Cioran & Dhamma

Everything is good which brings me closer to Buddha.

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In the Dhammapada, it is suggested that, in order to achieve deliverance, we must be rid of the double yoke of Good and Evil. That Good itself should be one of our fetters we are too spiritually retarded to be able to admit.

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Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?

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Buddhism calls anger, “corruption of the mind,” manicheism “root of the tree of death.” I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

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“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.

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Going to India because of the Vedanta or Buddhism is about the same as going to France because of Jansenism.
Moreover the latter is more recent, since it vanished only three centuries ago.

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Are we to execrate our age—or all ages?
Do we think of Buddha withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?

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When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled.
There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit It is Iteration, supreme impasse….

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That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”

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Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.

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Visit a hospital, and in five minutes you become a Buddhist, or become one again if you have left off being such a thing.

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If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”

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I ponder C., for whom drinking coffee was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without  coffee.” We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.

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A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana without remainder, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of ... a nap.

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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.