Aryan Buddhism

"It is necessary, however, that we should emphasize the Aryan-ness of the Buddhist doctrine for various reasons, In the first place, we must anticipate those who will put forward the argument of Asiatic exclusiveness, saying that Buddhism is remote from "our" traditions and "our" races. We have to remember that behind the various caprices of modern historical theories, and as a more profound and primordial reality, there stands the unity of blood and spirit of the white races who created the greatest civilizations both of the East and West, the Iranian and Hindu as well as the ancient Greek and Roman and the Germanic. Buddhism has the right to call itself Aryan both because it reflects in great measure the spirit of common origins and since it has preserved important parts of a heritage that, as we have already said, Western man has little by little forgotten, not only by reason of involved processes of intermarriage, but also since he himself to a far greater extent than the Eastern Aryans has come under foreign influences. particularly in the religious field. As we have pointed out, Buddhist asceticism, when certain supplementary elements have been removed, is truly classical" in its clarity, realism, precision, and firm and articulate structure, we may say it reflects the noblest style of the ancient Aryo-Mediterranean world.

Furthermore, it is not only a question of form. The ascesis proclaimed by Prince Siddhattha is suffused throughout with an intimate congeniality and with an accentuation of the intellectual and Olympian element that is the mark of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Roman Stoicism. Other points of contact are to be found where Christianity has been rectified by a transfusion of Aryan blood that had remained comparatively pure that is to say, in what we know as German mysticism: there is Meister Eckharts sermon on detachment, on Abgeschiedenheit, and his theory of the "noble mind," and we must not forget Tauter and Silesius, To insist here, as in every other field of thought, on the antithesis between East and West is pure dilettantism. The real contrast exists in the first place between concepts of a modern kind and those of a traditional kind, whether the latter are Fastern or Western; and secondly, between the real creations of the Aryan spirit and blood and those which, in East and West alike, have resulted from the admixture of non-Aryan influences. As Dahlke has justly said, "Among the principal ways of thought in ancient times, Buddhism can best claim to be of pure Aryan origin."

- The Doctrine of Awakening, Julius Evola.