Nietzsche's Views On Buddhism

Many philosophers and other devout pessimist have made claims that the Buddhist lifestyle is ultimately pessimistic. It’s easy to take the teachings of the buddha and apply them to a pessimistic lifestyle but the basis of pessimism is denial and that’s the opposite of what the buddha was attempting to teach. The basis of Buddhism is the four noble truths which are the existence of suffering, that suffering has a cause, that there is a cessation of suffering, and that the Eightfold path is the key to ending it. Buddhism accepts suffering and provides the tools to guide oneself away from it, whereas philosophers lose meaning in the search for truth in physical forms. The view of negativity and pessimism in Buddhism ends here.

In “ Nietzsche …show more content…
It is widely understood that Nietzsche believed Buddhism along with Christianity, draws people away from the “truth” in this world and claims that death is ultimately better than life. But in Nietzsche’s “ The Antichrist” he claims that “In the manner of a great physiologist, the Buddha had been able to cleanse the suffering spiritual wound without further infecting it with doctrines such as sin and damnation, as Christians had done.” Yet he then states "And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?" He is stuck in the cycle of the will to truth always leading back to the problem of morality. I feel as though if we can relate how the buddha says we have the ability to cast away suffering in this lifetime, to Nietzsche’s claims of truth in selections from his notebook of the early 1870s "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”,t hen we can try to view Buddhism in terms of pessimism and …show more content…
In “Introducing Buddhism” B y Charles Prebish, we are able to see a clear depiction of the path to enlightenment and how the combination of wisdom, morality, and meditation are able to create a separate understanding of “emptiness”. By combining the previous understandings of reality and the Buddhist teachings of peaceful acceptance, one is able to create their own individual “reality”. If one creates truth in all actions and lives according to the path then it is believed that “suffering is to be brought to an end and the transition from samsara to nirvana is to be made.” This “middle way” is the key to separating nirvana from the judgment of pessimism in reality. Not only does the path create an end of reincarnation and suffering in lives to come, but to be on the path means to hold true peace and understanding in body and spirit. One who can understand this sees that it is not possible to truly judge Buddhism as pessimistic because in order to do that pessimism must exist in a form in which it does