BAKER: Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of the same runs deep. Some think it runs so deep as to touch other streams of thought. One is the thought of Enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. Satori. Is this connection sensible?
ABLE: At the surface, that is doubtful. Cultures flourish like flowers, uniquely. Zen is a precious garden all its own, fit for its home in China and Japan. Now largely depleted. Gone from China long ago. In Japan, transformed into the cultivation of precious arts. The monasteries of Kyoto seem like endangered species in a zoo.
CHARLIE: Yes, but--we picked up the living stem in America in the sixties. Thanks to D. T. Suzuki in translation. Thanks to Alan Watts.
ABLE: Sixties hippies consumed thoughts like dope. They sent them up in smoke.
CHARLIE: Not everyone who took up Zen in the sixties was in the youth cult movement. It connected with those who knew that the outer casings of modernism locked out something vital in experience--but did not know what.
BAKER: Grant, for the sake of talk, the authentic life of the Zen thought of satori outside of its native culture. Through meditative practice of any kind, let's say, informed OR uninformed by Eastern traditions, the seeker can attain an instant of awakening to the reality of his personal existence. That existence has been driven by the Buddhist concept of desire, grasping for that which is desired, and the continuing suffering created by the inability to seize what he desires to grasp. Satori consists simply--or profoundly, if you wish--in the awakening to the illusory nature of such desiring. The seeker sees that he has been dividing up the world into bits and pieces and wanting certain bits or pieces. This is the grand process of dualistic thinking--the other thing is not this thing. That is not I; I am not that. Satori, or Enlightenment, lets the seeker know, in an instant, how wrongheaded such dualistic thinking is. The undifferentiated is the reality. Drop the desiring in a world divided up by wrongheaded dualistic thinking, and one finds himself where he always has been without knowing it--in a state of complete participation in everything satisfactorily, without the need for desiring, for grasping. This puts maya, division, into its proper place as a mere instrument of everyday consciousness, not at the ultimate place where the real state of affairs is felt, seen. Satori is thus an Awakening in a Moment.
CHARLIE: And it lasts. It is an enduring sufficiency for the person who experiences it.
ABLE: It sets things right?
CHARLIE: Right.
BAKER: Take some characteristics of satori, then, and see if they resonate with characteristics of Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of the same.
ABLE: It is Nietzsche's hardest thought, after all.
BAKER: For instance, Nietzsche offers us riddles. The riddle of the snake in the shepherd's mouth. The riddle of the serpent and the eagle twined in flight together. Zen offers the Koan as a situation about which to think.
CHARLIE: The riddle seems akin to the Zen Koan. Heidegger says of Nietzsche's riddles: "We would misunderstand the riddle and our riddling on it abysmally if we were to believe that our task is to hit upon a solution that would dissolve all that is questionable." (p.38). This accurately describes the function and nature of the Zen Koan too. It is not to provoke a "right" answer in logical or rational terms; it is to lead the person thinking about it to Enlightenment.
BAKER: The Moment (das Augenblick) and the instant of Enlightenment in Zen, satori, seem to have much in common. Heidegger uses the term "ecstatic temporality" to describe das Augenblick. (p. 41) We are tempted to think of the glimpsing of eternal return in the Moment as the instant when the Zen person breaks through the limitations of grasping--including the limitations of dualistic, rational thought itself. The experience leads to a new state of being, which leaves behind the limits of desire.
ABLE: Are we suggesting that Nietzsche's Overman and the Zen man after satori are inwardly establishing the same sense of their place in a temporal and a supra-temporal world? This stretches far across cultures.
CHARLIE: On p. 89, Heidegger opens a window on the "fundamental phenomenon of the void". This notion, so central to Buddhist thought, could offer a bridge between the Nietzschean western and the eastern ways of seeking insight into the fundamental awareness of existence.
ABLE: Nietzsche's idea leads to radical experience. Heidegger says, "The doctrine of eternal return can be grasped solely on the basis of the experience of nihilism and knowledge of the essence of nihilism." (p. 173)
CHARLIE: Underline the word "experience." Just as satori is an awakening experienced by the individual Zen person, so thinking the thought of eternal return is an awakening experienced in "the Moment" by the Nietzschean. Past and future meet. Countable time is annihilated and simultaneously affirmed. Nihilism is to the Nietzschean what pain and suffering, caused by grasping-desiring, are to the Zen person. Both are put down or overcome not by extrinsic doctrine but by an inward experience, felt at the core of one's being, including but going beyond one's rational powers. Satori and the thought of eternal return alike can occur WITHIN a human being--not elsewhere. Reason, science, polemics, doctrines--all are unable in themselves to achieve these states.
ABLE: So, both are seeking the right path to enlightenment or understanding of the way things are?
BAKER: Heidegger says, "Our explicit discussion of the content of the thought of eternal return has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right WAY of approaching the thought and its conditions." He identifies two conditions. "First, thinking in terms of the moment." "Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism." (p. 182) Substitute "awakening" for "moment." Substitute "grasping, pain and suffering" for "nihilism." This gives us a correspondence between the two projects in search of a right reckoning of human experience.
CHARLIE: Yes. Zen thinks in terms of a realization of the state of things in a moment of insight, which leaps beyond the boundaries of intellectual endeavor and the rigors of dutiful meditation and discipline. That realization occurs because the individual person experiences a release from the suffering caused by his desire; his desire makes him grasp, and grasping leads him to suffer with lack of fulfillment. A felt sense of putting that grasping into the right perspective vis-a-vis the nature of reality leads to Enlightenment and liberation from suffering. It is quite possible to see the felt sense of eternal return, in the Nietzschean way, as effecting the same kind of personal liberation, leading one to become--the Enlightened Overman!
ABLE: Here are two statements of the eternal return by Heidegger. Maybe they catch the essence of Zen Enlightenment:
To think eternity requires that we think the moment, that is, transpose
ourselves to the moment of being-a-self.
Only by way of nihilism and the moment is the eternal recurrence of the same
to be thought.
CHARLIE: Enlightening selection.
BAKER: The German mind and the Eastern mind found a crossroad in Hermann Hesse's fiction. We wonder if he was under a Nietzschean influence.
ABLE: Research needed.
BAKER: If he were, the bridge we have been building here might find a Hessean reinforcement.
CHARLIE: Let's look for that timber.