Response to Graham Parkes Review

·期刊原文
Response to Graham Parkes' Review
By Robert G. Morrison
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)
pp. 267-279
Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA

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see also:
Nietzsche and Early Buddhism, a Review of Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study, by Freny Mistry, and Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities, by Robert G. Morrison Reviewed by Parkes, Graham
Reply to Robert Morrison By Graham Parkes

p. 267 Response to Graham Parkes' Review Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)

If one is to treat the work of another with such disdain as Professor Parkes displays, then one needs to be very sure of one's own ground. But, upon examination, this particular patch of high ground is not as secure as may at first appear. Unfortunately, in making this clear, I have little choice but to address shortcomings in the late Freny Mistry's work that I had preferred in my book to pass over.

Parkes claims that Mistry brings to her work, "a comprehensive understanding of early (Theravāda) Buddhism." Leaving aside the naïveté of equating Theravāda Buddhism with early Buddhism, it has to be said that Mistry's understanding of Theravada Buddhism leaves much to be desired. I will cite a few examples.

On page 160 she makes one of the most egregious errors I have found in modern Buddhist literature. She says:

[I]f ethical action is performed with a view to reward, i.e. the desire to put an end to suffering or escape it altogether, the Buddha's ruthless injunction is: "There are eighty-four hundred thousand great periods, wherein both fools and wise, when they have run, have fared on, will make an end of suffering. Herein it is useless for one to say: 'By this

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virtue, by this practice, by this penance, or holy living I shall bring to ripeness the karma that is yet unripe...' (S iii.210)."

But this is not a "ruthless injunction" of the Buddha, and Mistry has in fact put into his mouth a teaching attributed to Makkhali Gosala, [1] of whom the Buddha says: "of all the theories put forward by recluses, that of Makkhali [Gosala] is the most vile." [2] It is the "most vile" because it denies the law of karma, that ethical actions have consequences, and to deny this is to deny the very foundation of the Buddhist spiritual life. Three pages later, she makes a similar mistake:

That self-redemption is a creative act ... itself entirely unrelated to extraneous purposes or ends ... is as much the Buddhist credo as it is the Nietzschean.

She then quotes the Buddha to give credence to this view:

If Bhūmija, those recluses or brahmans who are of wrong view, wrong aspiration [etc.], fare the Brahma-faring with an expectation, they are incapable of obtaining the fruit. [3]

As the Buddha goes on to say, this would be like trying to obtain oil from sand, which is equated with following the wrong spiritual path. Thus the text is quite unambiguous: the paths that the other samaṇas and brāhmaṇas follow will not bring them the results they seek, not because they want certain ends but because they are on the wrong path. The only way they will achieve their ends, as the text goes on to tell us (not mentioned in Mistry) is to follow the right path: "Whatever recluses and brahmans have right view, right aspiration [etc.], if they make an aspiration and lead the Brahma-faring, they are able to procure fruit" -- that is, achieve the spiritual ends they seek. Again Mistry has failed to understand the text, using the Buddha's criticism of the paths the other religieux follow as if the Buddha was commenting on his own Noble Eightfold Path. Mistry does say "extraneous purposes," but on the previous page she states what these are: "If the practising Buddhist were to act with the thought of nirvana or of a better future life the thought itself would render the decisive act unaccomplishable." For the practicing Buddhist, these are not "extraneous purposes."

Apart from misreading the text, Mistry conflates doctrines found in the Mahāyāna sūtras with those attributed to the historical Buddha as found in the Pali suttas. She proceeds as if it were the same "Buddha" who taught both traditions. This ignores the different contexts and purposes and even historical misunderstandings that are the foundation of these "later" Mahāyāna traditions. It is clear that she is trying to emphasize the importance of being experientially rooted in the present, that is, following the basic Buddhist practice of smṛti or "mindfulness" and samprajanya or "clear-comprehension," which is common to both the Pāli and Mahāyāna traditions. [4] However, an aspect of this practice contradicts what she says above, since "clear-comprehension" includes the clear-comprehension of purpose: "one should always question oneself whether the intended activity is really in accordance with one's purpose, aims or ideals." [5] Here, one clearly acts with a purpose or aim in mind. When we switch to the Mahāyāna Perfection of Wisdom tradition, we do have

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teachings that say, for example, that one should practice dāna or "generosity" without any thought of a giver, gift, or recipient: but this is to engage in a practice that, according to the Bodhisattva ideal, one has been practicing for kalpas to perfection, that is, transform it into a pāramitā through prajñā or "transformative insight." But the "perfection of generosity" (dāna-pāramitā) will only arise on the basis of the previous practice of generosity, which can include a hierarchy of aims and purposes from happy future states to that of attaining nirvāṇa in order to help all sentient beings.

According to the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, all these aims eventually have to be transcended in order for one to attain Buddhahood. Mistry may have something like this in mind, but unfortunately she displays no understanding of the various contexts of these teachings. To claim as Mistry does (she gives no source) that "If the practising Buddhist were to act with the thought of nirvana or of a better future life the thought itself would render the decisive act unaccomplishable" (p. 162), without any qualification, miscomprehends the very foundation of Buddhist practice, through a misunderstanding of teachings aimed at advanced Bodhisattvas, as if they were aimed at the ordinary practitioner, whose needs are quite different. As the Parable of the Burning House in the Lotus Sūtra shows, individuals are given different "play things" according to their capacities in order to entice them out of saṁsāra and onto the Buddhist path. The aim of a happy future state or of a nirvana for oneself are such "play things," even though they are eventually to be given up. This principle is also aptly illustrated in the Pāli suttas in the encounter between the brahmin Uṇṇābha and Ānanda, which I use (pp. 142-144) to make sense of the statement "he abandons taṇhā by means of taṇhā." [6]

On pages 89-90, Mistry once again fails to understand the text. In order to show that "the Buddha upholds reason as the foundation of his discipline," she quotes the Majjhima Nikāya (I.68), where Sunakkhata, who had recently left the Buddhist Order, accuses the Buddha of preaching "a doctrine acquired through logical thinking, constructed upon critical investigation, scrutinised by himself ... proclaiming that whoever thinks logically will arrive at the total destruction of suffering." Mistry goes on:

The Buddha on having obtained this information replies: "Sunakkhata has spoken these words in anger. The foolish man wants to censure the perfected one when he says 'And the object of expounding his doctrine is simply this that whoever thinks logically will arrive at the total destruction of suffering.'"

But this is not what the text actually says. Mistry relies on Grimm's The Doctrine of the Buddha for this quote from the Majjhima Nikāya, and not the Pāli Text Society translation listed in her Bibliography under "Translations Used." Grimm mistranslates the term takkāra (tat-kāra) as "thinks logically," when in actual fact it means "practicing." What the text actually says is that he who practices the Dhamma will eventually put an end to suffering, not he who thinks logically. Thus Mistry completely misses the point.

Mistry then compounds her error. She adds:

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In support of this: "Monks, I know not of any other single thing so intractable as the uncultivated mind... Monks, I know not of any other single thing so tractable as the cultivated mind..." (A i.4). [7]

Even if the Buddha had said what he did not, there is no meaningful connection between this supposed supporting statement and what that statement is supposed to support. The "cultivated mind" (bhāvitaṁ cittam) has nothing whatsoever to do with upholding "reason as the foundation of [the Buddha's] discipline." "Mental cultivation," as I show in my section on Citta-Bhāvanā (pp. 171 ff.), has little to do with reason, but is a matter of developing the affects, of exercising the Four Right Efforts, of purifying the mind of the kleśas or "afflictions" and cultivating skillful states of mind, of training the unruly and fickle mind, of developing mindfulness and clear comprehension, and so forth. Reason has a small part to play in the cultivation of citta, but by itself it is completely ineffective. Further, if Mistry had consulted the Pāli Text Society's translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, she would have noticed that the Buddha goes on to claim psychic powers (iddhi) such as the ability to multiply his bodily forms, sitting cross-legged, fly through the air like a bird, become invisible, pass through stone walls and mountains, walk on water, read the minds of others, and so forth. This is hardly the concern of reason. One does not cultivate such iddhis on a foundation of reason!

Mistry argues that "If original Buddhism is characterized as the 'religion of reason' par excellence it is because its interpretation of reality, crystallised in the Four Noble Truths, is not based upon a suprarational knowledge but upon the exploitation of human intelligence [which] carries with it ... the profound consciousness of rational limits" (p. 90). But if this were the case, Buddhism would be based not on reason, but on this "profound consciousness," which is aware of the limits of reason, and therefore must itself stand above reason, that is, be a form of suprarational knowledge. However, all schools of Buddhism have regarded the Dharma as atakkāvacara or "beyond the bounds of reason" -- in other words, suprarational. Mistry's whole treatment of Buddhism as the "religion of reason," of Buddhism being supposedly "scientific," is without any supporting sources, is misinformed, and lacks any clear line of rational argument.

Commenting on the inadequacy of translating the term dukkha as "suffering, misery, pain, etc.," Mistry (p. 121) goes on to say that it "signifies a composite of 'imperfection', 'impermanence', 'insubstantiality' and 'joy'," giving Rahula's What the Buddha Taught (p. 17) as her source. [8] Parkes, commenting on this passage, says that the term dukkha "connotes joy and even bliss," which is plainly absurd. The term dukkha connotes nothing of the kind. Here we are not talking about the term "dukkha," or even the fact of dukkha, but about the "Ariyan Truth of dukkha." It is only as an Ariyan Truth that states of bliss experienced, for example, by devas and brahmās, are understood to be dukkha. Dukkha, as an Ariyan Truth, is a perspective on unawakened existence, including its joys, available only to an Ariyan. It is how an Ariyan sees unawakened existence. Again Mistry makes a promising start, but fails to get to the real nub of the issue.

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Mistry also makes some basic errors. For the sake of simplicity and space, I will list only some of them.

Pages 54 and 66: Mistry locates the mind (manas) within the vedanākkhanda, the "aggregate of feeling/sensation," which is simply wrong.

Page 41: She has the Buddha denying "the non-dualistic (advaita Vedanta) position of Sankara," when the Buddha had never heard of such -- by the time Śaṅkara's Advaita Vedanta appeared the Buddha had been dead for some 1,200 years.

Page 37, footnote 36, and page 45: She has the Buddha, when entering his ascetic phase before his Awakening, receive "his initial spiritual instruction" from "Sankhya samanas," and says that "the Buddha's teachers [9] were Sankhya philosophers." But this is undoubtedly wrong, and shows no awareness of post-1934 scholarship in this area.

Page 183, footnote 28: Ignoring the diverse schools that comprise the Mahāyāna, she thinks that nirvāṇa in the Mahāyāna "connotes absolute communion with Being," which no school does.

Ibid.: She thinks that the Sthaviravāda and the Mahāsāṅghikas are Mahāyāna schools, which they are not, and that the former "attributes absolute omniscience to the Buddha," which they do not.

Page 77: Unaware of the important formulations of pa.ticcasamuppāda or "dependent origination" as the path from saṁsāra to nirvāṇa, [10] Mistry understands the doctrine of pa.ticcasamuppāda to be "subject to circular motion." If that were the case, there would be no escape from saṁsāra.

Page 185, footnote 31: She says that the Buddha "upheld the idea of the wife as one's best friend," giving Rahula as source, but Rahula does not actually say this; he does say that "love between husband and wife is considered almost religious or sacred" (What the Buddha Taught, p. 79), which is certainly not "What the Buddha Taught"!

Page 191: Mistry thinks that "The preservation of the state of nirvana ... entails consistent training," which contradicts all that is said about nirvāṇa in the Pāli suttas. The source of this view seems to be the only reference in the entire Pāli canon where doubts are expressed about the complete emancipation of the Arahant: "'gains, favours, and flattery might be for [the Arahant] a danger' (S ii.236)." [11] How this is possible when the text clearly states that the Arahant has destroyed the āsavas (khīnāsavo), which is always understood to entail complete Awakening and therefore freedom from any such influences, is a mystery. As the translator notes (ignored by Mistry), "The syntax of this sentence seems to me corrupt" because the sentence does not make sense. That the Arahant can be adversely affected by such worldly concerns is not a view found anywhere else in the Pāli suttas, nor in the Theravāda tradition as a whole, and one cannot use a single questionable source as the basis for such a controversial view while completely ignoring the generally accepted view.

Thinking that because Nietzsche mentions in a letter to Gersdorff (dated 13 December 1875) that he had read an English translation of the Sutta Nipāta, Mistry concludes that he must have been aware of certain verses from that text, which she

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cites (p. 86). However, Mistry did not bother to trace this text -- a very simple matter as there was at that time only one English translation. If she had she would have realized that Coomaraswamy's translation is an abridgment, and the verses she cites are omitted from that work. Mistry commits the same error on page 129, but by luck cites some verses included in the abridged translation. In his review, Parkes lists Coomaraswamy's translation, Dialogues and Discourses of Gotama Buddha (London, 1874), as being included in Mistry's "Introduction," but it is not. I assume he has taken this source from my work and attributed it to Mistry.

According to Parkes, Mistry was a Nietzsche scholar, and her work certainly has many intelligent and interesting aspects. But it was my main concern to see Nietzsche's opinions on Buddhism from the standpoint of Buddhist scholarship. From this perspective, I find Mistry's Buddhist scholarship too superficial, that it contains too many basic errors, that it relies on out-of-date secondary sources, and that her approach to the subject is too uncritical. Therefore I had two choices: either dedicate the first fifty or so pages of my work to the tedious task of showing the deficiencies in Mistry's work, or simply put it to one side and start afresh with my own research in this area. In consultation with my supervisor, I chose the latter. Parkes may think this is not playing by "the rules of the game," but I'm not really interested in playing academic games.

After Parkes' kid-glove treatment of Mistry's book, he turns his attention to mine and reveals his fangs, sinking them first into the issue of the title. He is struck by the "strangeness" of choosing the same title as Mistry. The only thing I find strange here is that Parkes should find this "strange." The title of my doctorate was Nihilism and Nietzsche's Buddha, which Oxford University Press thought not commercial enough, and they suggested Nietzsche and Buddhism. When I mentioned that there was already a book with that main title in print, they replied that as it was published in 1981 this was irrelevant. So I agreed. As for my covering "pretty much the same ground as Mistry's," it is my view that there are so many deficiencies in Mistry's understanding of Buddhism that this was necessary. And to say as Parkes does that this amounts to saying "the same things over again in [my] own words" or that I have "nothing to add to what is given in Mistry's account" I find quite absurd. However, I am relieved to see that he does affirm that I "develop a few ideas of [my] own."

Parkes laments what he sees as the diminishing standards and credibility of OUP for letting into print a work that reads "more like a run-of-the-mill doctoral dissertation than a work of real scholarship" that is marred by "plodding prose" and "a style that is awkward to the point of syntactical blunders." It is certainly a humbling experience to read through one's own prose after a quote from Nietzsche. However, other readers and reviewers disagree with Parkes' judgment. OUP's first reader comments: "The style is, on the whole, admirable. The book is clearly written, with a minimum of the jargon that infects so many recent writings on Nietzsche." Professor David Loy in his review comments: "The clear prose style may itself be an example of the Selbstuberwindung of its own dissertation genealogy." [12]

I am grateful to Parkes for pointing out real errors in the book, misprints, and a source I had missed. For example, it was 1865 and not 1864 when Nietzsche

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browsed in that secondhand bookshop, and he was thirty-four when he retired from Basle, certainly not thirty-one as I say. Here I was rather careless. But with regard to the causes of Nietzsche's eventual breakdown, I say this may have been a consequence of congenital syphilis. I did not say it was. My impression is that the matter remains unsolved. Fortunately, some of the misprints listed by Parkes, and many more, have been corrected in the paperback edition, published in the U.K., though a couple remain. However, to say as Parkes does that because an error (1864 instead of 1865) appears "in the first sentence of the book," it becomes "emblematic of the work as a whole" reveals a very odd form of logic, a rather prejudiced form. But what puzzles me about Parkes' keen copyediting eye is why he fails to mention the equal number of similar errors in Mistry's work.

My account of the importance of Darwinism to Nietzsche, which Parkes thinks "not very relevant" was considered by OUP's first reader to bring to light "important aspects of Nietzsche's thought ... which have been overlooked in recent writing on Nietzsche." Obviously, opinions vary.

My comment about "Nietzsche grumbling" is not simply "trivializing the concern with the little things," but is a rather lighthearted aside on Nietzsche's "comments on the relation between the German diet and the German spirit" (p. 108). And I cannot agree, when saying that Nietzsche's "little things," like the Buddhist's, are "no more than aids to self-overcoming" and "much, if not all, can be achieved without them" (p. 109), that this "totally nullifies the insistence of both ... on the benefits of full awareness of the specific, here-and-now details of our actual lives." What I am saying is that many of the minute details given in Buddhaghosa's account (pp. 105-107) and the examples from Nietzsche concerning "the food we eat, our metabolism, where we live, our climatic environment" (p. 102) contain many elements that are not essential to the pursuit of self-overcoming. The reason for this is "that the important forces are our affects" (p. 109), or, in the Buddhist case, the saṅkhāras (see pp. 110-111), not the physical body and the environment. These are certainly aids, but it is the affects and saṅkhāras that are the essential elements in the practice of self-overcoming.

Parkes then moves on to my "misunderstanding of Nietzsche's conception of the drives, or affects." He thinks I miss Nietzsche's view of "the predominance of inner forces over external in the constitution of the individual," because I say that what we are is "formed ... by the stimulus afforded by the environment." However, Parkes' ellipsis leaves out the important conditional "to a greater or lesser degree." This qualifies what I had previously said in the footnote on page 103:

Whether it is the subject themselves [i.e., the drives] or the environment (which includes parents, society, culture, etc.) that has the larger say in forming the individual depends, for Nietzsche, upon the kind and 'power' of the individual. What he calls the 'herd-types' are seen as hardly more than the product of their environment, and have no real independence of action or thought apart from what has been formed by the environment. The 'higher-types,' having some independence from the mores and attitudes of the 'herd type,' in other words, more power, are able to attain some degree of independence of mind and action. This, as we saw, is the main reason Nietzsche dislikes Darwinism: it

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favours the herd-type by over-emphasising the part that the environment plays in determining the 'fittest.' The problem being that in Nietzsche's scheme, his fittest are all too easily swamped by the lowly herd-types.

And on the following page:

Although both [Nietzsche and Buddhism] consider the environment as initially important, both agree that its influence can and must eventually be overcome.

The whole discussion in chapter 8 makes it unambiguously clear that I do not think that the drives are solely "formed ... by the stimulus afforded by the environment," which would entail that any talk of self-overcoming would be mere empty words. Nor do I neglect "the predominance of inner forces over external in the constitution of the individual," but simply draw attention to Nietzsche's view that in the case of the "herd-types" their environment plays the major role in determining what they are, and with the "high-types" it is the "struggle or ... Hellenic agon between the various affects within the individual" (p. 104) that determine what they become.

The role the environment plays in forming us is clearly summed up by Nietzsche in Daybreak:

However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being... [A]bove all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore the work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold -- the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. (p. 119)

The result of this is that we are mere accidents; what we have become is the result of mere chance encounters with the environment, which, in the case of Nietzsche's herd-type, plays the determining role. The way out of this is to realize "What we are at liberty to do," that "One can dispose of one's drives like a gardener." [13]

According to Parkes my next error is "in saying that 'to truly affirm life' consists of the higher type's 'adding distance between himself and his animal past,'" as I miss the point that "in living affirmatively the point is to engage one's 'animal past' in the right way -- by training the animal drives without taming them." But what I say is:

However, the 'higher type,' through self-overcoming, can bring about affects not shared by the common man, can influence the way his being unfolds and add distance between himself and his animal past, and his fellow men. This, for Nietzsche, is how to truly affirm life. (p. 110, emphasis added)

It is not simply a matter of either training or taming the animal drives: one can "make [a drive] wither away" (Daybreak 109), and one can also bring into being new drives, as when "There arises in us the scent of a kind of pleasure we have not known before, and as a consequence there arises a new desire" (Daybreak 110) that

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can do battle with whatever drives oppose it. The higher type is not distinguished from the lower merely through his having trained his animal drives, but by the fact that he has brought into being drives that are beyond the scope of the lower types, which correspondingly open other "higher" perspectives on life not available to the lower types.

Parkes then turns to the chapter on "'The Will to Power' and 'Thirst,'" where he expresses "puzzlement over [my] methodology" of using the notion of Erōs as found in Plato's Symposium as a paradigm for taṇhā to parallel my earlier use of Hesiods's Eris as a paradigm for the will to power. He then goes on to say that my discussion of taṇhā is "strained and ultimately not very illuminating." The "problem of desire" has been raised on a few occasions in Buddhist scholarship, [14] and this chapter is a serious attempt to deal with this "problem." But Parkes offers no informed criticism for me to respond to. I must say that I do find such comments quite petty and dismissive of a very important topic.

Thus it is a relief to find that Parkes thinks that, in my last two chapters, "Morrison begins to hit his stride as far as marking the 'ironic affinities' is concerned." Unfortunately, relief turns to further disappointment: "the author's poor understanding of what Nietzsche is saying prevents him from doing anything very interesting with it," my main problem being a "condescending attitude toward [my] subject." This apparent condescension on my part is in daring to offer some criticisms of Nietzsche's account of self-overcoming and sublimation. Parkes thinks that I consider Nietzsche "incapable of elaborating his ideas adequately." But I say nothing of the kind, only that Nietzsche's ideas are on the whole "rather sketchy and bereft of any clear and definite goal -- a matter of experiment and trial and error" (p. 171). This is not because Nietzsche was incapable of elaborating his ideas, but because his "experiment" was in its infancy and therefore incomplete. But: "If, instead of devoting his energies to complaining about uncompleted thoughts, Morrison had bothered to look for an account of the next stage in self-overcoming by reading the next section of Twilight of the Idols, he would have found what he was looking for," which amounts to "one loses spirit [Geist] when one no longer needs it" (Twilight IX.14). Reading the whole section again, I'm afraid I'm still looking. I also complain that Nietzsche "left no guiding examples of his method" (p. 159). I also fail "to see that the consummate exemplification of one who goes beyond 'great self-mastery' to successful self-overcoming is given a few pages further on, in the person of Goethe." But Parkes should read more carefully. I am referring to examples of Nietzsche's "method or methods," not his exemplars. Goethe is indeed an exemplar, but he is not an example of a method. Nietzsche's paean to Goethe [15] is certainly inspiring, but it is rather sparse on the methodology of becoming an Übermensch.

Parkes then turns general Buddhist doctrine on its head. Presumably referring to Nietzsche's aphorism "Beauty no accident" (Twilight IX.47), where, as Parkes sees it, Nietzsche emphasizes "that the true locus of culture is not the soul or spirit, but the body (Leib)," he thinks such "is significantly consistent with Buddhist practice." But what Nietzsche says here has little or no connection with Buddhist doctrine or practice. Although in Buddhism there is no "soul," the locus of Buddhist practice is

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citta, or "mind," which, as 1 point out (p. 172) is as much the locus of our affects as it is of our thoughts. It is citta that is "cultivated" (bhāvanā), not one's kāya or śarīra. What is cultivated is mindful awareness, mental clarity, right views, skillful affects, and so forth. These may find objective expression in words and deeds, and even physical demeanor. But these are the objectifications of the locus of Buddhist practice, citta. To say that the body is such a locus is simply wrong. Sure, certain physical activities such as Tai Chi, Hatha Yoga, and so forth can have a beneficial but limited psychological effect on the mind, and one of the "Four Foundations of Mindfulness" is the body and its movements. But as the Dhammapada informs us, it is "mind" (manas) that precedes all skillful and unskillful states, as well as their objectification through speech and bodily activity. [16] In the Upāli Sutta, [17] the Jaina view of the importance of bodily activity over "mind" activity is criticized by the Buddha as a gross misunderstanding. It is karmic activity that is the locus of creative activity in Buddhism. Karmic activity is cetanā, a matter of "intending" or "willing." The body is here the mere instrument of the "mind." It is a "result" (phala or vipāka) of previous karmic activity. This is elementary Buddhism.

To respond in detail to the rest of Parkes' review is simply beyond the scope of this response. It would require a dialogue with Parkes in order to try and establish a common ground to limit misunderstanding. But I shall address a few points.

Although I do "mention ... 'a movement from consciousness to instinct' in Nietzsche (p. 214)," I do not "elaborate or make clear that this is instinct refined through protracted discipline." There are two points here. First, from what I do say in my account of Nietzsche's self-overcoming (pp. 155-171), I think it obvious that what is initially crude and instinctual can, in Nietzsche's view, be transformed into something "refined." Second, in that account I give my reasons for concluding that Nietzsche's notions are not fully worked out; therefore it would be dishonest of me to "elaborate or make clear" what I do not think is clear. Compared with the practice of the "cultivation of friendliness" (mettā-bhāvanā), which is the Buddhist model of "sublimation" that I use as a comparison (pp. 178-182), Nietzsche's is very sketchy indeed. Nevertheless, I am interested to see what Parkes has to say on this subject in his Composing the Soul: will I find I missed something important? Or will I find, as is unfortunately all too often the case, that authors read much into Nietzsche that is simply not there. Perhaps Professor Parkes could send me a review copy.

According to Parkes, the "final stage of self-overcoming" is learning "to relax the discipline and trust to natural spontaneity." This is possible as "the discipline is no longer necessary because these various groups [of drives] have learned to live in harmony with each other." I cannot agree with this. This way of looking at what Nietzsche is aiming at is far too essentialist, as if all one had to do was create harmony among the various drives. But I mentioned earlier that in Nietzsche's gardener analogy it is not a matter of rearranging the relations of what is there, but of weeding out certain traits, cultivating those worthy of cultivation, and bringing new drives into being. It is this model that has affinities with Buddhism, that reflects the non-essentialist doctrine of pa.ticcasamuppāda. Thus, to say, as Parkes goes on to say,

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that "Morrison fails to see the inconsistency of his supposing that it is the 'I' that is doing the self-overcoming, since he never asks the (very Buddhist) question Nietzsche so often poses: Who, or which drive, or what group of affects is the agent of willing, disciplining, or whatever, in this particular situation" is so ridiculous as to be unworthy of comment.

It seems that for Parkes I just cannot get anything right: "The author spends a lot of time worrying about a contradiction he posits between Nietzsche's well-known deprecation of consciousness (Bewusstsein) and the necessary role he (Morrison) thinks it would have to play in the process of self-overcoming (pp. 204, 206)." Rather than worrying, what I actually do is list and contrast the various comments Nietzsche makes about consciousness -- most of which, if taken at face value, would undermine his project of self-overcoming -- and, from a broader perspective, try and determine just what the role of consciousness is in Nietzsche's project. As footnote 17 on page 201 shows, I am not a lone "worrier": for example, John Wilcox remarks that the "theme of the utility of consciousness is important in Nietzsche's notes; and it is inconsistent with his claim that consciousness has no effects. Nothing that is impotent can have utility." [18] This is not the product of "worrying," but of reading what Nietzsche actually says about consciousness, and trying to make overall sense of it.

But being engrossed in self-created irrelevancies, I overlook the "obvious point that what is conscious (in the sense of bewusst) for Nietzsche is always conditioned by language." Thus I "[miss] another close affinity between the Nietzschean and Buddhist projects": that, in Nietzsche's case, "almost all of our 'drive life' goes on beneath the level of consciousness," and the "Buddhists' insistence on the somatic aspects of mindfulness and their efforts to circumvent or undercut conceptual thinking -- which takes place consciously, in language." Personally, I think that to focus on language and conceptual thinking, besides being circular, misses the real issue here. In Buddhism, conceptual thinking is not the problem. The problem is our misunderstanding the conventionality of words and concepts, of being beguiled by them, of creating "views" (diṭṭhi) out of them. The problem is not that "consciousness is conditioned by language" (which is disputable), but is rather an "issue of grasping" (upādānagata), [19] that is, our attachment to concepts and ideas, our clinging to them, our emotional need for security, identity, belonging, and so forth. One has to distinguish between vicāra or "intellectual investigation," which is deemed necessary for the development of paññā, and papañca or "the tendency of the worldling's imagination to break loose and run riot." [20] In itself, conceptual thinking is not a problem. The necessary transformation of our affective composition that gives rise to the state of nippapañca, the ceasing of conceptual proliferation, will require a little more than mere attention to "the somatic aspects of mindfulness."

However, I do get something right: "Morrison rightly emphasizes Nietzsche's conception of objectivity as a matter of bringing as many perspectives to bear on the situation as possible." But of course, I don't make much use of this as I miss what Parkes sees as a correspondence between Nietzsche's "learning to see," which is "learning to comprehend and deal with each individual case from all sides," and the

p. 278 Response to Graham Parkes' Review Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)

"Buddhist aim of 'seeing and knowing things as they really are.'" But the reason I did not make much of this comparison is that I am not sure that there is one. "Seeing and knowing things as they are" arises in dependence upon samādhi, which is a state wherein the mind is temporarily purified of all unskillful affects, is calm, alert, profoundly concentrated, and "empowered." Although, in my account of Nietzsche's notion, perspectivism could certainly be an aid along the way to samādhi, traditionally "seeing and knowing" is of an altogether different order. It is what makes one an Ariyan. Its consequences are profound as it is what permanently liberates one from ever again becoming embroiled in saṁsāra. I think one has to beware the premature synthesis. I do not think that the Buddhist "seeing and knowing" is "accessible by following the important thrust in Nietzsche's thinking away from the anthropocentric standpoint." Indeed, I cannot agree with Parkes' interpretation here of The Joyous Science 349. Nietzsche considers that Darwin's "doctrine of the 'struggle for existence'" is "one-sided," and "is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists": "their ancestors were poor ... people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand."

In other words, Darwin's doctrine is conditioned by his social inheritance, which gives it a narrow and one-sided perspective. It is an illegitimate generalization from "an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life." Thus to counteract this one-sided perspective, Nietzsche thinks that the "natural scientist should come out of his human nook" and look around at the conditions prevailing in the broader world of nature. But I cannot agree with Parkes that this entails "thinking away from the anthropocentric standpoint." Nietzsche makes it unambiguously clear that there is no such standpoint:

Man imagines the existence of other things by analogy with his own existence, in other words anthropomorphically. (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 11)

How should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image! (Gay Science 112)

There is nothing for it: one is obliged to understand all motion, all "appearances," all "laws," only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end. (Will to Power 619)

At Beyond Good and Evil 36, he makes exactly the same point. We can never step outside our conditioned phenomenality so as to gain a non-anthropomorphic perspective.

Parkes concludes by saying that Mistry's work is "an illuminating prolegomenon to a comparative study of Nietzsche and Buddhism." However, I think I have shown that this is simply not the case. And I also think that Parkes misleads when he says that "readers interested in the current state of scholarship won't miss anything by ignoring the first ten chapters of Morrison's book, reading Mistry's study first, and then turning to the final two chapters of the new Nietzsche and Buddhism." However, I am relieved to find that he considers that at least two chapters of my work are worth reading.

p. 279 Response to Graham Parkes' Review Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)

Notes
1. See Dīgha Nikāya 1.54.

2. Aṅguttara Nikāya 1.286.

3. Majjhima Nikāya III.140, incorrectly entered as III.126 in Mistry.

4. For an example of the later, see Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra, chap. 5.

5. Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (London: Rider, 1962), p. 46.

6. Aṅguttara Nikāya II.146: "taṇhaṁ nissāya taṇhaṁ pajahati."

7. Actually, I.5.

8. Rahula makes no mention of "joy."

9. Aḷāra Kālama and Uddaka Rāmaputta?

10. See Morrison, pp. 187-196.

11. Actually, Samyutta Nikāya II.238.

12. See David Loy's review in Asian Philosophy 8 (2) (1998): 129-131.

13. Daybreak 560. For my account of this, see Morrison, pp. 163-171.

14. For example, see Wayne Alt, "There Is No Paradox of Desire in Buddhism," Philosophy East and West 30 (4) (October 1980): 521-530, and A. L. Herman, "A Solution to the Paradox of Desire in Buddhism," Philosophy East and West 29 (1) (January 1979): pp. 91-94.

15. Twilight of the Idols IX.49-51.

16. Dhammapada I.1-2.

17. Majjhima Nikāya I.

18. John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), pp. 172-179.

19. See Aṅguttara Nikāya IV.69.

20. Ñāṇananda, Concept and Reality (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1971), p. 4.