing to his realisation, but is, so to speak, only a consequence of it. Even, from an ‘ontological’ point of view, nibbāna is neither cause nor consequence.
I think that to understand the Buddha’s thought, we have to go back not just to Indian thought, but to the most remote antiquity. This is where philology can be useful. What did the word ‘arahant’ mean to the ancient inhabitants of India? It is translated as ‘deserving’ (worth, in English, which has the same root as the German wert, value). In my opinion, the arahant was first and foremost, as in ancient Greece, the hero. In old French, there is an interesting word : ‘valeureux’, the person who has ‘valeur’. The same words passed into the English language in the Middle Age : valorous & valor. So, in my opinion, we have to look for the distant origin of the meaning of the word ‘arahant’ in ancient India as being the valorous Aryan warrior, worthy of praise, deserving of honours.
The hero’s death does not affect the brilliance of his glory; on the contrary, it ennobles it. His goal is not death, but the nobility or beauty of his action. If we consider the teachings of the Buddha, who came from the warrior caste, as a spiritualisation of Indian thought, we see that the goal of those who aspire to nibbāna is not to escape from life. The Buddha is the beauty and value of the world, the most ‘divine’ of all beings (more divine than the gods).
Here again, the Ancients (Greeks or Indians) can help us, provided we don’t think in terms of a modern successor to biblical culture. The valorous one is the one who gives value to the world and who become a “god” (in the greek sense). In the Buddha’s case, he became more than a god !
To conclude, and to sum up my thoughts, I would say that the biggest and most serious accusation against Buddhism, namely that it is a nihilistic religion of self-denial, resignation and, above all, contempt for life, has no real basis in the teachings of the Buddha if we bear in mind the key notion of noble beings (arya). Be happy and at peace !
Alain (from France)
