In one of the Tibetan Buddhist sutras, the Buddha says: And I’m choosing this provocative language deliberately partly to evoke Richard Dawkins’s work on memes and religion and partly to knock the idea a little bit from its unassailable pedestal.ĭespite what many seem to think after the piece on Buddhism not being a philosophy, I’m very far from disliking Buddhism in the years since escaping the spell of Enlightenment I’ve spent 40 days in silence at 10-day Vipassana retreats and hundreds of hours practising Buddhist meditation. The difference, in this case, was that with Enlightenment I couldn’t see the unhealthiness of the urge and so with no mental defences it invaded my mind like a virus. It was a similar feeling to what I was talking about in the last instalment around why I had to put Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra down. And it was far from a rare affliction - three of my four closest friends were equally ensnared by the idea. When I was younger I - like many young Westerners over the past century - got drunk on the idea of enlightenment. “Dionysus against the crucified one Buddha.” It’s a great question and it reframes the parting shot of Nietzsche’s career in a way that is more relevant for many of us born after the death of God: What do you see as the distinctions, and where do you see enlightenment falling short? I’m interested in the distinction between eastern enlightenment and Nietzsche. This week’s instalment was prompted by a question from one of The Living Philosophy’s supporters on Patreon Kevin Sherman who wrote:

Hedonism vs asceticism