The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Buddha

[ 1 ] There is a great deal of talk about Buddha and Buddhism in our time. This fact may be all the more interesting to those who observe the development of humanity, given that this awareness of the essence of Buddhism—or, perhaps better said, this longing to understand Buddhism—is not even that old within our Western intellectual life. We need only think of the most significant figure who, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had such a profound impact on our Western intellectual life and whose influence continues to resonate so powerfully to this day: Goethe. If we trace Goethe’s life, Goethe’s work, and Goethe’s knowledge, we see that in all of this, the Buddha and Buddhism do not yet play any role at all. And relatively soon, we see in a thinker who, in a certain sense, was even Goethe’s disciple—Schopenhauer—how the influence of Buddhism already shines powerfully through in his work. Then interest in this Eastern school of thought grows ever greater. And in our time, it is already inherent in many people to engage with what has actually flowed into human development through that which is associated with the name of the great Buddha.

[ 2 ] It must be said, however, that, strangely enough, most people today still associate Buddhism with another concept that—when viewed in its essence—should not, in fact, be linked to Buddhism in the way it often is: namely, the concept of repeated earthly lives, which has played a role time and again in these lectures. We can safely say that for most people who are interested in Buddhism today, this idea of repeated earthly lives—or, as we call it, the idea of reincarnation—is, in a certain sense, fundamentally associated with Buddhism. Now, on the other hand, it must be said—as grotesque as it sounds—that for those who delve deeper into these matters, this linking of Buddhism with the idea of repeated earthly lives seems almost as if one were to say: One could seek the best understanding of the works of art from antiquity among those who destroyed these very works of art at the dawn of the medieval world! This sounds grotesque, but it is nonetheless true. It soon becomes clear that this is the case when one considers that all the striving toward which Buddhism is directed is aimed at underestimating as much as possible these repeated earthly lives—which, to Buddhism, certainly appear to be a certainty—and at reducing their number as much as possible. Thus, liberation from rebirths—from repeated earthly lives—is what we must regard as the very core of the entire Buddhist philosophy. Liberation from repeated earthly lives, which Buddhism regards as an indisputable fact, is its essence.

[ 3 ] Even a—one might say—superficial examination of the history of our Western intellectual life could teach us how the idea of repeated earthly lives actually has nothing to do with an understanding of Buddhism, and vice versa. For within Western intellectual life, the idea of repeated earthly lives confronts us in such a magnificent way in a figure who certainly remained unaffected by Buddhist thought: namely, Lessing in his most mature treatise on “The Education of the Human Race”; which he concludes with his affirmation of repeated earthly lives. In the context of this idea, the meaningful words resound from Lessing’s treatise *The Education of the Human Race*: “Is not all eternity mine?” Thus, for Lessing, repeated earthly lives—in terms of the fruitfulness of earthly striving—become the testimony that tells us: We are not on earth in vain; we act within earthly life and look toward an ever-expanding earthly existence in which we can bring the fruits of past earthly lives to maturity. — Thus, it is precisely the prospect of a meaningful, fruitful future and the awareness that human life contains something which, in view of repeated earthly lives, can be said: “You continue to have an effect!”—this is what essentially matters to Lessing.

[ 4 ] What is essentially at the heart of Buddhism is telling ourselves: We must attain such knowledge, such wisdom, that can free us from what may appear before our mind’s eye as repeated earthly lives. Only then will we be able to calmly enter into what may be called “eternity”—if, in any one of these lives, we can free ourselves from the subsequent lives that are to follow.

[ 5 ] Now, it has always been my aim, in the course of these winter lectures, to show how the idea of repeated earthly lives is by no means drawn from any ancient traditions—not even Buddhist ones—for the sake of spiritual science, but rather how it must emerge from an unbiased observation and contemplation of life in the spiritual-scientific sense, particularly in our own time. Thus, it seems superficial to directly associate Buddhism with the idea of repeated earthly lives. Rather, if we wish to grasp the essence of Buddhism, we must direct our spiritual gaze toward something entirely different. Here I must once again recall the law of human evolution that we already encountered in our consideration of the great Zarathustra, and which has shown us that the human soul, with its entire constitution, has passed through various states in the course of evolutionary development; that the experiences reported to us by external history and external records are, in essence, merely a late phase in human development, and that, when we go back to prehistoric times, we can in fact perceive, from a spiritual scientific perspective, a state of the soul among pre-humans in which human consciousness was in a completely different condition. Let this be briefly repeated.

[ 6 ] The way we view things today in ordinary human life—perceiving them with our senses and combining these perceptions with our intellect, which is linked to the brain, to transform them into wisdom and our science—this essentially intellectual form of our consciousness has only evolved from another form of consciousness. This has already been pointed out, and it must be emphasized once again today. Pre-human beings possessed a different kind of consciousness: In the chaotic disorder of our dream life, we have a final remnant, a kind of heirloom—but an atavistic heirloom—of what once existed as, so to speak, a normal human state of soul: an ancient form of clairvoyance through which humanity, in a state lying between waking and sleeping, gazed into what lies hidden beyond the sensory world. While today our consciousness essentially alternates between waking and sleeping, and we seek an intelligent state of mind while awake, in ancient times people, amidst the ebbing and flowing images—which were not as meaningless as the images of dreams but could be clearly related to supersensory events and things— experienced a kind of state of consciousness from which our present-day intellectualistic state of consciousness has gradually developed. We can thus trace our origins back to a kind of clairvoyance possessed by pre-humanity and to a long-standing evolution of human consciousness. Through that ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance, pre-humanity was able to glimpse into the supersensible world, and from its connection with the supersensible it gained not only knowledge, but what one might call the innermost satisfaction of the soul in the spiritual world—bliss in the sense of connection with a spiritual world. For just as certain as it is today for human beings, in their sensory and intellectual consciousness, that their blood consists of substances that exist in the physical world outside them, indeed, that his entire organism is composed of these substances, so certain was it for the people of antiquity that, with regard to their spiritual and soul aspects, they had sprung forth from what they perceived as the spiritual world through their clairvoyant consciousness.

[ 7 ] It has also already been pointed out that certain phenomena in human history—which are also revealed to us through external facts—can only be understood if one assumes such a primordial state of human life on Earth. More and more—as has already been noted—even the natural sciences are coming to the conclusion in the primeval times of humanity, to no longer assume—as nineteenth-century materialist anthropology did—that such a primal state was universal in those times, as is found today among the most primitive peoples; rather, it is becoming increasingly clear that in the primal state of humanity, there were advanced theoretical conceptions of the spiritual world, only that these were expressed in symbolic form. What we find in myths and legends—if we truly penetrate them—we can only understand by tracing them back to a primordial wisdom of humanity that flowed into humankind in a completely different way than the intellectualist science of our time. Admittedly, there is still not much sympathy today for the view that what we find among primitive peoples is not the spiritual state of primordial humanity, but rather something in a state of decline that has fallen from an earlier height; there is not much sympathy for the view that all peoples originally possessed a high wisdom derived from clairvoyance; but the facts will compel humanity to accept, even hypothetically, what spiritual science has uncovered from its sources and what—as could be demonstrated in many other instances—is thoroughly corroborated by the natural sciences. Thus, what has just been described regarding a possible future course of human development from a scientific perspective will prove to be true.

[ 8 ] We thus look back on a kind of primordial wisdom, but also on a primordial feeling and sensibility of humanity, which we can characterize as a clairvoyant connection between human beings and the spiritual world. Now it is also easy to understand—as we were already able to point out in our discussion of Zoroastrianism—that during the transition from the ancient state of the soul, that is, from the clairvoyant state of the human soul, to the intellectual, unbiased perception of the external sensory world, two currents can arise. One of these currents is found, particularly throughout the course of historical development, among those peoples who had preserved the ancient memories and also the ancient feelings in such a way that they said: Humanity was once connected to the spiritual world in a clairvoyant state, and then descended into the sensory world. This spread to the soul’s overall sensibility in such a way that it was said: “We have stepped out into the world of appearances, but that is an illusion, it is Maya. Humanity could only know its true nature—and was connected to it—when it was in communion with the spiritual world.” — Thus, a certain melancholy over something lost and a certain detachment from what lies in the immediate sensory environment—and from what the human intellect can grasp—permeates the people and nations who had preserved such a sense of an ancient clairvoyant state. In contrast, we can characterize another current, which we can trace in particular in Zoroastrianism. It is found among the people and nations who said to themselves: We want to take on the new world, which, in essence, has only now been given to us. The people who committed themselves to this assault on the new world did not look back with melancholy at what they had lost, but felt more and more that they must connect with all the forces through which they can see beyond everything that surrounds us as the sensory world—and to which the spirit, through a truly profound contemplation, can also arrive in the realm of human knowledge. Such people felt the urge to connect with the world, not to look back, but to look forward, to be fighters, and to say to themselves: The same divine-spiritual essence is interwoven into the world that is now given to us as was that in which we were enveloped in times past. We must seek it in our surroundings; we must connect with the good elements of the spiritual and thereby promote the development of the world. — This is essentially the worldview that originated in the northern part of the Asian continent: north of that territory where people looked back with melancholy on what had been lost.

[ 9 ] Thus, a spiritual life arose on Indian soil that can be understood entirely in terms of a looking back to a former connection with the spiritual world. If we consider what arose in India—whether as Sankhya philosophy, Yoga philosophy, or the practice of Yoga—we can summarize it by saying: The Indian has always strived to rediscover the connection with those worlds from which he had emerged; he sought to shed what surrounded him in the material world. They sought to break free from their entanglement and connection with the external sensory world, and by shedding the sensory world, to reestablish the connection with the spiritual worlds from which humanity had descended. Yoga is reconnection with the spiritual world, stepping out of the sensory world, liberation from the sensory world. Only by accepting these premises as the fundamental mood of Indian spiritual life can one understand how, on Indian soil—a few centuries before the Christian impulse made its mark on Western life—the great, powerful impulse of the Buddha shines before our spiritual gaze like a final sunset glow of Indian spiritual life. One can understand the figure of the Buddha only against the backdrop we have just characterized in terms of its mood. Here we must say: If we assume such a fundamental mood, we can understand that on Indian soil a way of thinking and a mindset could arise that viewed the world as in decline, as descending from the spiritual world into sensory illusion, into Maya, into what is precisely the “great delusion” that Maya is. It is also understandable that, from the perceptions of the external world—in which human beings are so deeply interwoven—the idea arose for the Indian that this descent occurs, as it were, in stages, in repeating steps. Thus, in the Indian worldview, we are not dealing, so to speak, with a descent in a straight line, but rather with a descent from epoch to epoch. From this perspective, we come to understand the indeed profound spirit of a culture that we must nevertheless describe as a “twilight culture,” for it is in this way that we must characterize the idea of the Buddha, which stems from such a worldview.

[ 10 ] We can therefore say, for example: The Indian looked back to a time when humanity was connected to the spiritual world; then it sank down to a certain level, rose again, sank down again, was lifted up again, sank down again—but in such a way that each subsequent descent was always a further descent. Each ascent is something like an installment payment offered to humanity so that it does not have to absorb all at once what it has, in fact, entered into with this descent. Every time such an epoch of decline comes to an end, a figure known as a “Buddha” arises within the ancient Indian worldview. The last of the Buddhas is the one who was incarnated—that is, embodied—in the son of King Suddhodana: the Gotama Buddha. The Indian looks back on other Buddhas and says to himself: Since the time when humanity stood at the height of the spiritual world, a whole series of Buddhas have existed; since the last decline of the world, five Buddhas have appeared. — The Buddhas always signify that humanity should not sink into a decline into Maya, but that, time and again, a portion of the ancient wisdom should be brought forth from which it can draw sustenance; but because humanity is moving in a downward direction, this wisdom is lost time and again, and a new Buddha must then come to bring it such a renewal. The last one was none other than Gotama Buddha. Before such a Buddha—if we may speak in layman’s terms—ascends to Buddhahood through his various lifetimes, he must first attain another state of being: that of a Bodhisattva. The Indian worldview also regards the prince of Suddhodana, the Gotama Buddha, as a Bodhisattva rather than a Buddha until the age of twenty-nine. It is therefore this Bodhisattva, who was born into the royal house of Suddhodana, who, through the efforts of his life, ascended to that inner enlightenment which is symbolically depicted as “sitting under the Bodhi tree” and is then expressed in the “Sermon at Benares.” In his twenty-ninth year, through these events, this Bodhisattva ascended to Buddhahood and was now able, as the Buddha, to bring back to humanity a final remnant of the ancient wisdom, which—according to Indian belief—the coming centuries will be allowed to exhaust. When humanity has descended so low that the wisdom brought by this last Buddha has been exhausted, another Bodhisattva will ascend to Buddhahood—the Buddha of the future, the “Maitreya Buddha,” who, according to the Indian worldview, is expected to come in the future.

[ 11 ] Now let us consider what, so to speak, like an ancient wisdom, permeated the Buddha’s soul at the very moment he had just ascended from a Bodhisattva to a Buddha. From this, we can best understand what this ascension from a Bodhisattva—a state one attains through the efforts of many lifetimes—to a Buddha truly signifies.

[ 12 ] A legend tells us what was still going on in the mind of this Bodhisattva. Until the age of twenty-nine, he had seen only what he could see in the royal household of Suddhodana. There, he was shielded from everything we might call human misery—the kind that intrudes upon life and constantly undermines the fruitful course of life itself. And so the Bodhisattva grew up—albeit with his Bodhisattva consciousness, that is, a consciousness thoroughly imbued with the inner wisdom of his previous earthly lives—seeing only what was fruitful, the unfolding of life. Then he stepped out—the legend is well enough known, so we need only recall its essence—and beheld what he had never been able to behold in the royal palace: a corpse. He saw in the corpse that death takes the place of life: the element of death enters into what is fruitful, life-sustaining existence. He beheld a sick and ailing person: illness enters into health. And he beheld an old man staggering wearily along: old age enters into what rises to existence with the freshness of youth. We must be clear—as the Indian worldview presupposes in the spirit of Buddhism itself—that the one who became a Buddha from a bodhisattva saw all such experiences with his bodhisattva consciousness. He thus saw the destructive element of existence embedded within the process of wise becoming. This had such an effect on his great soul that he said to himself—so the legend tells—: “Suffering pervades life!” Now let us truly place ourselves in the position of one who, from within Buddhism, views these things for himself—in the position of this Bodhisattva Gotama, who, with great wisdom — of which he was not yet fully aware, but which was already stirring within him — had thus far in this life seen through the fruitful process of becoming and was now directing his gaze toward the destructive, the perishable element of existence. If we adopt such a perspective—the one the Buddha himself had to adopt given the circumstances of his existence—then we can imagine that this Buddha, with his great soul, must have said to himself: Yes, if we now attain wisdom and knowledge, and this knowledge leads us to becoming, then an idea of ever-continuing, fruitful becoming forces its way into our soul. Wisdom, then, gives rise to the idea of fruitful becoming. But then we look out into the world. There we see a destructive element: sickness, old age, and death. It cannot be wisdom or knowledge that would introduce old age, sickness, and death into life. It must be something else. So one can—as the great Gotama might have said, or rather felt, since he was not fully aware of his Bodhisattva consciousness—be imbued with wisdom, attain the idea of fruitful becoming from within that wisdom, but life shows us destruction, sickness, and death, and many other things that intrude destructively into life. — There is something to be recognized that the Bodhisattva cannot yet fully comprehend. The Bodhisattva has passed through life after life, has utilized rebirth after rebirth for his soul in such a way that the wisdom within him has grown ever greater, enabling him to view life from a higher vantage point. Yet, upon leaving the royal palace and now encountering real life, its very essence has not yet penetrated his consciousness. What we can gather within ourselves from life to life as knowledge, what we can accumulate within ourselves as wisdom, cannot ultimately lead us to an understanding of the true mysteries of existence. These must lie elsewhere; they must lie outside the life we live through from incarnation to incarnation.

[ 13 ] This idea took root in the soul of the great Gotama and led directly to the enlightenment known as the “Enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree.” There it became clear to him—we might put it this way—that we live in a world of māyā, or illusion. We live through life after life in this world of māyā, or illusion, into which we have stepped from a spiritual existence. In this life, we can ascend to higher and higher states of spiritual attainment. But through what this life gives us—no matter how many incarnations we go through and no matter how much wiser we become through this life—we cannot solve the great mystery of existence that stares us in the face in old age, sickness, and death. —It dawned on him that the teaching of suffering must be even greater for him than the wisdom of a bodhisattva. And his enlightenment now consisted in telling himself: Thus, what unfolds in the world of māyā, or illusion, is not true wisdom; it is so far from true wisdom that even after many lifetimes in this outer existence, we cannot gain an understanding of suffering or free ourselves from it. This external existence, then, has something else woven into it that is far removed from wisdom, from all knowledge. — Consequently, it was self-evident that, within an element devoid of wisdom, the Buddha sought that which pervades life with old age, sickness, and death. — It is not the wisdom of this world that can bring liberation in any way, but something else that cannot be gained from this world at all—something that can only be attained by completely withdrawing from the world of external existence, in which rebirth follows rebirth and incarnation follows incarnation. — Thus, from that moment on, the Buddha saw in the teaching on suffering the fundamental element that humanity needs for its further progress. Thus, he saw in an element devoid of wisdom—which he called the thirst for existence, the wisdomless thirst for existence—the cause of suffering entering the world. Wisdom on the one hand, and the unwise thirst for existence on the other—that was what led him once again to say to himself: Thus, only liberation from these rebirths, from these repeated earthly lives—which, even with the highest wisdom, cannot free us from suffering—can be the very thing that leads to salvation, to true human freedom. Therefore, he pondered the means that could lead human beings out of the world in which their reincarnations take place, and into that world—which we need only understand correctly, so that we do not end up with the grotesque, fantastical notions that are so often circulating about it—which Buddha called Nirvana.

[ 14 ] What kind of world is Nirvana, into which one is to enter after having progressed so far in life that the thirst for existence has been quenched, so that one no longer desires to be reborn? It is a world that can only be properly described by saying: In the Buddhist sense, the true world of salvation and bliss cannot be described by anything derived in any way from what we perceive in the sensory world, in the spatial world, in the world of physical existence all around us. Everything we perceive in the spatial world, in the physical world, can only offer us something that does not point toward liberation; therefore, we must not apply any of these attributes to the world in which a person seeks liberation. So let all those attributes, all those words that a person can conjure up when describing something in the environment, fall silent within you. None of this exists in the world of bliss. There is no way to form a conception of the world into which one enters after having overcome reincarnation. One can therefore describe it only with a negative term: It is everything that we do not perceive in the external world! Therefore, let us assign it only a negative designation; let us say of this world: The one for whom everything that binds him to this existence here has been erased will come to know what it will be like there when he enters this world, which here can be described only with a negative word—with Nirvana.

[ 15 ] Thus, for the Buddhist, this world is one that cannot be described by any of our words. Not a void, but an existence so full, so fulfilled, so filled with bliss that he has no words for it—and he certainly does not intend to use them to describe a void. With this, we have already grasped the very essence of Buddhism and its spirit. From that sermon in Benares, where the doctrine of suffering was first articulated, everything we know about Buddhism is permeated by the recognition of life’s suffering, the recognition of the nature of suffering, and that which leads to suffering: the thirst for existence. Therefore, there can be only one thing that leads humanity to progress: liberation from this existence in the cycle of rebirths. The next step is then to specify the means—that is, the path of knowledge—which leads beyond earthly wisdom and contains the means by which a person gradually becomes capable of entering Nirvana, or, in other words, learns to use earthly rebirths in such a way that they are ultimately overcome and one is liberated from them.

[ 16 ] Now that the fundamental idea of Buddhism has been outlined here in abstract terms, if we turn our attention to its very essence, we must say: This attitude presents a unique perspective on the overall picture of humanity. It isolates the human being; it inquires into the human being’s destiny and the purpose of existence, as the human being stands as a single personality, as a single individuality in the world. How could a worldview built upon the fundamental mood that has been discussed conceive of it any other way? A worldview that has emerged from this fundamental mood: Humanity has descended from spiritual heights and now finds itself in a world of illusion, from which the wisdom of a Buddha can occasionally liberate it for the sake of earthly existence, but which leads it—as in the case of the last Buddha—to seek liberation from earthly existence. How could the purpose of human existence, within such a mindset, be characterized other than as standing in isolation from one’s entire surroundings? After all, the underlying view of existence is such that it represents a decline and that the development of earthly life signifies a descent. Therefore, it is also very remarkable and telling how enlightenment is sought by the Buddha himself. Without this particular characterization of the Buddha’s enlightenment, neither the Buddha nor Buddhism can be understood.

[ 17 ] Buddha seeks enlightenment in complete isolation. He goes out into solitude. What he has acquired from life to life is to be overcome in a completely isolated existence, and the light that can enlighten him about the world and its misery is to burst forth from the power of his soul. There stands the Buddha, a solitary figure, waiting for the moment of enlightenment when he will be able to realize—relying entirely on himself—that the causes of humanity’s suffering lie in the individual’s urge toward rebirth, toward incarnation in this world; that the thirst for existence, as it lives within the individual, is the cause of the misery all around, for all the destruction that works its way into existence.

[ 18 ] One cannot understand this very peculiar form of Buddha-enlightenment and the Buddha’s teachings without contrasting them with what we encounter in Christianity. There, six hundred years after the appearance of the great Buddha, we find something entirely different. The human being’s relationship to the world and to the entire environment is also characterized therein. But how? If we were to characterize the Buddha-man once more, we could use an abstract expression and say: Through the Buddha’s teachings, the view of the world becomes ahistorical. This ahistorical nature is, in essence, what characterizes all Eastern thought. In this view, Eastern thought sees one Buddhist epoch follow another. History is not a descent from a higher to a lower level; rather, history is the striving upward toward the attainment of a specific goal and the possibility of uniting with the entire world, with the past, and with the future. That would be history. The Buddha-man, however, stands there isolated and alone, grounded solely in his own existence, and he seeks to find within that existence the powers that will lead him to liberation from the thirst for existence and thus from rebirths. Six centuries later, the Christian view of humanity’s overall development is different. If we now set aside the prejudices that are widespread throughout the world, we can characterize the Christian idea in the following way.

[ 19 ] Insofar as the Christian idea is based on the ideas of the Old Testament, it points us back to a pre-human era—just as the grand, powerful imagery of Genesis does—to that state in which human beings related to their spiritual worlds in a different way than they did later. But now we encounter the distinctive feature through which, within Christianity, human beings relate to the world in a completely different way than is the case in Buddhism. Here, the following idea can be described as Christian: Within me lives a wisdom through the state of soul that I now possess. Through the way in which I observe the sensory world and synthesize it with my intellect, a wisdom, a science, and a way of life live within me. But I can go back to a state of soul from pre-humanity, when souls were in a different condition. At that time, something occurred that cannot be described merely in the Buddhist sense as a descent of humanity from divine-spiritual heights into the sensory Maya or illusion, but must be described as something else entirely—namely, what is characterized by a grand image, albeit one that in our time is still often based on a lack of understanding: the Fall. Whatever one may think of the Fall, one thing must be acknowledged—and that is sufficient for today. In this Fall, human beings sense something that belongs to them, something that leads them to say to themselves: Just as I now stand here as a human being, forces are at work within me that did not arise in isolation within this human being standing before me, but that go back to a distant past and were involved there — were involved precisely in the fact that, at that time, humanity—to which I belong—did not merely descend, but descended in such a way that it entered into a different relationship with the world than it should have according to the conditions that had previously prevailed. In its descent, humanity has, as it were, through something that happened through its own fault—which can be described as preconscious guilt—descended from a height at which it stood to a certain depth. We are therefore not dealing merely with a simple descent, as in Buddhism, but with a changing sense of feeling in this descent, which—had only the previous conditions been at work—would not have turned out as it has now: for now it has come to pass that the state of human souls has succumbed to temptation.

[ 20 ] Thus, the one who looks from the surface of Christianity into its depths reflects on a state of the human soul that has, of course, been overcome in the course of history, but of which he says to himself: Because something happened in the past, this state of the soul—which, in its effect, lies within me as something subconscious—has become different from what it should have become. The Buddhist, however, views the world in this way: I have been cast out into the world from a connection with the divine-spiritual world. As I look upon it, this world offers me nothing but māyā, or illusion. — But this is how the Christian views the world: I have descended into this world. Had I descended in a way that corresponded solely to the previous conditions, I would be able to see through the sensory appearance everywhere, beyond the illusion into true being, and would be able to find what is right everywhere. But since I have descended in a manner different from what the previous conditions required, I have, through myself, made this world an illusion. — Why is this world an illusion? asks the Buddhist. He answers: It is because of the world! —“Why is this world an illusion?” asks the Christian. He answers: “It is because of me! I myself—my capacity for knowledge, my entire state of mind—have placed myself in the world in such a way that I now do not see what is original, that the consequences of my actions do not manifest in such a way that everything is fruitful or could easily come into being.” It is I myself who have covered the world with the veil of illusion. — Thus the Buddhist may say: The world is the great illusion; therefore, I must overcome the world! Thus the Christian may say: I am placed within the world and must find my purpose there.

[ 21 ] When a Christian realizes that spiritual science can lead him to an understanding of repeated earthly lives, he can tell himself that he must make use of them to achieve the goal of his life. He knows: We now look upon a world full of suffering and error because we have strayed so far from our original purpose that, through our gaze and our actions, we have transformed the world around us into Maya. But we do not need to remove ourselves from this world to attain bliss; rather, we must overcome what we have done to ourselves—and what causes us to see the world not in its true form but as an illusion—and return to our original human purpose. For at our core lies a higher human being. If this higher human being, who lies deeply hidden within us, were to look upon the world, he would perceive it in truth; he would not lead his existence through sickness and death, but through health, the freshness of youth, and eternal life. This is the human being whom we have veiled within ourselves by being connected to an event in the world’s development that continues to resonate within us and testifies that we do not stand alone, that we are not brought into the world by the individual’s thirst for existence, but that we rest within all of humanity and share in a primal guilt of all of humanity.

[ 22 ] Thus, historically speaking, the Christian stands within all of humanity and feels connected to it—historically connected to all of humanity. He looks toward a future of which he says to himself: What has been veiled within me by humanity’s descent, that I must reclaim. I must not seek Nirvana, but rather the higher human being within myself. I must find my way back to myself. Then the world around me will not be an illusion, but will be the world in which I will be able, through my own efforts, to overcome suffering, illness, and death. — Thus, the Buddhist seeks liberation from the world and from rebirths by combating the “thirst for existence”; thus, the Christian seeks liberation from the lower self and the awakening of the higher self, which he himself has veiled, in order to see the world in its truth. And there is something that stands in the same relationship as black to white, which we find in the wisdom of the Buddha when we compare it with Paul’s meaningful words: “Not I—but Christ in me!” Here we see the very consciousness that works within us, and with it we step out into the world as human individuals. The Buddhist says: Human beings have descended from spiritual worlds because the world has forced them down. The world that has instilled in them the thirst for existence must therefore be overcome; they must move beyond this world. — The Christian, however, says: No, it is not the world’s fault that I am this way; it is my own fault! — Thus, as Christians, we enter the world with our ordinary consciousness. Within this consciousness, something continues to work in our personality, in our individuality, that previously existed as a clairvoyant, pictorial consciousness. We have erred within this consciousness, which is no longer our own. But if we wish to attain the goal of our existence, we must make amends for this error. Just as a person, when in later life, must never say to himself: “I sinned in my youth, but it is not right for me to atone now for what I did in my youth, when I did not yet possess the consciousness I have now”—so, too, a person must not say now: “It would be unjust for me to make amends with my present consciousness for what I did in a different state of consciousness—one that I no longer possess, but which has been replaced by intellectualistic consciousness.” — But a person can make amends only if the will arises within them to ascend from their present state of consciousness—with the “I” in which they now live—to a higher “I,” which can be characterized by the Pauline phrase: “Not I—but Christ in me”—rather, a higher consciousness within me! — “I have descended,” the Christian must say, “to states other than those that were previously given. Now I must ascend again. But I must ascend not through the ‘I’ that I now possess, but through a power that can take hold within me and lead me beyond the ordinary ‘I.’” This can only happen when it is not I, but Christ within me who acts and leads me back to the place where I see the world not as maya or illusion, but in its true reality—where the forces through which sickness and death have entered the world can be overcome by what Christ accomplishes within me.

[ 23 ] One best understands the very essence of Buddhism when one compares it with the very essence of Christianity. For then one sees how it is possible that Lessing, in his *The Education of the Human Race*, could write: “Is not all eternity mine?” — that is to say: If I use my successive incarnations to allow the Christ-force to live more and more within me, then I will reach what I cannot reach now, because I have shrouded myself in a veil: the sphere of eternities. — The idea of reincarnation will yet reveal itself in a wholly different splendor in the sun of Christianity. But it is not only the idea of reincarnation that matters—for it will be increasingly embraced by Christian culture as a spiritual-scientific truth as we move into the future—but what matters is that Buddhism, from its innermost conviction, must hold the world responsible for Maya, or illusion, whereas the Christian holds himself as a human being responsible and locates within the innermost being of the human being those processes that lead to an ascent to what may be called salvation—which, in the Christian sense, is not merely salvation but resurrection, because through it the “I” is raised to a higher “I”: to that from which the human being has descended.

[ 24 ] Thus, when the Buddhist looks at the world, he is confronted with the world’s original sin and feels merely placed within this world; he wishes to be redeemed from it. Similarly, the Christian is confronted with his original sin and wishes to atone for it. This is a historical way of thinking. For here, human beings link their existence to a primordial act of pre-humanity in the past and to a future act, when humanity will have progressed so far that its entire existence will be permeated and illuminated by what we call the Christ-Being. This is also why Christianity does not place successive Buddhas within the course of world history—who, so to speak, ahistorically repeat more or less the same thing from epoch to epoch—but rather places a singular event within the entire course of human development. While the Buddhist sees his Buddha sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, ascending to enlightenment as an isolated individual, the Christian looks to Jesus of Nazareth as one who descends from the outer realm of the world—that which is the inspiring world spirit. This is depicted just as vividly for us in the image of John’s baptism in the Jordan as in the Buddha’s enlightenment while sitting beneath the Bodhi tree. Thus we see the Buddha sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, his own soul yearning to break free from the cycle of rebirths—and thus we see Jesus of Nazareth standing in the Jordan: the very essence of the world descends upon him, symbolically represented by the image of the dove as the Spirit that descends into his inner being. This is how the follower of Buddhism feels: Something emanates to me from the Buddha’s deed that tells me: Quench the thirst for existence, uproot earthly existence, and follow the Buddha to where the worlds lie that cannot be described by any earthly concept. — This is how the Christian feels: Something emanates from the deed of Christ through which the deed lying in pre-humanity can be corrected. And when the spiritual influence of the world that lies beyond the physical world comes to life in my soul just as it did in Christ himself, then I will carry into my subsequent incarnations that which increasingly makes the Pauline words—“Not I—but Christ in me!”—a reality for me, which will lift me ever higher to the level from which I descended. — That is why it is so moving when it is recounted that the Buddha said to his innermost disciples: “I look back on my past lives as if upon an open book; I can read page by page, I can survey life after life that I have lived, and in each of these lives I have built a physical body in which my spirit dwelt as in a temple. But now I know that this body, in which I have become the Buddha, is the last.” And he pointed to the Nirvana into which he was to enter, and said: “I can already feel the beams cracking, the pillars collapsing, the physical body being constructed for the last time and now being completely destroyed.”

[ 25 ] Let us now compare such a statement with another found in the Gospel of John, where Christ also points out that he dwells in an outward body, and let us hear what Christ says there: “Tear down this temple—and on the third day I will raise it up again!” A completely opposite perspective! This means: I want to do something that can make fruitful and bring to life all that flows down from God out of pre-humanity, all that flows into the world and into us. — In these words we see an indication that the Christian must live through all these forces in the ever-recurring earthly lives that make the saying true: “Not I—but the Christ in me!” We must only be clear that the Christ spoke in such a way that the rebuilding of this temple has, so to speak, an eternal significance, that it signifies the inflow of the Christ-force into all those who feel themselves to be so placed within the overall development of humanity. We must not speak of this event—which we call the Christ Impulse—as though it could in any way be repeated in the course of human evolution. The Buddhist, when thinking in the true sense, conceives of a succession of Buddhas, a repetition of earthly epochs that, in their earthly course, essentially have a similar meaning. The Christian points to a unique event characterized by the Fall, and must therefore also point to a unique event: the Mystery of Golgotha, which is the reversal of that first event. Anyone who—as has often happened in human history and threatens to happen again now—wishes to suggest a repetition of the Christ event would thereby only demonstrate that they have not grasped the very essence of a historical understanding of human development. If history is to be genuine, it must unfold in such a way that it is directed from a single point. Just as a scale must have a point of equilibrium and just as the beam on which the two pans hang must have a point of support, so too must there be a singular event in a historical conception of human development, such that historical development points backward and forward toward that singular event. Anyone who were to speak of a repetition of the Christ event would be saying something just as absurd as if someone were to claim that a balance beam could be supported at two points. The fact that Eastern wisdom speaks of a succession of similar individualities that follow one another—as is the case with a number of Buddhas—highlights the difference between the Eastern worldview and what humanity has achieved in the course of its development, which first emerged in the West with the Christ impulse, which is unique. Anyone who were to dispute the uniqueness and singularity of the Christ event would thereby also dispute the possibility of true history in human development; that is to say, such a person understands nothing of true history.

[ 26 ] What we might call the awareness that each individual human being is part of the whole of humanity—that a meaning runs through human development from beginning to end, that it is not merely a repetition of the same—is, in its deepest sense, also Christian consciousness. This is part of Christianity and cannot be separated from it. It is the true progress that humanity has made in the course of its development: that it has advanced from the old worldview of the East to the new worldview, from ahistory to history, — the progress from the belief that the wheels of world events simply roll on in the same way, one after another, to the other belief, which sees in the entire development of humanity something imbued with meaning.

[ 27 ] It is through Christianity, then, that the doctrine of repeated earthly lives first acquires its true meaning. For now we say to ourselves: Human beings live their repeated earthly lives because the meaning of earthly existence is to be instilled in them repeatedly, and because with each earthly life a new meaning of earthly existence comes to them. There is a striving not only within the isolated, individual human being, but there is also meaning in all of humanity, with which we feel connected. And the Christ impulse at the center shows that, in relation to the spiritual sun, human beings can become aware of this connection—that they do not merely become aware of a profession of faith in a Buddha who tells them: “Save yourself!” but becomes aware of the connection with a Christ who has performed the deed that corrects what is symbolically represented as the Fall in relation to humanity’s descent. We cannot better characterize Buddhism than by showing how it is the twilight of a worldview that has begun to decline, and that a final great, mighty flash of this worldview occurred with the Gotama Buddha. We therefore revere him no less. We revere him as the great Spirit who once again calls into earthly existence the mood that so truly brings humanity the awareness of its connection to primordial wisdom—a wisdom that points with its voice to the past. We know, however, that the Christ impulse points powerfully toward the future; it is meant to take root more and more deeply in human souls so that they may understand: Not salvation—but resurrection, the transfiguration of earthly existence—that is what gives earthly existence its true meaning.

[ 28 ] One need not seek what is active in human life solely in dogmas, concepts, and ideas; there may well be some for whom Buddhism is more appealing than Christianity could ever be. Rather, one must seek the essential in the impulses, sensations, and feelings that give meaning to human development. And here we can say: There is something in our time that can inspire sympathy for Buddhism in a great many people. It is, in a sense, something akin to a “Buddha mood” among a large number of people today. Goethe did not yet possess this “Buddha mood.” Goethe, with his love of existence and his conviction that the spirit from which the human spirit originates is interwoven with external existence, sought deliverance from the torments of narrowness—which, for example, enveloped him during his first stay in Weimar—by contemplating the external world, moving from plant to plant, from mineral to mineral, from work of art to work of art, and by seeking, behind the plant, behind the mineral, behind the work of art, the spirit from which the human spirit originates. He sought to become one with that which reveals itself as the spirit in all things. And Schopenhauer, his student, about whom Goethe himself said—referring to what Schopenhauer learned from Goethe: “/p”

Your well-considered thoughts, flowing through foreign veins,
Will immediately clash with your own self

[ 29 ] This Schopenhauer, who made his own coined phrase his motto: “Life is a troublesome affair; and I have resolved to make the most of mine.” — Then such resignation leads to the stage where a person becomes capable of bringing forth the higher human being, the Christ-like human being, from within oneself. Then one resigns oneself because one knows that one has not yet reached the highest stage of humanity. That is heroic resignation! It is compatible with human consciousness, for it says: We move from life to life with a sense of existence, and as we live toward the future, we know that in the repetition of earthly existence, all of eternity is ours.

[ 30 ] Thus, throughout the course of human development, two currents of worldview stand before us. One is the Schopenhauerian view, which says: Alas, this world with all its suffering is such that we can only sense the true place of humanity when we look at the works of the great painters, who depict a figure that, through its asceticism, has attained something like liberation from earthly existence—a figure that already hovers above earthly existence. Essentially—Schopenhauer argues—the highest expression of such a human being, liberated from the earth through asceticism, is revealed in the way they look back upon earthly existence and say: “Now I have only my physical shell left, which has become meaningless to me.” I strive upward and anticipate that existence which will touch me once the earth has been overcome, once I have overcome all that is bound up with earthly existence. Therein lies the great liberation. And I will no longer have anything within me that could remind me in the future of my earthly existence.” So said Schopenhauer, after he had been imbued with the spirit that Buddhism brought into the world. Goethe, acting on a genuine Christian impulse, views the world in the same way he has his Faust view the world. Even if we do not find comfort in what is outwardly trivial. People withdraw—at least in their consciousness—from the world of facts, in which there is so much to process, and seek only to reach a higher level within themselves through the development of their soul. Thus, an unconscious Buddhism has existed for a long time. It is at work in the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When such an unconscious Buddhist then becomes acquainted with Buddhism, he feels, out of convenience, more closely connected to Buddhism than to European spiritual science, which wrestles with the facts because it knows that the spirit manifests itself across the entire scope of those facts.

[ 31 ] That is why one can say: It is precisely this unbelief and paralysis of the will—which stem from a weakness of spiritual insight—that arouse sympathy for Buddhism. The Christian worldview, on the other hand, demands in its very essence—as its fundamental spirit lived on in Goethe—that human beings not surrender to their individual limitations of understanding and speak of the limits of knowledge, but rather that they say: There is something within me that can rise above all illusion and attain truth and liberation in life. — Such a worldview may indeed require a great deal of resignation, but this is a different kind of resignation than that which shrinks back from the limits of knowledge. If one resigns oneself in the Kantian sense, one says: Human beings are fundamentally incapable of penetrating the depths of the world. In this case, one resigns oneself on principle by acknowledging one’s limitations in knowledge. But one can also resign oneself in the spirit of Goethe, telling oneself: You are simply not yet at the stage where you can perceive the world in its truth; but you are capable of development. — Then such resignation leads to the stage where a person becomes capable of bringing forth the higher human being, the Christ-human, from within themselves. Then one resigns oneself because one knows that one has not yet reached the highest human level. That is heroic resignation! It is compatible with human consciousness, for it says: We go from life to life with a sense of existence, and as we live toward the future, we know that in the repetition of earthly existence, all of eternity is ours.

[ 32 ] Thus, throughout the entire course of human development, two currents of worldview stand before us. One is the Schopenhauerian view, which says: Alas, this world with all its suffering is such that we can only sense the true place of humanity when we look at the works of the great painters, who depict a figure that, through its asceticism, has attained something like liberation from earthly existence—a figure that already hovers above earthly existence. Essentially—Schopenhauer argues—the highest expression of such a human being, liberated from the earth through asceticism, is evident in the way they look back upon earthly existence and say: “Now I have only my physical shell left, which has become meaningless to me.” I strive upward and anticipate that existence which will touch me once the earth has been overcome, once I have overcome all that is bound up with earthly existence. Therein lies the great liberation. And I will have nothing left within me that could remind me in the future of my earthly existence. So said Schopenhauer, after he had been imbued with the spirit that Buddhism brought into the world. Goethe, acting out of a genuine Christian impulse, views the world just as he has his Faust view the world. Even if we do not look at it in the outwardly trivial sense, even if we know that all our earthly works will decay with the earth and perish with the earthly body, we can still say, in Goethe’s spirit: We look upon everything we go through on earth, and as we go through it, we learn. For even if what we build here on earth perishes—what we achieve does not perish, as we go through the school of earthly existence in our earthly building. — And so, with Faust, we look not merely at the permanence of our earthly works, but at the fruits of our earthly works in the eternity of our own souls, and we say—in a truly Goethean way—summarizing in words that which must lead beyond Buddhism:

The traces of my days on Earth
Shall not be lost in the ages!