The Doctrine Of Awakening * Julius Evola (1943/1996)

I ran into a free ebook version of this book in the webstore of my ereader’s manufacturer. The version that I have is a pretty badly converted PDF to ebook with notes in the middle of the text (below the pages in the PDF no doubt) and badly converted text with replaced characters (“dtmd” for “atma” for example) and messed-up formatting. Oh well, it is free…

Evola speaks about “the ‘Doctrine of Awakening,” that is to say, Buddhism” (p. 18). He bases himself on the oldest texts which are Pali:

The term Buddhism is derived from the Pali designation Buddha (Sanskrit: Buddha) given to its founder; it is, however, not so much a name as a title. Buddha, from the root budh, “to awaken,” means the “Awakened One”: it is thus a designation applied to one who attains the spiritual realization, likened to an “arousing” or to an “awakening,” which Prince Siddhattha announced to the Indo-Aryan world. Buddhism, in its original form-the so-called Pali Buddhism-shows us, as do very few other doctrines, the characteristics we want: (1) it contains a complete ascetic system; (2) it is universally valid and it is realistic; (3) it is purely Aryan in spirit; (4) it is accessible in the general conditions of the historical cycle to which present-day humankind also belongs. (p. 17)

In this way Evola argues that Buddhism is originally a warrior religion:

Only in certain Western misconceptions is Buddhism —considered in later and corrupted forms- presented as a doctrine of universal compassion encouraging humanitarianism and democratic equality. (p. 48)

Fortunately “The Doctrine Of Awaking” does not get any more ‘political’ than this. Actually, it is something of a spiritual handbook with many quotes, references, thoughts of the author and information about Buddhism in its different forms. Especially the closing part about Zen Buddhism is very nice. Actually I found the book more enjoyable than I expected and especially because I ran into it quite by accident, this was a nice surprise.
1943 /1996 Inner Traditions, isbn 0892815531