Julius Evola

Spiritual Virility in Buddhism

It is the fate of almost all religions to become, so to say, denatured; as they spread
and develop, they gradually recede from their original spirit, and their more
popular and spurious elements come to the fore, their less severe and essential
features, those furthest removed from the metaphysical plane. While hardly any
of the major historical religions have escaped this destiny, it would seem that it is
particularly true of Buddhism. We need only consider the prevalent notion of the
teaching of the prince of the Sakyas that has been formed not only in the West by
those who profess admiration for Buddhism, but also for many centuries past in
many strata of the peoples of the East.
The terms in which the 2500th anniversary of the death of the Buddha has been
commemorated this year and the way in which the message that the Buddhist
religion should have for the modern world has been spoken of, afford evidence of
this.
While someone has lately been able to say: “There is no other alternative: the
world today must choose between the H bomb and the message of the Buddha”—
thus identifying that message with pacifism and humanitarianism—the Western
friends of Buddhism have been almost unanimous in appraising it as a
sentimental doctrine of love and universal compassion, a doctrine composed of
democracy and tolerance, to be admired also for its freedom from dogma, rites,
sacraments: almost a sort of secular religion.
It is true that these distortions appeared quite early in the history of Buddhism.
But though it may seem audacious on our part, we have no hesitation in saying
that this is a falsification of the message of the Buddha, a deteriorated version
suited not to virile men, standing with head erect, but to men lying prostrate in
search of escape and spiritual alleviation, for whom the law and discipline of a
positive religion are too severe.
If we accept the interpretations referred to, Buddhism in its real essence would be
a system of ethics rather than a religion in the strict meaning of the term. This
character, which some historians of religion had stressed in an attempt to charge
Buddhism with supposed inferiority as compared to theistic and dogmatic

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religions, is today claimed by others as a merit, their claim being based on a
misapprehension of a different but not less serious kind. If Buddhism, taken in its
original forms cannot be called a “religion,” this depends on the fact that it is not
below but above the plane of all that can be legitimately defined as “religion,”
especially theistic religion. The doctrine of awakening and enlightenment, the
essential core of Buddhism, has nothing “religious” about it, because it is
preeminently of an “initiatic” or esoteric character, and as such is accessible only
to a few elect. It therefore represents not a “broad way” open to all (as in more
than one of its aspects, almost in its very name, the Mahayana was) but a “straight
and narrow path” reserved for a minority. This is already made clear by the
accounts given in the canon of the first moment of the enlightenment of the
Buddha. When Prince Siddharta had the revelation of the truth and of the way, the
dhamma, he resolved not to spread it, believing it to be inaccessible to the masses,
to the natures not noble, immersed in samsara. And so, from the way the story is
told, it would seem that only through the mythical intercession of certain
divinities the Buddha was induced to change his mind and to consent at last to
communicate and announce the possibility of the Great Liberation and the path to
be followed to attain it.
It is known that in the beginning the Order of the Ariya, the noble “sons of the son
of the Sakyas,” was restricted, even if not by extrinsic limits. Thus for instance,
the Buddha objected to the admission of women. And those who like to see in the
attitude of the Buddha towards the conception of caste and the exclusiveness of
the Brahmanas, evidence of an equalitarian and universalistic spirit, are much
mistaken. They confuse that which lies beneath the differences and limits proper
to every sound hierarchy (as is the case with democratic equalitarianism, whether
social or spiritual) with that which lies above such differentiated structures, as in
the case of the really awakened Buddhist and of the initiate in general. The
comparison drawn between the Awakened One and a flower that rises
miraculously from a heap of dung[1] is pretty eloquent on this point, even if it be
not edifying to those who indulge in a democratic and humanitarian interpretation
of Buddhism. Considered in the framework of the Hindu situation of his day, the
Buddha was a revolutionist only in so much as he opposed to the fictitious and
obsolete dignities, corresponding no longer to real qualifications, true dignity, to
be shown in each case by works and effective superiority. Thus, for instance, he
maintained the designation of Brahmana, but opposed the type of the real
brahmana to that of the false one.[2] If in the case of Buddhism one can speak of
universalism, this is the universalism of the summits, not the promiscuous one at
the base.
The reduction of Buddhism to mere moral teachings appears as the height of
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absurdity to anyone who remembers the canonical parable of the raft. In no
spiritual tradition more than in Buddhism is the purely instrumental and
provisional character of morality, of sila, so strongly stressed. As is known, the
whole body of moral rules, with good and evil, dhamma and adhamma, was
compared by the Buddha to a raft that is built for crossing a river, but which it
would be ridiculous to drag along when the crossing has once been made.[3]
Contrary to the view, whether philosophical or religious, which ascribes to some
moral rules an intrinsic autonomous value (a typical instance of this is the so-
called “absolute morality” of Kant’s categorical imperative) the Buddha ascribed
to the several attitudes of right conduct that he pointed out, a purely instrumental
value, the value of means justified only in view of a certain aim and therefore
only sub conditione. But this end, just as the higher grades of Buddhistic ascesis
and contemplation, is beyond morality, nor can it be measured by the religious
conception of “holiness.” As Milarepa was to say: “In my youth I committed
some black deeds, in my maturity some white ones; but now I have rejected all
distinctions of black and white.”[4]
Thus the fact that some of the rules of the sila may perhaps correspond to what
the moralists may desire, should deceive no one. The spirit inspiring the action in
the two cases differs fundamentally. This holds good also for that which the
“spiritualists” admire so much in Buddhism: the ethics of love, of compassion, of
innocuousness. He who follows the path of the awakening cultivates these mental
attitudes only as the means for freeing himself from the bonds of ignorance, of the
samsaric ego; not out of sentimental altruism. A conception such as the Western
one, expressed by the words: “God is love”, with the consequent absolutization of
this sentiment, would be for the authentic Buddhist doctrine an absurdity. Love
and compassion are mere details of the opus remotionis, whose aim is a
liberation, an enlargement or opening of the soul which can favor, in some cases,
the “rupture of the level” and the sudden flash of illumination. Thus not only is
the famous series of the four brahmavihara-bhavana or appamanna, which
includes love and compassion, technically and practically equivalent to the
several states of a purely “dry” intellectual contemplation, leading to the same
goal (the four jhana and the arupa-jhana), but even in the series of
brahmavihara-bhavana, the last stage, upekka, is impassibility, the disincarnate
neutrality of a soul that has got free from all sentimentality, from both the bonds
of the “I” and the “you” and shines as a pure light in an ontological super
individual essentiality expressed also in the symbol of the “void”, sunna or
sunnyata.
We are not the only ones who have noted that this notion of the void is not
affirmed only by the Mahayana, but is found already clearly stated in the canon of
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early Buddhism. The work proper to Mahayana has been rather that of making
this notion the object of a paradoxical philosophical elaboration (paradoxical
because this idea corresponds to an absolutely super-rational level detached from
philosophy) to which Mahayana added a popular soteriological religion which
carried the misdirected interpretation of the precept of compassion to a form that,
inter alia, leads to a flagrant contradiction in the system of this form of later
Buddhism. In fact on the one hand the precept of compassion and love for all
beings is announced to such a degree that the Mahayanic Bodhisattva vows that
he will not enter nirvana until all living creatures have been redeemed; while on
the other hand, according to the Mahayana doctrine of the universal “void,” all
these beings would be non-existent, would be so many illusions, mere apparitions
of the cosmic dream generated by ignorance. This contradiction and nonsense
alone should suggest that to the precept spoken of and also to the doctrine of
universal illusion must be given a meaning that differs widely from the exoteric,
literal, and popular one attributed to them. Both the one and the other should be
understood on a purely pragmatic plane.
Both in some aspects of the Mahayana, in which alone the esoteric doctrine of the
“awakening” has been replaced by a “religion,” and in other currents, the
essential core of Buddhism has been enveloped by philosophical, mythological,
and ritualistic dross and superstructures. When considered in relation to them, the
so-called “Zen”-Buddhism stands for a return to the origins, a reaction in all
respects similar to that of early Buddhism itself to degraded Brahmanism. Now
the Zen throws into clear relief the essential value of illumination, its
transcendency in respect of all that which, in the several cases, may favor it, and
at the same time its immanency, that is to say the fact that the state of
enlightenment and nirvana does not mean a state of evanescent ecstasy, an escape,
so to say, of which compassion is only a pale reflex accompanied by horror of all
that is action and affirmation; it is instead a higher form of freedom, a higher
dimension; for him who holds fast to it there is no action that cannot be
performed, and all bonds are loosened. This is the right interpretation of the
doctrine of the void, of the non-ego, and also of the Mahayanic conception of the
identity of nirvana and samsara in a third principle higher than either and anterior
to either. That should be recalled to those who accept unilaterally the theory of
innocuousness, of the timorous respect of all forms of life. As a matter of fact,
Zen Buddhism could be called the doctrine of the Samurai, i.e., of the Japanese
nobility[5] who are certainly not noted for their abhorrence of arms and
bloodshed. The fact is that the pivot on which all this wisdom turns is one only:
the severance of the bond of the ego, the destruction of ignorance, the awakening.
When the bond of the ego is severed, all restrictions cease. On the human soil on

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which the seed of the doctrine falls depends the fruit it will bear. The
humanitarian, pacifist, vegetarian figurine of the Buddhist is a distortion, and in
any case its acceptance is not compulsory. A Samurai and a Kamikaze may
equally well be a Buddhist. From a book in which a Buddhist chaplain describes
the days of the Japanese put to death by the Americans[6] we see how these men
died without conversions or repentance, in a perfect state of Buddhist grace; men
who if they were not “war criminals” as the victors claimed, were as generals,
officials and politicians certainly not delicate shy flowers of the field.
Those who have experienced that fundamental inner transformation, that “rupture
of the level” which is the essential feature of Buddhist realization, are in
possession of an unshakeable calm, an “incomparable certainty” which not even
the age of the H bomb and of all the other devilries of the modern world can
disturb; which can be preserved above all tragedies and all destructions, even
when man’s human and illusory part is involved. Now, it is in this direction rather
than in any other that lies the message that Buddhism may have for our days. At
the conclusion of one of our works[7] in which we tried to reconstruct the essence
of the Buddhist doctrine, we pointed to the dual possibility it offers. The first is
that of a clear and virile askesis which creates in man firmness and serenity,
samatha, by means of a carefully built up technique of the mind which allows the
detachment and strengthening of a principle that transcends the purely human,
irrational, emotional and in general the samsaric substance of our being. In no
other tradition are these techniques taught in such a clear, thorough, we might say
scientific form, free from specific religious or ethical implications, as they are in
Buddhism. What here is of particular importance is the style of the clear vision,
yatha bhutam, which is that of a superior realism, the vision exactly in keeping
with reality. A goodly number of gifted men can still make an “immanent” use of
Buddhist teachings thus understood. We may even find in them the corrective of
the prevalent trends of our day: the religion of life, of struggle, of “becoming,”
the union with irrational, instinctive and sub-personal forces that ever urge man
on in a “flight towards” (Bernanos), destroying in him all centrality, all real
consistency. In an age like ours, samsaric as no other has ever been, already that
which as a system of free and virile askesis in Buddhism is mere preparation for
ultramundane realization, might serve to create limits, to provide inner means of
defense, to keep at bay the anguish or the rapture felt by those who cling
convulsively to the illusory mortal Ego; this—let us repeat it—is not to be
understood as an escape, but as a means for assuring a serene and superior
security and liberty. And it is in view of the times that are approaching that
perhaps never so much as now has there been need of men educated along these
lines.

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But in the Canons we find opposite the use of such disciplines for life to the use
of them for carrying us “beyond life.”[8] It is here that Buddhism presents itself
as the doctrine of awakening, identical with a strict doctrine of initiation, which as
such is timeless (akalika), not tied down to historic contingencies, superior to all
faiths and all systems of mere devotion. It is not easy for the Westerner to realize
what the real purpose of Buddhism is on this level. The ideal here is the absolute
unconditioning of being, the attainment of absolute transcendency. By now the
puerile idea of those who identified nirvana with “nothingness”, or regression into
the unconsciousness of a kind of trance determined by the distressing know ledge
that” life is suffering”, has been to a large extent discarded. Also the teaching that
“life is suffering” belongs only to the exoteric aspect of Buddhism. The deeper
meaning of the expression dukkha is “commotion,” is agitation rather than
“suffering”: the condition that the ariya, the “noble son,” rejects is that of
universal impermanence, of the transitory—a state that should therefore be
essentially understood in ontological terms, and whose emotional significance is
quite secondary. Its counterpart is thirst, tanha; and the extinction, the nirvana in
question, is not destruction in general but precisely and only the destruction of
what in the being is thirst, insatiable longing, fever, and attachment, in its many
forms and branches. Beyond all that lies awakening and enlightment, the
samhhodi which leads to the unconditioned, the immortal.
Perhaps the antithesis between the initiatic notion of “awakening” and the
religious and more especially Christian notion of “salvation” or “redemption” has
not yet been adequately stressed. The religious conception is based on the
assumption that man is a being existentially detached from the sacred and the
supernatural; because of his ontological status of creature, or as the result of an
original sin, he belongs to the natural order; only by the intervention of a
transcendent power, only on the assumption of his “conversion,” of his faith and
of his renunciation of his own will, only by Divine action, can he be “saved” and
attain to life in “paradise.”
The implications of the notion of “awakening” are entirely different; man is not a
fallen or guilty being, nor is he a creature separated by an ontological hiatus from
a Creator. He is a being who has fallen into a state of sleep, of intoxication and of
“ignorance.” His natural status is that of a Buddha. It is for him to acquire
consciousness of this by “awakening.” In opposition to the ideas of conversion,
redemption, and action of grace, the leading motive is the destruction of
“ignorance,” of avijja. Decisive here is a fact of an essentially “noetic,” viz.
intellectual, and not emotional nature. This confers an indisputable aristocratic
character on the doctrine of Buddhism. It ignores the “sin”-complex, self-
abasement, and self-mortification. Its askesis is clear and “dry”; it is alien to the
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features of auto-sadism or masochism which are always present in the forms of
the asceticism more known to the West, and which have often given rise as to a
reaction among Westerners to anti-ascetic prejudice and a distorted exaltation of
life.
This character of loftiness, which is due to Buddhist ontology, is matched by the
Buddhist doctrine of autonomy: man is the free master of his own destiny. He
alone is responsible for what he is. Thus in conformity with his vocation, he can
confirm the state in which he is, or he can change it. There are no penalties and no
rewards; therefore there is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear; the only things
that must be taken into consideration are objective, unsentimental, extra-moral
connection of cause and effect. If a Buddha sets himself free, it is by his own
efforts alone. On the path leading to awakening no external aid is to be looked for.
This conception, on which already pivoted the traditional Hindu notion of karma,
is particularly stressed by Buddhism. The historical Buddha, as is well known, did
not present himself as a divine savior, but as a man who, after attaining by
himself enlightenment and the Great Liberation, points out to those having a like
vocation the path to follow. All this refers to early Buddhism. With Mahayanic
Buddhism in its prevailing and popular aspects, we descend once more to the
level of the soteriological religions; myriads of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas busy
themselves to assure the salvation and happiness of all living beings.
Again, if we turn to the terminus ad quem, i.e., to the ultimate ideal of Buddhism,
the break with religious conceptions is a clear one and it is difficult for
Westerners to grasp fully. In the West we are accustomed to consider as a
religious ideal “Paradise,” the survival of the believer in heaven, and only a few
mystics speak of the unitive life, of union with the Being. But the Buddhist doc
trine looks on all that as too little and it left it behind. Its horizon is that of the
traditional Hindu metaphysics, which consider the divine worlds as themselves
belonging to samsara, for which immortality does not consist in the perpetuation
of individuality but in the realization of the Unconditioned; nor the Being here is
the supreme point, that beyond which nothing other is conceivable. The Being is
matched by the Non-Being and the Unconditioned is that which is superior and
anterior to both. In a well-known sequence[9] the Buddha rejects and condemns
one by one all the identifications: identification with the body, with the elements,
with the Ego, with the cosmos, with the divine hierarchies, even with the God of
Being, that is to say with the Brahma. In a speech which is Michaelangelesque in
its grandeur, identification with the God of Being, which is equivalent to the unio
mystica, the ultimate limit of religious rapture, is rejected in terms that see in it
almost a diabolical temptation,[10] for it would represent a limit to the great
Liberation, to the attainment of the Unconditioned.
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He who has a knowledge of these dimensions of the Buddhistic experience,
dimensions that appear clearly in the canonical texts, what can he think of those
who consider that Buddhism is not even a religion but a system of sickly
sentimental secular morality, consisting of humanitarianism and indiscriminate
love, the pale evanescent wisdom of one who has recognized that the “world is
suffering”? Undoubtedly, the metaphysical dimensions of Buddhism just referred
to can only be grasp? ed, let alone achieved, by very few. But the ultimate
background of the whole system is indeed that. The canonical saying is known:
“All the waters of the ocean have but one flavor, that of salt; so the sense of the
whole of the Law is only one, that of liberation.”[11] For the ultimate, the great
nirvana, or more correctly, the “void,” the sunna, the Buddha uses the method of
the so-called “negative theology”; it is unnameable, indefinable, in
comprehensible to the human mind; one can only say what it is not, not what it is,
for one cannot even apply to it the category of being. But how ignore what may
be called the traces, the marks of Him who has no marks? Because “the lord of
men and gods” was called the perfectly “awakened One.” As “unconquered and
intact beings,” similar to “lofty Supermen” appear those who have travelled along
this path[12]; like lions in whom anguish and terror are dead[13] they see the
past, they see the heavens and the infernal regions,[14] they know this world and
the world beyond, the kingdom of death and the kingdom free from death, the
temporal and the eternal.[15] They are “like tigers, like bulls in a mountain cave”
though they appear as “beings free from vanity, who have appeared in the world
for the good of many, for the health of many, for compassion of the world, for the
good, the profit and the health of men and gods.”[16] “I have passed beyond the
brambles of opinions, I have acquired power over myself, I have reached the path,
I possess the knowledge, I have none who guide me” says the Awakened One of
himself.[17] He is the “daring One who never hesitates, the sure guide, free from
passion, bright as the sunlight, free from pride, heroic”; he is the “One who
knows, who is dazzled by no fevers, overcome by no troubles, tempted by no
victories, stained by no stains”; he is “the great being who lives apart, freed from
all ties, no longer slave to any servitude”; he is the “worthy One who keeps watch
over himself, of steady step, ready to the announcement,” “inclined to none and
disinclined towards none, sublime in soul, powerful, impassible”; he is “the One
whom no thirst burns, no smoke dims, and no mist wets; a spirit who honors
sacrifice and who rises up majestically as no other does.”[18] Passions, pride,
falsehood have fallen away from him like mustard seeds from the point of a
needle. Beyond good, beyond evil, he has cast off both chains, and detached from
pain, detached from pleasure he is purified. As he knows, he no longer inquires:
“How so?” He has reached the bottom of the element free from death. He has left

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the human bond and the divine bond and has freed himself from all bonds; no one
in the world can conquer him, who has for his domain the infinite and whose path
is known neither by the gods nor by angels, nor by men.[19]
Notwithstanding the hyperbolical element in some of these attributes, from them
takes definite shape an ideal type against a background of grandeur and spiritual
virility which it would be hard to find in any other tradition, beside which the
religious values of “sanctity” itself pale and droop. Judged by this standard, far
from being a doctrine accessible to all, a doctrine that makes things easy for the
“spiritualists” because it has no dogma and no rites, and is free from
exclusivisms, the Buddhist path of awakening is, as we have said, a narrow one
reserved to those who possess an exceptional vocation and qualifications, and in
following it, it may be said that the saying of the Katha-upanisad is also
applicable: it is like walking on a razor edge while no help, either human or
divine, is given.
It is agreed that wisdom of this kind cannot be “popularized.” Indeed, it should
not even be indiscriminately communicated for it is not without risk” the canon
itself speaks of the consequences of the doctrine if wrongly interpreted: it is like
one who having seized a serpent in the wrong way, sees it pounce on him,
producing death or mortal pain. It stands out and remains a summit, bearing
witness to what a superior humanity could conceive. As to the forms in which
Buddhism has become a religion sui generis, and, worse still, as to those forms in
which it is conceived and appreciated as a democratizing humanitarian morality,
they should be rightly considered as an unparalleled contamination of the truth.

East and West, vol. 7, no. 7 (January 1957): 319–327.

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Notes

[1] Dhammapada, 58–59.

[2] Cf. Suttanipata, I, vii, 21; Digha-nikaya, XII, 1. 24–26, 28; Dhammapada, 141.
[3] Majjhimonikaya, XXII.
[4] Vie de Milarepa, trans. Kazi Dawa Samdup (Paris, 1955), p. 81.
[5] Kaiten Nukariya, The Religion of the Samurai (London, 1913).
[6] Shinsho Hanayama, Heiwa no Hakken (Tokyo, 1949). Translated into Italian by G.
Morichini, in the Bocca edit., under the title La Via della pace (Rome, 1954).
[7] J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening (London, Luzac and Co., 1951).
[8] Cf. for example Majjhimonikaya, LII.
[9] Majjhimonikaya, I.
[10] Majjhimonikaya, XLIX.
[11] Anguttara-nikaya, VIII, 19.
[12] Majjhimonikaya, CXVI.
[13] Suttanipata, III, vi, 47.
[14] Samyutta-nikaya, III, 58–59; Dhammapada, 422–23.
[15] Majjhimonikaya, XXXIV.
[16] Ibid., IV.
[17] Uravagga, III, 21.
[18] Majjhimonikaya, LVI.
[19] Dhammapada. 420 sg. and passim; Majjhimonikaya, XCVIII.

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