20.

In my condemnation of Christianity, I would not want to do an injustice to a related religion that even outweighs it in the number of its followers: Buddhism. Both belong together as nihilistic religions—they are décadence decay/decline religions—yet both are separated from each other in the most curious way. The critic of Christianity is deeply grateful to Indian scholars for the fact that one can now compare them.

Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity. It carries the inheritance of objective and cool problem-posing in its body; it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years, and the concept of "God" is already dismissed when it appears. Buddhism is the only actually positivist religion that history shows us, even in its theory of knowledge (a strict phenomenalism the view that we only know phenomena, not things in themselves). It no longer says "struggle against sin," but rather, giving full right to reality, "struggle against suffering." It has—and this distinguishes it deeply from Christianity—already left behind the self-deception of moral concepts; it stands, to speak in my language, beyond good and evil.

The two physiological facts upon which it rests and which it keeps in view are: first, an excessive irritability of sensitivity, which expresses itself as a refined capacity for pain; and second, an over-spiritualization, a life lived far too long in concepts and logical procedures, under which the instinct of the person has suffered for the benefit of the "impersonal" (states that at least some of my readers, the "objective" ones, like myself, will know from experience). Based on these physiological conditions, a depression has arisen, and against this, Buddha proceeds hygienically. He employs for this the life in the open air, the wandering life, moderation and choice in diet, caution against all intoxicants, and caution likewise against all affects that produce bile or heat the blood. He advises no care, neither for oneself nor for others. He demands thoughts that either provide rest or amuse, and he invents means to break others of their habits. He understands kindness, the act of being kind, as health-promoting. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism self-denial/severe self-discipline; there is no categorical imperative, no coercion whatsoever, not even within the monastic community (one can always leave again). These are all means to strengthen that excessive irritability. For this very reason, he also demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than the feeling of revenge, of aversion, of ressentiment deep-seated resentment ("not through enmity does enmity come to an end": the moving refrain of all Buddhism...). And rightly so: these very affects would be completely unhealthy with regard to the main dietetic intent. He combats the mental fatigue he encounters—which expresses itself in an all-too-great "objectivity" (that is, the weakening of individual interest, loss of balance, of "egoism")—by strictly leading even the most spiritual interests back to the person. In Buddha's teaching, egoism becomes a duty: the "one thing needful," the "how do you get rid of suffering," regulates and limits the entire spiritual diet (one might perhaps remember that Athenian who also made war on pure "scientific-ness," Socrates, who elevated personal egoism to morality even in the realm of problems).

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