The Doctrine of Awakening Quotes

“Modern man has not only to fight against materialism, but must also defend himself from the snares and allures of false supernaturalism. His defense will be firm and effective only if he is capable of returning to the origins, of assimilating the ancient traditions, and then of relying upon the ascesis to carry out the task of reestablishing his inner condition. For it is through this that these traditions will reveal to him their deepest and perennially real content and show him, step by step, the path.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Solitude should not be a burden, something that is suffered, that is borne involuntarily, or in which refuge is taken by force of circumstances, but rather, a natural, simple, and free disposition. In a text [Suttanipāta] we read: 'Solitude is called wisdom, he who is alone will find that he is happy'.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“As in a mirror, he 'looks at himself again and again before performing an action; he looks at himself again and again before saying a word; he looks at himself again and again before harboring a thought.' It can easily be seen that by following such a path a man naturally transforms himself into a kind of living statue made up of awareness, into a figure pervaded by composedness, decorum, and dignity . . .”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Once detachment, viveka, is interpreted mainly in this internal sense, it appears perhaps easier to achieve it today than in a more normal and traditional civilization. One who is still an 'Aryan' spirit in a large Eu­ropean or American city, with its skyscrapers and asphalt, with its poli­tics and sport, with its crowds who dance and shout, with its exponents of secular culture and of soulless science and so on-among all this he may feel himself more alone and detached and nomad than he would have done in the rime of the Buddha, in conditions of physical isolation and of actual wandering. The greatest difficulty, in this respect, lies in giving this sense of internal isolation, which today may occur to many almost spontaneously, a positive, full, simple, and transparent charac­ter, with elimination of all traces of aridity, melancholy, discord, or anxiety. Solitude should not he a burden, something that is suffered, that is borne involuntarily, or in which refuge is taken by force of cir­cumstances, but rather, a natural, simple, and free disposition, in a text we read: 'Solitude is called wisdom [ekattam monam akkhatarin], he who is alone will find that he is happy'; it is an accentuated version of 'beata solitudo, sofa beatitudo'.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Awakening’ is the keystone and the symbol of the whole Buddhist ascesis: to think that ‘awakening’ and ‘nothingness’ can be equivalent is an extravagance that should be obvious to everyone. Nor should the notion of ‘vanishing,’ applied in a well-known simile of nibbāna to the fire that disappears when the flame is extinguished, be a source of misconception. It has been said with justice that, in similes of this sort, one must always have in mind the general Indo-Aryan concept that indicates that the extinguishing of the fire is not its annihilation, but its return to the invisible, pure, supersensible state in which it was before it manifested itself through a combustible in a given place and in given circumstances.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“An Aryan [noble] mind has too much respect for other people, and its sense of its own dignity is too pronounced to allow it to impose its own ideas upon others, even when it knows that its ideas are correct.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Finally, the tern 'asceticism' is also susceptible to being misunderstood by those who view Buddhism from the outside. Evola reminds his readers that the original meaning of the term asceticism is "practical exercise," or 'discipline' — one could even say 'learning.' It certainly does not mean, as some are inclined to think, a willingness to mortify the body that derives from the idea of penance, and even leads to the practice of self-flagellation, since it is believed that one must suffer in order to expiate one's sins. Asceticism is rather a school of the will, a pure heroism (that is, it is disinterested) that Evola, a real expert in this subject, compares to the efforts of a mountain climber. To the layman, mountain climbing may be a pointless effort, but to the climber it is a challenge in which the test of courage, perseverance, and hero-ism is its only purpose. In this we recognize an attitude that Brahmanism knew under certain forms of yoga and Tantrism.

In the spiritual domain, the procedure is the same. Buddha, as we know, was tempted early in his life by a form of asceticism that was similar to that of a hermit living in the desert. This approach involved prolonged fasts and techniques aimed at breaking the body's resistance. Siddhartha, however, realized himself and achieved the Awakening only when he understood this type of asceticism to be a dead end. Turning away from the indignant protests of his early companions, he stopped mortifying his body, ate to placate his hunger, and returned to the world of human beings. But it was then that his detachment started to develop: the world no longer had a grasp on him, since he had become a 'hero,' or like the ancient Greeks would have said, a 'god.”
― JEAN VARENNE, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“This reaction to the work was obviously a misunderstanding. It ignores the fact that the future Buddha was also of noble origins, that he was the son of a king and heir to the throne and had been raised with the expectation that one day he would inherit the crown. He had been taught martial arts and the art of government, and having reached the right age, he had married and had a son. All of these things would be more typical of the physical and mental formation of a future samurai than of a seminarian ready to take holy orders. A man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable to dispel such a misconception.

He did so on two fronts in his Doctrine: on the one hand, he did not cease to recall the origins of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who was destined to the throne of Kapilavastu: on the other hand, he attempted to demonstrate that Buddhist asceticism is not a cowardly resignation before life's vicissitudes, but rather a struggle of a spiritual kind, which is not any less heroic than the struggle of a knight on the battlefield. As Buddha himself said (Mahavagga, 2.15): 'It is better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.' This resolution is in accord with Evola's ideal of overcoming natural resistances in order to achieve the Awakening through meditation; it should he noted, however, that the warrior terminology is contained in the oldest writings of Buddhism, which are those that best reflect the living teaching of the master. Evola works tirelessly in his hook to erase the Western view of a languid and dull doctrine that in fact was originally regarded as aristocratic and reserved for real 'champions.'

After Schopenhauer, the unfounded idea arose in Western culture that Buddhism involved a renunciation of the world and the adoption of a passive attitude: 'Let things go their way; who cares anyway.' Since in this inferior world 'everything is evil,' the wise person is the one who, like Simeon the Stylite, withdraws, if not to the top of a pillar; at least to an isolated place of meditation. Moreover, the most widespread view of Buddhists is that of monks dressed in orange robes, begging for their food; people suppose that the only activity these monks are devoted to is reciting memorized texts, since they shun prayers; thus, their religion appears to an outsider as a form of atheism.

Evola successfully demonstrates that this view is profoundly distorted by a series of prejudices. Passivity? Inaction? On the contrary, Buddha never tired of exhorting his disciples to 'work toward victory'; he himself, at the end of his life, said with pride: katam karaniyam, 'done is what needed to he done!' Pessimism? It is true that Buddha, picking up a formula of Brahmanism, the religion in which he had been raised prior to his departure from Kapilavastu, affirmed that everything on earth is 'suffering.' But he also clarified for us that this is the case because we are always yearning to reap concrete benefits from our actions. For example, warriors risk their lives because they long for the pleasure of victory and for the spoils, and yet in the end they are always disappointed: the pillaging is never enough and what has been gained is quickly squandered. Also, the taste of victory soon fades away. But if one becomes aware of this state of affairs (this is one aspect of the Awakening), the pessimism is dispelled since reality is what it is, neither good nor bad in itself; reality is inscribed in Becoming, which cannot be interrupted. Thus, one must live and act with the awareness that the only thing that matters is each and every moment. Thus, duty (dhamma) is claimed to be the only valid reference point: 'Do your duty,' that is. 'let your every action he totally disinterested.”
― Jean Varenne, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The world of "becoming" is thus, in a manner of speaking, the truth Buddhism uses from the start. In the becoming nothing remains identical, there is nothing substantial, and nothing permanent. It is the becoming of experience itself, consuming itself in its own momentary content. Ceaseless and limitless, it is also conceived as nothing more than a succession of states that give place one to another according to an impersonal law, as in an eternal circle. We can here see an exact parallel of the Hellenic concept of the "cycle of generation" kύkλoς τς γενέσεως, and the "wheel of necessity," κύκλoς τς εἱμαρμένης.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“That the divinities can do little for men, that man is fundamentally the artificer of his own destiny, even of his development beyond this world—this characteristic view held by original Buddhism demonstrates its difference from some later forms, especially the Mahayana schools, into which infiltrated the idea of a power on high busying itself with mankind in order to lead each individual to salvation.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“When an ascesis is understood as a technique for the conscious creation of a force that can be applied, in the first place, at any level, then the disciplines taught by the doctrine of awakening can be recognized as those that incorporate the highest degree of crystallinity and independence.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“what is elsewhere fragmentary here becomes systematic; what is instinct becomes conscious technique; the spiritual labrynth of those minds that achieve real elation through the workings of some “grace” (since it is only accidentally and by means of suggestions, fears, hopes, and raptures that they discover the right way) is replaced by a calm and uniform light, present even in abysmal depths, and by a method that has no need of external means.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“We have implied that asceticism, when considered as a whole, can assume various meanings at successive spiritual levels. Simply defined, that is to say as “training” or discipline, an ascesis aims at placing all the energies of the human being under the control of a central principle. In this respect we can, properly speaking, talk of a technique that has, in common with that of modern scientific achievements, the characteristics of objectivity and impersonality. Thus an eye, trained to distinguish the accessory from the essential, can easily recognize a “constant” beyond the multiple variety of ascetic forms adopted by this or that tradition.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“mania here being considered as tripartite, that is, as "mania of desire, mania of existence, mania of ignorance—kāmāsava, bhavāsava, avijjāsava.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“the Sāṁkhya or the Vedānta doctrines, for example, and where it might be figuratively illustrated by saying: man is a god who is unaware that he is such—it is his unawareness (avijjā) alone that makes him a man.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The paṭicca-samuppāda—which literally means "conditioned genesis" or "formation"—considers a series of twelve conditioned states. The term used is paccaya, condition, and not hetu, cause: it is a question of conditionality and not of true causality. We may here return to the simile of a substance that, in being transformed, passes through various states, each of which contains the potentiality of giving place, in appropriate circumstances, to the next, or, if neutralized, of suspending the next. On what level does this causal series develop?”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“nirodha,”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“paṭicca-samuppāda”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“states of consciousness corresponding to the three watches of the night,”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Conditioned Genesis The problem of "origin," corresponding to the second truth of the Ariya, is investigated more deeply in what is known as doctrine of dependent origination or "conditioned genesis" (paṭicca-samuppāda), which makes a separate study of the stages and states by which conditioned existence is arrived at.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“santāna,”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The passage from purely individual consciousness to this saṁsaric consciousness that includes indefinite possibilities of existence, both "infernal" and celestial—this, fundamentally, is the basis of the whole Doctrine of Awakening. We are not dealing here with a "philosophy" but with an experience that, to tell the truth, is not the sole property of Buddhism. Traces and echoes of it are also to be found in other traditions, both Eastern and Western: in the West, particularly in terms of secret knowledge and of initiatory experience. The theory of universal pain, of life as pain, does not represent, in this respect, anything other than something completely external and, as we have already said, profane. Where it has been widely diffused it refers only to the forms of a popular exposition.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“You do not exist. You cannot say 'mine' of anything. You do not possess life—it is life that possesses you. You suffer it. And the possibility of immortal survival of this phantom 'I' at the dissolution of the body is only a mirage, since everything tells you that its correlation with this body is essential to you and a trauma, an indisposition, a fainting fit, or any kind of accident has a definite influence over all its faculties, however 'spiritual' and 'superior' they may be.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Here it will be well to add the following consideration. We have already said that the first two truths of the Ariya, with particular reference to the doctrine of thirst and of fire, may not be directly evident to modern man. He may be able to understand them fully only in special or critical moments, because the life he normally leads is as if outside himself; half sleepwalking, he moves between psychological reflexes and images that hide from him the deepest and most fearful substance of existence”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“Beings, then, are the heirs of actions.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“In changing the state—in having a different "name-and-form" (philosophically we might say: a different principium individuationis)—it is well to change also the denomination.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“In the same way the life of beings has only the duration of a thought: the being of the past moment has lived, but does not live and will not live; the being of the future moment will live, but does not live and has not lived; the being of the present moment lives, but has not lived and will not live."29”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The theory of anattā, of "not-I," thus has this meaning: the "I" does not exist outside the process of burning, it is this very process—were a halt really made, the "I," the illusion of being "I" would collapse.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The contacts develop through attachment, upādāna. This occurs above all in the fivefold stem that makes up the person in general: materiality, feeling, perception, formations, individuated consciousness.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts

“The process of saṁsāric life is thought of as a flame attached to burning material or rather as a flame that is itself its own material.”
― Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts