I think that you have met Mr. Samaratunga. It is he who is busying himself with the publication of the Notes on Dhamma I have written, and it is on this account that I have thought it advisable to inform him of the nature of my present bodily disorders, of the fact that I have already attempted suicide, and that it remains a possibility that I shall make another attempt.[1]

That is to say, I did not wish him to embark on an undertaking that he might later regret, in the event of my suicide in the not-too-distant future. He seemed to be distressed at what I had to tell him, and has kindly offered his help; but he says that the situation is beyond his unaided powers, and has asked me if he can discuss the matter with you. I have told him that I have no objection. If, therefore, he does consult you, please consider yourself at liberty to talk to him freely about it; but I would prefer that you erred on the pessimistic side rather than the optimistic, for two reasons: (i) If things go wrong he will be less upset if he has not been led to expect too much, and (ii) I have not, in fact, asked for his help, and unless there is a very good chance of cure or at least substantial relief I am not at all inclined to start upon a course of treatment that will be burdensome for me and perhaps expensive for him. There is nothing more discouraging than to submit to a course of medical discipline and at the end of it to find oneself no better off than before.

In my last letter I told you that the condition had been cured by good mental concentration. This (as expected) did not last -- both the weather and the guts went wrong.

P.S. If you should meet Dr. __ and he asks after me, please assure him that I am taking honey daily for my heart. He insisted that honey is very good for strengthening the heart, adding that 'it contains all the unknown vitamins' -- an irresistible recommendation! If we were offered the choice between a pill containing a generous quantity of all the vitamins hitherto discovered and one containing all those not yet discovered who would hesitate for a moment? The effect of the discovered vitamins is known and limited, but the undiscovered vitamins hold out boundless hopes of regeneration (especially if swallowed during a total eclipse of the sun).

Besides, the assertion about honey has the delightful property of being irrefutable except retrospectively -- it is always unassailable at the time it is uttered. For suppose some new vitamin is discovered in (say) the skin of a certain plantain but is found not to be present in honey, then it is true that before the discovery of this vitamin the assertion about honey was mistaken, since this particular unknown vitamin was actually not contained in honey; but now that this vitamin has been discovered it is no longer amongst those that are 'unknown', and though we may have to confess that, yesterday, our assumption that honey contains all the unknown vitamins was perhaps a little premature, today we can be quite sure, without fear of contradiction, that it is absolutely true. The question arises, if a well-known doctor were to announce impressively, 'Gum arabic contains all the unknown vitamins', would he get people to swallow it?




[L. 32]   23 November 1963

Kierkegaard's attitude towards his books was that nobody was competent to review them except himself -- which, in fact, he proceeded to do, his later works containing a review of his earlier ones. I have much the same attitude towards the Notes.

The last section of the Notes -- FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURE -- is really a remarkably elegant piece of work, almost entirely original, and also quite possibly correct. I am obliged to say this myself, since it is highly improbable that anybody else will. It is most unlikely that anyone will make anything of it. The reason that I do not want to leave it out is principally that it provides a formal demonstration of certain structural features (intention and reflexion, for example) to which frequent appeal is made in the earlier part of the Notes, and so long as the demonstration is there, these features (whose existence it is fashionable, in certain circles, to ignore) cannot simply be dismissed as fictions. Besides, it always inspires confidence in an author if he has a few pages of incomprehensible calculations at the end of his book.

I thank you for hoping that I am in good condition; and, indeed, I should be only too delighted to be able to oblige. But the fact of the matter, alas! is that I am really very much as I was before. The troublesome erotic stimulation continues as before. Morale remains rather precarious. I have to recognize the ominous fact that I have now given up all hope of making any further progress for myself in this life.

This means that my reason for continuing to live is more or less dependent upon outside circumstances (at present, mostly upon business of one kind or another connected with the Notes, or upon an occasional windfall in the form of an interesting book). And all these external things are highly insecure. Once they go (as they may do at any time), I shall be left with no very good reason for continuing to live, and quite a good one for discontinuing. However, the situation does not cause me sleepless nights, and, really, nobody will be less distressed by my absence than I shall.

In any case, my present position has a great advantage: it gives me the freedom to say whatever I think needs saying without troubling whether I am making myself unpopular in the process. Unfortunately, however, reckless outspokenness on the subject of the Dhamma does not seem, in Ceylon, to produce unpopularity at all -- rather the contrary. A certain Venerable Thera, on receiving a copy of the Notes -- which condemns, point by point, almost everything in a published book of his -- has written an amiably inconsistent eulogy of the Notes, commending Mr. Samaratunga's intentions to print it, and giving names of people to whom it might well be sent. (The point is, of course, that he wrote his book not out of any heartfelt conviction, but simply in accordance with the established tradition -- and, I may say, did it very competently. And, being safe in the anonymity of the tradition, he does not feel that the Notes apply to him personally.)




[L. 33]   13 February 1964

Many thanks for sending me The Medical Mirror.[1] I don't know how it is in England -- philistinism is the usual order of the day --, but it seems that the German doctors are not insensitive to current trends of philosophical thought.

I was struck by the remarks of one doctor whose task it is to look after patients suffering from anxiety. Formerly, no doubt, anxiety in patients would have been attributed to nervous (and therefore physiological) disorders, and the remedy would have been treatment by drugs or perhaps surgery. (Even now in America, I believe, the opinion is that all mental disorder will eventually be amenable to treatment by new psychotropic drugs and neurosurgical techniques -- but then the Americans are the least philosophical of mortals. One of Sartre's characters remarks somewhere that 'For an American, to think about something that worries him, that consists in doing all he can not to think about it'.[2]) In other words, the whole matter of mental sickness would have been regarded as intelligible -- in theory at least -- in purely deterministic terms. But now this German doctor says

As some people commit suicide in order to escape fear, the knowledge of death also cannot be the ultimate reason of fear. Fear rather seems to be directly related to freedom, to man, whose task as an intellectual being it is to fashion his life in freedom. His personality is the authority which permits this freedom. But his freedom, on the other hand, allows man to become aware of himself. This encounter with himself makes him fearful.

The only reality is 'care' at every level of existence. For the man who is lost in the world and its distractions this care is a fear that is short and fleeting. But let this fear once take cognizance of itself and it becomes anxiety, the perpetual climate of the lucid man 'in whom existence comes into its own'. (Myth, p. 18)

But if this is true, it is true always. Why, then, is anxiety so much more prevalent today, apparently, than it was formerly? The world is more comfortable than it was (and nobody has invented more unpleasant forms of death than have always existed), and yet mental homes are multiplying and full to overflowing. Why should it be so? This is where Nietzsche comes in -- he is the diagnostician of our times. Nietzsche declared that 'God is dead', and called himself the first accomplished nihilist of Europe. Not, indeed, that Nietzsche himself assassinated God; he found him already dead in the hearts of his contemporaries; and it was by fate, not choice, that he was a nihilist. He diagnosed in himself and in others the inability to believe and the disappearance of the primitive foundation of all faith, that is, belief in life. (I am quoting Camus.[3])

Here, in a Buddhist tradition, it is not always realized how much in Europe the survival of death, and therefore of valid ethical values, is bound up with the idea of God. Once God is 'dead' (and he started dying, convulsively, with the French Revolution), life for the European loses its sense. 'Has existence then a significance at all? -- the question' (says Nietzsche) 'that will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity.'[4] And so the task that Nietzsche set himself was to find out if it was possible to live without believing in anything at all: to be absolutely free, in other words.

Being a man of integrity (there are not so many after all) he used himself as a guinea-pig -- and paid the price with madness. But he discovered in the process that complete liberty is an intolerable burden, and that it is only possible to live if one accepts duties of one sort or another. But what duties? The question, for the European, is still unanswered. ('No one would start to play a game without knowing the rules. Yet most of us play the interminable game of life without them, because we are unable to find out what they are.' -- Cyril Connolly in 1944.[5]) In the old days, when God was still alive -- when Christianity was still a living force in Europe --, people were faced, just as they are now, with the anxious question 'What should I do?';[6] but the answer then was ready to hand -- 'Obey God's commandments -- and the burden of anxiety was lifted from their shoulders. They feared God, no doubt, but they did not fear themselves. But now that God is dead, each man has to carry the burden for himself, and the burden -- for those who do not shirk the issue and bury their ostrich heads in the sands of worldly distractions -- is impossibly heavy. No, it is not death that these anxiety-ridden inmates of our asylums fear -- it is life.

'And what is the answer?' perhaps you will ask. As I have tried to indicate (in KAMMA), the answer, for the ordinary person, is not self-evident. On the other hand, he may well feel that there ought to be some answer -- as indeed Nietzsche himself did when he wrote

It is easy to talk about all sorts of immoral acts; but would one have the strength to carry them through? For example, I could not bear to break my word or to kill; I should languish, and eventually I should die as a result -- that would be my fate.[7]

I was fascinated by the account of 'a surgical super-operation reported recently from abroad [America?], where in nine hours of hard work a patient was operated for a malign tumour, an intervention which removed the entire pelvis including the legs and re-established new openings for urinary and intestinal tract'. Just imagine -- no more itching piles, no more ingrowing toenails. But surely they could have removed a lot more? After all, one can still live without such useless impedimenta as arms, eyes, teeth, and tongue, and with only one lung and one kidney, and perhaps no more than half a liver. No wonder the writer comments that the surgeon should make inquiries about the patient's reserves of asceticism -- just the right word! -- before he starts on his labour of love!




[L. 34]   19 August 1964

You are right, life is not so very simple for anyone. And once one has got fixed habits and is accustomed to one's little self-indulgences, and perhaps made a certain position for oneself in the world (professional seniority, the regard of one's colleagues, and so on), it is not so easy to make a drastic change and take a leap into what is really something of an unknown element.

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Editorial notes:

[31.1] another attempt: The sequence begins with L. 45. [Back to text]

[33.1] Medical Mirror: The quotation is found in issue 6 of 1963, as part of a translated extract from a talk (in German) by Prof. Dr. Thure von Uexküll given at a symposium on 'Fear and Hope in Our Times'. [Back to text]

[33.2] Sartre: 'Americans do not enjoy the process of thinking. When they do concentrate, it is in order to escape all thought.' Troubled Sleep, p. 29. [Back to text]

[33.3] quoting Camus: This passage paraphrases sections of The Rebel, pp. 57-67. [Back to text]

[33.4] Nietzsche: From 6ET, p. 30. [Back to text]

[33.5] Connolly: The Unquiet Grave, p. 79. [Back to text]

[33.6] What should I do?: The draft of an article found among the Ven. Ñánavíra's effects:

The Foundation of Ethics

The ethical paradox -- What should I do? -- is beyond the province of the natural sciences; for the natural sciences, based as they are upon the principle of public knowledge, are inherently incapable of comprehending the idea of personal choice. What about the sciences of man -- history, anthropology, sociology -- can they help us? These certainly tell us how man has behaved in the past, and how in fact he now behaves. And when we ask them whether man ought to behave in the way he has and does, they are able to point to the manifest consequences in this world of man's various kinds of behaviour, and if we press them further to indicate which of these consequences are good and which bad, they can often tell us which have been most generally approved by man and which disapproved.

But if we ask them whether the majority of mankind has been right in approving what in fact it has approved and in disapproving what it has disapproved, they are silent. The answer of course is simply that if I, personally, approve what the majority of mankind has approved I shall say that the majority is right, but if I disapprove I shall say that it is wrong. But the scientific method eliminates the individual on principle, and for the humanist sciences man is essentially a collective or social phenomenon. For them, in consequence, I as an individual do not exist at all; at best I am conceded a part-share in the general consensus of opinion. The individual's view as an absolute ethical choice is systematically swallowed up in the view of mankind as a whole; and if the ethical question is raised at all, the sciences of man can only reply that the opinion of the majority represents the ultimate truth (a view that the defeated candidates in any election, who are themselves always in the majority, know to be false).

Furthermore, the only consequences of man's behaviour that these sciences are in a position to consider are the social consequences; what effects an individual's behaviour has upon himself or upon some other individual is not a comprehensible question. This means that a person seeking ethical enlightenment from the sciences of man is likely to conclude that only social values are moral values, and that a man can do as he pleases in private. It is hardly necessary to remark that with the growth of these sciences this view has already become extremely fashionable, and no great wonder: it puffs up the politician into an arbiter and legislator of morals -- a function hitherto restricted to Divine Personages or their Representatives -- and it allows the private citizen to enjoy his personal pleasures with a clear conscience. Eventually, we meet with political systems that have been raised to the status of religions. It is evident that the question of ethics, of the personal choice, does not come within the competence of the sciences either of nature or of man to answer.

It may happen, of course, that a man who clearly understands this may nevertheless decide that the service of man is the highest good. But if we press him to say why he has decided that concern with human society is the aim and purpose of his life, he will perhaps explain since he himself is a human being his personal happiness is bound up with human societies, and in promoting the welfare of mankind in general he is advancing his own welfare.

We may or may not agree with him, but that is not the point. The point is that, in the last analysis, a man chooses what he does choose in order to obtain happiness, whether it is the immediate satisfaction of an urgent desire or a remote future happiness bought perhaps with present acceptance of suffering. This means that the questions 'What is the purpose of existence?' and 'How is happiness to be obtained?' are synonymous; for they are both the ethical question, 'What should I do?' But there is happiness and happiness, and the intelligent man will prefer the permanent to the temporary.

The question, then, is 'How is permanent happiness, if such a thing exists, to be obtained?' This question in the West, with its Christian tradition, has always been associated with that of the existence of God, conceived as the ultimate source of all values, union with whom (or the admittance to whose presence) constitutes eternal happiness. The traditional Western Ethic is thus 'Obey the Laws of God'. But with the decline of Christianity before the triumphal progress of science God was pronounced dead and the question of the possibility of permanent happiness was thrown open. 'Has existence then any significance at all?...the question,' Nietzsche declared, 'that will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity.'
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