Nietzsche's Hinduism, Nietzsche's India: Another Look

David Smith

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 28, Autumn 2004, pp. 37-56 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nie.2004.0015

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v028/28.1smith.html

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Nietzsches Hinduism, Nietzsches India: Another Look David Smith

his essay attempts a provocative overview of Nietzsches relationship with Hinduism and India.1 It is a reading that nds Nietzsche off balance and at a disadvantage, for its starting point is the fact that Nietzsche read the Laws of Manu [Manavadharmasastra]2the one Indian text that really excited him in a popular edition whose absurd annotation of the text gained Nietzsches credence. I refer to Louis Jacolliots French translation.3 Manu was a relatively well-known text in nineteenth-century Europe and Jacolliot was a popular and indeed notorious writer. Nietzsches choice of version shows, I suggest, ignorance of both scholarly and popular writing on India. I shall also consider Nietzsches relationship with other key Hindu texts and his other references to Hinduism and India. In line with the starting point of Jacolliot, my discussion continues mainly in the context of French writers contemporary with Nietzsche, particularly Ernest Renan, the hugely successful author of Vie de Jsus and Professor of Semitic Languages at the Collge de France, in some respects a triumphant alter ego of Nietzsche, being both philologist and wide-ranging thinker, though today their relative importance is reversed. I conclude with brief assessments of the eternal return and the bermensch in relation to Hinduism, and with a look at Nietzsches own India, as distinct from his Hinduism.

Nietzsche, Jacolliot, and Manu

In Nietzsches day there was considerable academic and popular interest in India and the religion of the majority of its inhabitants. Louis Jacolliot was not only a translator of Manu but also was a major popularizer of Hinduism and India. After the rst ush of Enlightenment and then Romantic enthusiasm, European writing on India had become unfavorable to Hindus and Hinduism. Jacolliots extreme enthusiasm for early Hinduism and with what seemed to be long and wide experience of contemporary India was a more or less unique combination, and for a while a winning one. In his heyday, the 1870s, Jacolliots Hinduism and Jacolliots India were signicant factors on the popular literary and cultural scenenot only in France but also in Britain, the United States, and India, notwithstanding that they were the product of the imagination of a silly man. It
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 28, 2004 Copyright 2004 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

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is bizarre to juxtapose Nietzsche with Jacolliot, the now immensely famous intellect with the forgotten fraud, but the juxtaposition arises from Nietzsches acquisition and reading of Jacolliots book. In Jacolliots favor is the fact that he did know something about India, whereas Nietzsche is primarily an expert on himself, and the world as seen in the mirror of himself, his work a bible for the solitary man.4 Jacolliots India of occultism and dancing girls is the real thing misunderstood and embroidered by his imagination; Nietzsches India is based on Nietzsche. Marcel Conche said, Nietzsche and Buddhism, which means: Nietzsche and Buddhism as he wishes to see it5so too Nietzsche and Hinduism. Both Hinduism and Buddhism are of interest to Nietzsche not in themselves but as alternative positions from which to continue his attack on Christianity. Nietzsche declares that the critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to the students of India for making Buddhism available as a religion to compare with Christianity.6 It may fairly be assumed that Nietzsche felt a similar gratitude in respect of the availability of Hinduism. Buddhism, as a pessimistic and decadent religion for Nietzsche, resembles Christianity but is a hundred times [. . .] more truthful, more objective (A 23). Hinduism is an afrmative religion rather than a negative one like Buddhism and Christianity, but, like Buddhism, it is a product of the ruling orders (KSA 13:14[195]/WP 154).7 Nietzsche seldom referred to Hinduism; nor did he use the word Hinduism, speaking rather of Brahmanism, the Vedanta, or Indian philosophy. However, the only extensive Indian text that he chose unprompted to read for himself was a central text of Hinduism not relating to philosophy, namely, Louis Jacolliots version of the Laws of Manu. A valuable account of the defects of Jacolliots book has been given by Ann-Marie Etter. However, the question needs to be considered more widely. That Nietzsche read Jacolliots Manu with enthusiasm is astonishing, but no less remarkable are the implications for the state of his previous knowledge of Hinduism and India. Misunderstanding has been aggravated by the fact that Louis Jacolliot, still a well-known gure at the time of his death in 1890, quickly faded away into deserved oblivion. For long it was thought simply that Nietzsche read the Laws of Manu in translation and was excited by them. Thus even Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith in the 1991 Penguin translation of the Laws of Manu, when mentioning what they admit is his extraordinary interpretation of the text, remark in a footnote that presumably, Nietzsche knew Httners 1797 German translation.8 However, it has been known from the publication of the Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsche that Nietzsche uses Jacolliots Manu. It is one of the books he possessed, and it shows marks of attentive reading. He refers to Jacolliot by name in one of his notebooks, and sometimes gives page numbers with the extracts that he translates into German. No other Indian text excited Nietzsche in this way. There is no record of his having read through any other

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Indian text entirely on his own initiative. He looked at books about Hinduism and Buddhism, but as Renan said, for a philologist there is nothing more important than reading original texts.9 Of course, with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had left philology behind him; but he still lays claim to a philologists style of reading, as in Daybreak: slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations (D P5).10 But this is the way he wants to be read, not the way that he reads other people. The way that Nietzsche writes to Heinrich Kselitz (Peter Gast) about his discovery of Manu (31 May 1888) calls for the careful reading Nietzsche would want for his published work:
I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson: I found Manus book of laws in a French translation done in India under strict supervision from the most eminent priests and scholars there. This absolutely Aryan work, a priestly codex of morality based on the Vedas, on the idea of caste and very ancient (uralten) traditionnot pessimistic, albeit very sacerdotalsupplements my views on religion in the most remarkable way. I confess to having the impression that everything else that we have by way of moral lawgiving seems to me an imitation and even a caricature of itpreeminently, Egypticism does; but even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin. It makes the Jews look like a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organices a people. The Chinese also seem to have produced their Confucius and Lao-Tse under the inuence of this ancient classic of laws. The medieval organization looks like a wondrous groping for a restoration of all the ideas which formed the basis of primordial (uralte) Indian-Aryan societybut with pessimistic values which have their origin in the soil of racial dcadence. Here too, the Jews seem to be merely transmittersthey invent nothing.11

It is not entirely clear from Nietzsches phrasing here whether or not he had previously heard of Manu. As we shall see, he certainly had; but the contents of Manus book seem new to him. He is not simply explaining to Gast what he thought Gast might not have known, since he begins his account of the Laws of Manu, I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson [Belehrung]. He must mean here either the contents of Manus law book were new to him, or Jacolliots interpretation was new to him. Either reading is devastating to any claim to merit in Nietzsches understanding of Hinduism. Nietzsche in this letter clearly takes on board Jacolliots absurd claim that Manu is the ultimate source of all law codes, and even more absurdly, with no relation whatsoever to the Indian text, that the Semitic peoples were in origin Hindu outcastes (chandalas). Nietzsche participates in Jacolliots project by adding China to the list of countries whose laws go back to Manu. What was Nietzsche doing learning a lesson from Manu in 1888? Today, even a cursory reading of Schwabs Renaissance Orientale shows how widely Manu was known and discussed in Europe from 1794, the date of Sir William Joness translationa work that won him a statue in St. Pauls Cathedral in London, his

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hand resting on the great tome of Manuright up to the end of the nineteenth century.12 It would be fair to say that no single text is more important for understanding Hinduism than the Laws of Manu; and of Indian texts probably only Kalidasas play Sakuntala was more widely read in nineteenth-century Europe. Max Mller had declared decades earlier that, Instead of the Veda, the Brahmans of the present day read the Laws of Manu.13 No less than four other European translations were available at the time Nietzsche read Jacolliot.14 Nietzsches varied reading about Hinduism and Buddhism would have made at least the name of Manu and his law book familiar. In 1865 a student at Bonn, Nietzsches notes on Schaarschmidts lecture course on the general history of philosophy include a reference to the Laws of Manu.15 Koeppen in his book on the religion of the Buddha gives detailed references to Manu, and discusses Manus treatment of chandalas;16 Nietzsche borrowed Koeppen from the university library in Basel in 1870. Thomas Brobjer notes that Nietzsche added a reference to Manu to the index of Oldenbergs Buddha, and suggests that this was done at the time Nietzsche was reading Jacolliot.17 However, if Nietzsche was hoping to nd out more about Manu from Oldenberg, he looked in vain. Unlike Koeppen, Oldenberg has almost nothing to say about the Laws of Manu or indeed about caste. But almost every book on Indian religion mentioned Manu. In the words of Monier-Williams, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, Manu was certainly one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever produced.18 The signicance of Manu went beyond specialized Indological treatises. It is difcult to remember today how fresh and exciting Sanskrit texts were in nineteenth-century Europe. Schopenhauer, who quotes Manu twice in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, refers to it as the oldest of all the codes of law.19 Schopenhauers enthusiasm was widely shared. To take only major gures in contemporary French writing, the following instances may be noted. Renan, like Nietzsche, a philologist by trainingthough he never abandoned philologyrefers to Manu: four times, for example, in his LAvenir de la science.20 Another up-to-date and forward-looking writer like Guyau (185488) in his LIrrligion de lavenir, a book in Nietzsches library, refers to Manu.21 Even Victor Hugos novel Notre-dame de Paris (1831) set in the Middle Ages refers to the Laws of Manu. For those who had eyes to see, who did not refuse to see India, Manu was everywhere.

Jacolliots India
In 1985 Ann-Marie Etter took a careful look at Jacolliots translation and showed how it departs from the received text of Manu.22 The text Jacolliot was working from is not now available; he claimed that it was based on the ancient version of Manu, preserved, as he thought, in southern India. According to

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Jacolliots reading of his version of Manu, the ancient Near East was populated by outcastes who had freed themselves from Brahmin domination by emigrating from India. (Hence Nietzsches view in his letter to Peter Gast that the Jews were a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organizes a people.)23 Etter briey discussed Jacolliots life, quoting the Grande Encyclopdie (Paris, 18851902) to the effect that he was a judge in the French colonies, in Pondichery, Chandernagore, and later Tahiti and that in his long stay in India [he] collected a quantity of materials which enabled him to publish some very interesting works, but in them romanticism often predominates over scientic truth, so that he must be considered as a very brilliant vulgarizer rather than a scholar or historian. Etter refers to two other of Jacolliots books, Le Spiritisme dans le Monde and Chrishna et Christna, and correctly dismisses him as an India-fanatic who thought that everything in human culture and spirituality had its origin in India. However, she is misled by Jacolliots own claims when she concedes that he must have known India well, that he must have been an Indienkenner.24 Caracosteas valuable archival research published just a year ago has established that Jacolliot was in India for only twenty-seven months,25 a far cry from the twenty years residence recently credited to him by one French Indologist.26 Moreover, by only mentioning two other books by Jacolliot, Etter gives a very inadequate impression of his place in the literary scene. Jacolliot was even less authentic than she supposed and at the same time was far more prominent. His publications were numerous, including many books of travel writing and several novels. His translation of Manu was one of his series of tudes Indianistes, comprising some thirteen volumes, republished as a handsomely bound complete set, which came to sit on the theosophist Madame Blavatskys bookshelf. Apart from portions of translations from modern Tamil plays, and passages taken from Max Mller, his tudes Indianistes are worthless; however, they sold well. No less than ten of his travel books describe his experiences in India and Sri Lanka and several went into multiple editions. He was eagerly read by occultistsas the New Age enthusiasts of the day were calledand also by the general public. He might be characterized today as a combination of Dalrymple and Van Daniken, with an added element of sexual titillation. Performances by dancing girls and hints of sexual encounters are a constant backdrop to the travel books. There must be some truth underlying the accounts of his experiences, but ten books about the very limited period of his stay in the region, with at least some of his time taken up by ofcial duties as magistrate, must mean that a considerable part was played by imagination. The only novel Jacolliot wrote about India, Le Coureur des Jungles, appeared the same year that Nietzsche discovered his Manu, 1888.27 When it is said of the French hero, the Jungle Hunter, What was the date of his arrival in the land of the lotus? No one knows,28 one cannot but be reminded of the mysterious

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and concealed length of Jacolliots stay in India. The novel is set in 185758, after the British had brutally put down what they called the Mutiny. The Jungle Hunter and his friends, commissioned by the old Emperor in Delhi. . . had made war together again the English.29 For ten years he had traversed the length and breadth of India, revolted by the rapacity of the British, and then managed to form, with Nana-Sahib, the vast conspiracy that resulted in the war against the invading British. One of the closing highlights of the novel has the Jungle Hunter, disguised as a fakir, hypnotize Sir John Lawrence, placing on the head of the Viceroy his two hands charged with magnetic uid; with his eyes equally pouring forth mysterious efuvia against which the Viceroy strained vainly to struggle. The viceroy is made to believe himself an outcaste (pariah, or chandala) and then to walk like a dog. The Hunter loses self-control for a moment, such is the expenditure of magnetic uid that he has made to control the other man. There was a sort of counter shock. It is not rare in India to see fakirs gradually exalt themselves to madness when they struggle against a subject with a uidic force superior to their own.30 The novel ends with the Hunter sailing off with Nana Sahib for an unknown destination. Mysterious powers feature in one of the two other books of Jacolliot referred to by Etter, Le Spiritisme dans le Monde.31 This work falls into two parts. In the rst, larger part, he gives an account of life-stages and of various types of yogi and renouncer, with passing references to an earlier technologically advanced civilization. The second part, often cited by occultists, is the account of his exeriences with a Hindu magician. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was very much impressed by this part of the book. Jacolliot, Doyle reports, found among the native fakirs every phenomenon of advanced European mediumship levitation of the body, the handling of re, movement of articles at a distance, rapid growth of plants, raising of tables. Their explanation of these phenomena was that they were done by the Pitris or spirits, and their only difference in procedure from ours seemed to be that they made more use of direct evocation. They claimed that these powers were handed down from time immemorial and traced back to the Chaldees.32 There is evidence that on his return in Paris in 1872, if not before, Jacolliot was a spiritualist and went in for table-turning.33 Nietzsche himself once went to a spiritualist sance. Beforehand he writes to Kselitz (2 October 1882), This evening, a sensational manifestation of spiritualism at Leipzig, at the command of the spirits. They afrm that this sance will be very important for the history of spiritualism: that a personality will be invokedin short, I must be present at it, and six people await agitatedly what I will say about it. But the best medium is in an advanced state of pregnancy. The spirits will make their apparition today, for instance the Russian nun and the child. Two doctors will be present. The next day, he writes that spiritualism is a pitiful deception and, after the rst half-hour, boring. And this Prof. Zllner has let himself be cheated by this medium! Not a word more about it! I was expecting something else, and I had in advance provided myself with three

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ne theories, physiologico-psychologico-moral, but I didnt have to use my theories at all.34 Nietzsches reading in psychology and physiology bore no relation to Jacolliots murky world. Etter does not mention Jacolliots most famous and most signicant book, La Bible dans lInde.35 La Bible sets the pattern for the rest of Jacolliots Indianist studies. We nd an advocate pleading his cause in short high-pitched paragraphs, harangue that in its repetitions becomes a rantIndia is the source of all civilization. It is true that a major historian, Michelet, was writing only three years earlier that primeval India was the original cradle, the matrix of the world.36 But Jacolliot sought to bolster his more extreme view by a nave and uncritical reading of Sanskrit texts. Jacolliot elaborates his claim with copious extracts from Manu, sometimes with chapter and verse, more usually without. Manu is Jacolliots core text, and it bore some relation to his duties as a magistrate. Manu forms the basis for part one of Jacolliots thesis. Part two is that Christ is a reminiscence of Krishna, on whose life the life of Christ is based; but this rests on gross forgeries, bearing no relation whatsoever to original Indian texts. They seem to have been produced to order by a Brahmin to satisfy Jacolliots need; he explicitly says that one particular Brahmin came up with this information. In addition, there is some direct reportage of aspects of Indian religion, for the most part from Jacolliots own experience, but vague and of little value. However, the book seems to have had considerable success. It would be interesting to study its reception in some detail. The reviewer of an 1882 counterblast by a Spanish missionary noted that Jacolliots book, and another of the Indianist studies, Les Fils de Dieu, created a sensation when they appeared. Rationalists and freethinkers viewed it then as giving the deathblow to Christianity; freemasons thought him a great scholar and a profound thinker until they actually read the books. However, for the general reader, says the reviewer, the books continue to be poisonous.37 In India, the translation, The Bible in India, was warmly received. Dayanand (182483), founder of the Arya Samaj, an important Hindu reform movement, refers to Jacolliots book as showing that all sciences and religions found in the world have spread from this country.38 The broader scope of Jacolliots appeal in Europe is shown by Gladstones reference to Jacolliots proposed etymologies in one of his studies of Homer.39 Gladstones mention of The Bible in India brings down on him the wrath of John FiskeMr. Gladstone. . . does not. . . appear to suspect that it is a disgraceful piece of charlatanry, written by a man ignorant of the very rudiments of the subject which he professes to handle.40 We may note that another of Fiskes books, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe in German translation, was in Nietzsches library. Fiske is almost certainly referring to Max Mllers attack on Jacolliot. As Michael Ahlsdorf has pointed out, Nietzsche borrowed from the university library in Basel in 1875 the German translation of Max Mllers Lectures

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on the Science of Religion (1870/1874), in which Mller demolishes Jacolliots claims to scholarship.41 Mller notes that Jacolliots La Bible dans lInde has lately attracted considerable attention, and declares that no Sanskrit scholar would hesitate for one moment to say that [the passages cited from the sacred books of the Brahmans] are forgeries and that Jacolliot has been deceived by his native teacher.42 It is amusing, by the way, to note that what specically and especially arouses Mllers contempt is that Jacolliot attributes to the Veda the notion that woman is the soul of humanity.43 [I]t is not difcult to see, Mller writes, that this is the folly of the nineteenth century, and not of the childhood of the human race. The real forgeries relate to the insertion of the Jesus story into the Puranas. Only a verse or two of his original Manu differs from the standard text with regard to the status of women. Jacolliots summary of the Hindu view of the importance of woman has a core of truth, if taken to refer to her intrinsic status in Hinduism as Shakti, (divine) power. It is also worth mentioning that Jacolliots view here is not novel. For example, in Hugos novel Notre-dame de Paris, decades before Jacolliot, the learned archdeacon de Josas is found quoting Manu in praise of women.44 The elements of Jacolliots appeal in the past are various. In addition to his grandiose attempts to establish himself as a historian of the human race, his brief account of magical feats in India received considerable attention, most notably through his being quoted by Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical movement. She refers to Jacolliots books some fty times in her rst major publication, Isis Unveiled, though even she refers to him as unreliable. Presumably because of adverse criticism of The Bible in India, references to Jacolliot are much reduced in her magnum opusif that expression can be used for her manner of compositionThe Secret Doctrine. However, Jacolliots uncritical enthusiasm for India, his ideas of Atlantis, and his proclaimed observations of psychic phenomenathough the latter plays only a very small part in his writingscombine to make him a major source and even inspiration for the early years of the Theosophical Society. In May 1887, when Paul Deussen visited Nietzsche at Sils en route for Greece, Meta von Salis-Marschlins reports that their discussions included the theosophic movements link to the Eastern religions.45 There is an interesting passing reference in Guyaus Irrligiona copy of which Nietzsche possessedto the Theosophical Society of the United States sending missionaries to India in 1879, or rather counter-missionaries to teach the majesty and glory of all the ancient religions.46 It would be interesting to know to what extent Nietzsche and his interlocutors were aware of the activities of Blavatsky and the rest of the current New Age of his day. As mentioned above, he took the trouble to attend a spiritualist sance in Leipzig. He makes passing reference in his writings to somnambulism and hypnotism, and to the activities of Indian fakirs.47

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Whether or not Jacolliots name came up in relation to theosophy or other aspects of occultism, it can be proved that Nietzsche had heard of Jacolliot before he picked up his Manu. Brobjer points out that Nietzsche had read in 1884 an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled Maenadism in Religion, which refers to Jacolliot: There was, unfortunately, no Louis Jacolliot in ancient times to watch unseen the sacred midnight revels, and then give a glowing description of them to the unilluminated.48 Gilman had already noted that Nietzsche possessed this particular issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and had had an essay of Emersons in it translated into German for him; and of particular relevance here, he had noted that Nietzsche read the article on Maenadism with great care, making some twenty annotations on each page, in the form of French or German translations of particular words. Gilman remarks, The importance of this essay for Nietzsche during the mid-eighties is evident. He was returning to the question of the Dionysian in a manner which altered many of his earlier ideas on the problem. Here he was presented with a succinct summary of the leading views of ethnologists and historians of religion on this topic.49 Cheek by jowl with these leading views is the reference to Jacolliot. The writer on Maenadism, who lamented a lack of a Jacolliot in ancient times, may well have had in mind his account in his Voyage au pays des perles of worship of the female principle (shakti-puja) in the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where he sees, so he says, the worship of the goddesses degenerate into an orgya more public event than the private parties he usually describes; and where he compares the participants to bacchantes and satyrs. Jacolliot tells us that he spies on proceedings from a secret hiding place. The three girls representing the goddesses, the temple dancers, and a hundred and fty beautiful young women from the local town, all adorned with owers, form an erotic tableau. Ascetics bring in jars of intoxicating liquors. Everyone was naked. I dont know how to portray the overwhelming effect produced on me by the sight of all these fresh young womens bodies rising up, in ecstatic poses, from a bed of rose petals [. . .] and blue lotuses, in the midst of the sculpted columns and all the marvels of Hindu architecture. At a signal from the chief priests, all the women interlaced their arms and legs to form a crown around the three who represented the goddesses. Never in his senseless dreams has the imagination of a smoker of opium conceived anything more bizarre, more extraordinary, more magnetic, more unnerving. . . than the spectacle of these waves of human esh on an ocean of owers. The Brahmins and their guests worship the goddesses. Dishes of all sorts of food, meats of every kind forbidden at ordinary times were brought in, heaped high. After offerings to the goddesses the men and women jumped up and threw themselves pell-mell on the food and drink which they held to be consecrated, vying with each other to eat and drink the most. At the signal of a rework, the three Brahmin priests publicly perform the deed of generation with the three young women who rep-

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resent the Goddesses. At once the three hundred men and women deliriously throw themselves upon each other like two troops of rutting tigers who have just met in the jungle. [. . .] and when these bacchantes and these satyrs reach the last degree of exaltation, they will no longer even distinguish between the sexes. It will be understood that I must stop here in painting these shocking customs which still today soil the religious mysteries of India, mysteries that this country transported by emigration through the entire ancient world.50 Jacolliot eats his cake with one hand and throws it away with the other. He delights in alluding to his own sexual encounters, and at the same time is horried by an orgy sanctied by religion. In all his books he praises ancient Hinduism and scorns modern Hinduism. Indeed, Jacolliots primal Hinduism bears a striking resemblance to Christianity, being monotheist and free from the divisions of caste, free too from Brahmins. It is difcult to say whether or not the description he gives here is fabricated, though with Jacolliot fabrication is always likely. He almost certainly has in mind literary descriptions and contemporary paintings of ancient Greece and Rome as parallels, but this would be the case whether or not he made up his description.

Nietzsches Knowledge of Indian Literature

Nietzsche had no interest in supposedly direct rsthand accounts of Dionysiac or any other kind of experience of India, but he was interested in the hierarchical structure of society and in asceticism. Michel Hulin refers to Nietzsches passionate and highly selective reading of the Laws of Manu; Nietzsche is fascinated by the historical success of the Brahmanic caste, which he imagines to have ruled over Indian society for millenia.51 But as Brobjer shows, Manu by no means represents Nietzsches political ideal. Manu, like the Roman Empire, represents stability, but Nietzsches full approval is reserved for the afrmative and creative values of the Renaissance and ancient Hellas.52 My aim here is to show that it was surprising that he was so taken by a book so obviously unscholarly; and surprising also that he had not heard of Jacolliots other works. The key conclusion here from Manu is that Nietzsches knowledge of the scholarly and the popular literature on Hinduism must have been remarkably slight. This seems to the case as well with other preeminent Hindu texts. Sir William Jones did not translate only the Laws of Manu; he also translated Kalidasas ancient Sanskrit play Sakuntala, a work that took educated Europe by storm, and was praised by Goethe, the most famous literary gure in Europe. But Nietzsche had not read this play until it was shown to him by Meysenbug in 1877. And then he did not like it.53 It may further be noted that Wilamowitz in his review of The Birth of Tragedy remarks upon the absence of any reference to Sakuntala.54 Nietzsches position on this matter can perhaps be justied as a

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matter of personal taste, but for the author of The Birth of Tragedy to be ignorant of what was rst thought to be the oldest of all dramatic forms, which had swept across Europe in various translations, surely shows a mind closed to dramatic art in wider dimensions as well as closed to India. This impression is conrmed when we look at other popular Indian texts, popular, that is, in Europe at the time. The oldest Sanskrit texts, and the most venerated, are the Vedic hymns. The one signicant use of a Vedic hymn by Nietzsche is the motto for Daybreak,55 and the title of Daybreak itself, but this was the suggestion of Heinrich Kselitz (Peter Gast).56 Nevertheless, the prominent position of the Vedic quotation is emphasized by the reference to India in almost the last words of the book. The only other reference to a Vedic hymn, as distinct from the Upanishads and the Vedanta, and as distinct from notebook references to the Vedas in Manu, is the copying out in a notebook of a verse from the famous creation verse Rig-Veda X 129, one of a series of extracts from a volume of Max Mllers essays. Nietzsches claim in Ecce Homo that the poets of the Veda are priests and are not worthy to loose Zarathustras sandals (EH Z6),57 would seem to be based on almost total ignorance of the Vedic hymns, ignorance that would be reprehensible were he still a philologist. To this might be contrasted a remark of Renan in his LAvenir de la sciencea remark that might have been at the back of Nietzsches mindthat there is much to be done before Sanskrit is perfectly understood, and that it might be regretted that a quite big volume had been written on the sandals of the Hebrews before the Vedas had found an editor.58 Nietzsches boast is in fact an accurate reection of his general relationship with Hinduism, namely, that his own views and creations are superior to Hinduism, a relationship discussed below in respect to the bermensch and eternal return. Another major text Nietzsche might have been expected to know was the Ramayana. Johann Figl claims that Nietzsches interest in Indian ideas goes back to his schooldays at Pforta and discovers a reference to fate in relation to the Indian epics in the draft of an essay on the Nibelungen Song: Such a profound conception of fate shines outeven if visible to only the sharper of sight from those folk poems in which the spiritual and emotional world of a whole nation comes to light in primordial magnicence and purity, in the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the Nibelungen and Gudrun (BAW 2, 445 Nachbericht). Figl claims that that contemporary scholarship on India was taken account of at Pforta.59 But the mere mention of the titles of the two Indian epics by Nietzsche means little. While it is true that Nietzsche does not say much about any of his reading in his published works, there is no reason to suppose that Indian poetry was of any interest to him at all, a view conrmed by his antipathy to Sakuntala. All the same, the Ramayana was well known in Europe. Consider Michelets La Bible de lhumanit, a work that has been suggested as a possible source of

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the distinction Nietzsche makes between Apollo and Dionysos, and that may have been introduced to Nietzsche by Meysenbug, who had met Michelet.60 Michelets popular work begins with a lyrical evocation of the Ramayana: a Colossus, ve hundred times higher than the Pyramidsthe gigantic ower of Indiathe divine Ramayana;61 a comparison that surpasses Michelets comments in the Le Peuplea book of his that Nietzsche possessed in German translationthe Ramayana, the Mahabharata, gigantic pyramids in front of which all our little Western works should be humble and respectful.62 Michelet proclaimed the death of God but wanted to replace Christianity by a new religion of the people, and Nietzsche had little sympathy for his view: Everything that pleases me is foreign to him.63 For Michelet, the high point of the Ramayana is Rama embracing his monkey companion-devotee, Hanuman, seeing here the reverse of the caste system in the brotherhood of beings. This reading overlooks the signicant incident, notorious today among the Dalits, as Nietzsches chandalas are now called: Rama ordering the immediate death of a low-caste man who has the temerity to become an ascetic; but at least Michelet took the trouble to read the epic. Nietzsche, however, does twice refer to a famous story best known from its version in the Ramayana, namely, what Salom called the Vedic story of Visvamitra, that as she says, exemplies the mutual dependence in Nietzsches thought of relentless suffering and self-deication.64 Marco Brusotti has shown that Nietzsches phrasing and consequently his knowledge of the story comes from his former pupil Jacob Wackernagels essay on Brahmanism.65 This lively and signicant story comes in the rst book of the Ramayana, and would be encountered early in reading the Ramayana, if one actually read the Ramayana. The magical powers of ascetics are vividly described; by dint of his ascetic prowess the king Visvamitra becomes a rishi, and creates a new heaven for his protg, a king whom his rivals sons had made a chandala. The same source, Wackernagels essay, lies behind a passage in Daybreak: For those Brahmins believed, rstly that the priests were more powerful than the gods, and secondly that the power of the priests resided in the observances: which is why their poets never wearied of celebrating the observances (prayers, ceremonies, sacrices, hymns, verses) as the real givers of all good things. Nietzsche takes this superiority of men over gods as a goal to be imitated: let us rst of all see to it that Europe overtakes what was done several thousands of years ago in India, among the nation of thinkers, in accordance with the commandments of reason! (D, 96). One of the several verses he copies from Jacolliot that are not in the received text of Manu is the following: Where is the god who would be capable of withstanding the solemnity and prayers of the ascetic (yati) who has withdrawn into the forest? (KSA 13:14[198]). But Nietzsche does not meet such gures as Visvamitra in the context of the Ramayana in their full literary environment.

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Indian Anticipations of Nietzschean Concepts

We now come to what has always been supposed to be the source of Nietzsches strongest connection with Hinduism and India, his friendship with Paul Deussen, the great European expert on the Vedanta. Deussen gave Nietzsche copies of his two books on the Vedanta, Das System des Vedanta and his translation of Sankaras commentary on the Brahmasutras. Certainly Nietzsche looked through Das System des Vedanta, much the more accessible of the two, but in fact was not in the least disposed to carry out the careful study that would be necessary to properly understand its rich contents. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he refers to the Upanishadic notion of oneness with Brahman in deep sleep, and refers to Deussens translation of Sankaras commentary, but is happy to move on to home ground with Epicurus at the end of the section (GM III.17). Salom declared that it was impossible to ignore the inuence of Das System des Vedanta upon Nietzsches own writings from 1883: one is tempted to write explanatory notes in the marginatmanand Brahman.66 But it did not occur to Nietzsche to use those terms. If all the foregoing discussion has sought to downplay Nietzsches knowledge of Hinduism, nevertheless, the two teachings to which Nietzsche laid special claim, the bermensch and the eternal return both stand in a peculiar and remarkable relationship to Hinduism and Buddhism. Such at least must be the conclusion of anyone familiar with those religions. In his reminiscences of Nietzsche, Deussen subjects his friends twin ideas to stringent critique. If one claims that the next period that the world will go through will take exactly the same course in the least details as in the present period, that is an opinion entirely deprived of any basis. In essentials the process will remain the same, but the modalities will be unceasingly new. He deftly knocks Nietzsches idea on the head: three billiard balls, each with its surface made up of an innite number of points, never exactly reproduce the same mutual positions, and likewise the game of the evolution of the world will have innite variations.67 Eternal return is physically and logically impossible. Deussen also gives the notion of the bermensch short shrift. From 1873 Nietzsche was saying to me that his goal was not the negation of the will but its ennoblement and, already at that period, I replied to him that one could not yet understand the negation of the will, if one did not see in it the greatest ennoblement. For classical antiquity and for many in modern times, says Deussen, the highest task of morality consists in deciding the ways and means which lead the most surely to happiness. This Deussen calls the pagan group. It was the Vedanta that headed the other group, which also includes Platonism, Christianity, and the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. When the Veda says one should liberate oneself from the illusion of individuality and recognize that one is the atman, it is saying exactly the same thing that Nietzsche wants: that

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the man in us be surmounted, in order that the bermensch may appear.68 Nietzsches notions of the bermensch and the eternal return have been minutely examined by many scholars and interpreted in numerous and diverse ways. My point here is simply that to use them the way he did shows Nietzsche to have been oblivious of the obvious Indian parallels. Brandes in 1889 suggested that the bermensch was a more dogmatic version of the scientic world rulers that Renan had postulated in his Dialogues Philosophiques, a book that Nietzsche possessed.69 Renan nds it natural to use the Sanskrit word for god, deva, in respect of his oligarchical brain-only supermen. Renan has been described as a kind of companionable, drawing-room Nietzsche,70 but Nietzsche sees him as his antipodesthough of course Renan is not the only antipodes for Nietzsche. Renan sought to exorcize the void left by the death of God with the religion of science.71 His view of a future deity as the world reduced to a single super-entity, which absorbs all life into its burning throat in a river of pleasure which again ows out in a torrent of life, was once described by Lionel Gossman as a fantasy of God only slightly less obvious than the fantasies of todays porno culture.72 Gossman was writing in 1982, before the Internet and the novels of William Gibson. He was, however, writing long after the theophany of the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna shows Arjuna his true form (modeled on Siva), swallowing up the whole universe into his gaping mouth. Renans vision also encapsulates the idea of Siva limitlessly pouring forth the world from himself. As Hulin has pointed out,73 Schopenhauer gives a striking anticipation of Nietzsches notion of the bermensch by postulating a man who found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence. . . whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for lifes pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject. But even better for Schopenhaueras later for Deussenwould be the man who understood the truths of the Upanishads. For him, death would be an impotent specter. He knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectication or copy, to which therefore life and also the present always remains certain and sure. The present is the only real form of the will. Therefore no endless past or future in which he will not exist can frighten him, for he regards these as an empty mirage and the web of Maya. Schopenhauer then declares that in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna puts his young pupil Arjuna in this position.74 What Schopenhauer does not specically refer to is the magnicent and overwhelming theophany to which Arjuna is treated. Nietzsche too ignores this; he ignores the Bhagavad Gita entirely,75 he ignores Sanskrit literature, for he makes his own way. Schopenhauer makes an intriguing reference to Siva in conjunction with Dionysos in the rst volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:

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Birth and death belong equally to life. [. . .] The wisest of all mythologies, the Indian, expresses this by giving to the very god who symbolizes destruction and death [. . .] to Shiva as an attribute not only the necklace of skulls, but also the lingam, that symbol of generation which appears as the counterpart of death. [. . .] It was precisely the same sentiment that prompted the Greeks and Romans to adorn the costly sacrophagi, just as we still see them, with feasts, dances, marriages, hunts, ghts between wild beasts, bacchanalia, that is with presentations of lifes most powerful urge. This they present to us not only through such diversions and merriments, but even in sensual groups, to the point of showing us the sexual intercourse between satyrs and goats.

The classical artists, like the creators of Hindu mythology, wanted to show that the whole of nature is the [. . .] fullment of the will to live.76 Perhaps, if Nietzsche had been given a book he requested for his seventeenth birthdayWollheim da Fonsecas Mythologie des altes Indienhe might have gone on to make some use of what Schopenhauer called the wisest mythology.77 Nietzsches many references to dance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra have often made subsequent readers think of Dancing Siva, and Wollheim makes some reference to Siva as dancer, as Natesvara, lord of dancers, but in fact that form of Siva was almost completely ignored in the West until Coomaraswamys essay The Dance of Siva was published in 1914.78 It was necessary for people to see at least photographs of Chola bronzes for Dancing Siva to be properly appreciated outside India. But not only does Siva resemble Zarathustra in some respects, but there are several points of convergence between Siva and Nietzsche/Dionysos/Zarathustra. Siva, the archetype of the Indian wandering ascetic, ceaselessly walks across India, Siva whose home is the Himalayas, the snow mountains, Siva the yogi, Siva the ascetic whose magic power creates the world. Siva as ithyphallic, the wild dancer, resembles Dionysos, Dionysos, who came, as Nietzsche says, from India (BT, 20). Schopenhauer makes the link between Siva and bacchanalia quoted above not on the basis of historical claims in Greek texts but on structural grounds, on a parallel duality of love and death in the two gods.

Nietzsches India
Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an Indiabut that it was our fate to be wrecked against innity? Or, my brothers. Or? Daybreak, 575

India for Nietzsche is the land of Hindus. He shows little awareness that it was under Muslim rule for several centuries. Other than words based on brahman, his usual term for Hindu is Inder or indisch. Only a handful of times does Nietzsche use the word Hindu.79 Nevertheless, India for him is the land of

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Hindus alone, not of Hindus and Muslims. At the same time, it is noteworthy that Nietzsche refers to almost none of the common stereotypes of India, other than the incapacitating nature of the heat. He does not refer, for instance, to devotees throwing themselves under the wheels of the Jagannath car, or the suicide of widows on their husbands funeral pyres, as do almost all Europeans who write even briey about Hinduism, for example, Schopenhauer in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Renan in LAvenir de la science.80 How much did Nietzche know of the real geography and culture of India?81 One view of India that Nietzsche would have had was on stage, in opera. In Delibess Lakm, which Nietzsche saw in Nice in the winter of 188788, priests bring out ten-armed Durga from the temple in a palanquin, while the Hindus sing that the goddess is golden in colour, the spirit of the Ganges who makes everything change.82 This procession is the backdrop for the chief priests attempted murder of Gerald. And apparently there was for Nietzsche something Indiansomething Hinduabout Bizets Carmen, which he went to so many times, since he says at the beginning of Der Fall Wagner, each time that Ive heard Carmen, I have felt myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher than I usually feel: made so indulgent, so happy, so Hindu (so indisch) (CW, 1). Was it the dance of Carmen that reminded him of India? But the dance of Carmen is, as he says, Moorish, and he never hints at anything resembling the India of dancing girls beloved of Jacolliot; nor was the Indian origin of the gypsies then widely known. It is remarkable that Nietzsche speaks of himself here as Hindu (indisch), for the context in which he does so is revelatory of the emptiness of his understanding of Hinduism, of its self-referentiality.83 Experience of India for NietzscheNietzsches Indiawas, I suggest, the other India for which he set sail at the end of Daybreak, and where perhaps he was shipwrecked; an India where no one lived but Nietzsche, that was not the real India or any known land. In reality, going to India never crossed his mind. Far from going to India, even metaphorically, he could not even get to Paris, the cosmopolis of his dreams, the capital of the nineteenth century. Strange that he could call his writings travel-books; they were written for himself aloneat least that is what he suggests in his 1886 preface to the second volume of Human, All Too Human (HH II, P6). Rohde says of his last meeting with Nietzsche, in the spring of 1886, that he had a new look, As if he came from a country where nobody else lived,84 but was that really a new look? Perhaps his visit to Jacolliots India was en route to a different continent altogether. Department of Religious Studies Lancaster University

NOTES
1. The most valuable treatment of this topic is still that of Mervyn Sprung. Sprungs paper has been published twice: originally as Nietzsches Interest in and Knowledge of Indian Thought,

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in David Goicoechea, ed., The Great Year of Zarathustra (18811981) (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984); and, with an additional paragraph, Nietzsches Trans-European Eye, in Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Sprung concludes that ideas from India penetrated Nietzsche as little as drops of water penetrate a gooses feathers (1984, p. 177). 2. The Laws of Manu [Manavadharmasastra or Manusmrti] is a Sanskrit text composed around 200 b.c., informally known as Manu, which is how I shall generally refer to it in the text. 3. Louis Jacolliot, Les Lgislateurs religieux: Manou-Moise-Mahomet (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1876). Symptomatic of Jacolliots inherent unreliability is the inaccuracy of title of the book: the contents refer only to Manu, not Moses or Muhammad. Similar inaccuracies can be found in some of his other book titles. 4. Roger Scruton, Continental Philosophy from Fichte to Sartre, in Anthony Kenny, ed., The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 232. 5. Marcel Conche, Nietzsche et le bouddhisme (Fougres: Encre Marin, 1997), 17. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, section 20, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954). Nietzsches works will henceforth be cited in the text by abbreviation of the title (in English), followed by subdivision (if applicable) and section number. I rely chiey on Walter Kaufmanns translations for Viking Press/Random House and R. J. Hollingdales translations for Cambridge University Press. Unpublished notes and fragments from the Nachla are cited as KSAi.e., Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols., ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988)followed by appropriate volume, notebook, and note numbers. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967). 8. The Laws of Manu, with introduction and notes, trans. Wendy Doniger with Brian K. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), xx. 9. Dans ltat actuel de la littrature sanskrite, en effet, la publication et la traduction des textes vaut mieux que toutes les dissertations possibles, soit sur lhistoire de lInde, soit sur lauthenticit et lintgrit des ouvrages, LAvenir de la science (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1910), 245. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 11. Christopher Middleton, ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 29798. 12. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950). 13. F. Max Mller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2d ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1880), 2:308. 14. Sir William Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu (Calcutta, 1794); J. C. Httner, Hindu Gesetzbuch: oder, Menus Verordnungen (Weimar 1797)a translation of Jones; A. Loizeleur-Deslongchamps, Lois de Manou (Paris, 1833); and G. Bhler, The Laws of Manu (Oxford, 1886). Brobjer has shown what a keen reader Nietzsche remained despite the problem with his eyes, making full use of libraries, even checking out the size of the library before he visited a town; frequenting bookshops, and borrowing books from friends. Thomas Brobjer, Nietzsches Reading and Private Library, Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (1997): 66393. See also Brobjers article in this issue, Nietzsches Reading About Eastern Philosophy. Nietzsches nomadic life was not in itself a bar to knowledge of Hinduism and India. 15. Johann Figl, Nietzsches Early Encounters with Asian Thought, in Parkes, ed., 59. 16. Carl Friedrich Koeppen, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung (Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider, 1857), 1:3954. 17. Thomas Brobjer, The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsches Writings: The Case of The Laws of Manu and the Associated Caste-Society, Nietzsche-Studien 27 (1998): 300318.

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18. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism: or Religious Thought and Life in India (London: John Murray, 1887), 51. 19. Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:336. 20. Renan, Avenir, 59, 148 (twice), 232. 21. Jean-Marie Guyau, LIrrligion de lavenir: tude sociologique (Paris: Flix Alcan, 1887), 267. 22. Annemarie Etter, Nietzsche und das Gesetzbuch des Manu, Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 34052. 23. For detailed discussion, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10710. 24. Etter, Nietzsche und das Gesetzbuch des Manu, 345. 25. Daniel Caracostea, Louis-Franois Jacolliot (18371890): A Biographical Essay, Theosophical History 9, no. 1 (January 2003): 1239. In outline, as established by Caracostea, Jacolliots life was as follows. Born in Charolles in 1837, son of a legal functionary, he studied law and practiced as a lawyer in Saint-Etienne. But after three years of this, in 1864, complaining of susceptibility to a sore throat, he applied for a French colonial magistracy. He was appointed deputy-judge in Pondicherry and arrived there in December 1865. In June the following year, he was promoted to Imperial Prosecutor, and two months later to Imperial Judge in Chandernagor. He was in Chandernagor just over four months, before resigning on account of ill health. He left India on March 9, 1868, never to return. His stay in India lasted twenty-seven months. After some months in Tahiti he remained in France, giving lectures in Paris from 1873 to 1885, as police records show, supplementing the income from his writings. In 1887 he was elected mayor in the village of Saint-Thibault-des-Vignes, east of Paris, and remained in ofce until his death on October 30, 1890. 26. Catherine Champion, Limage de lInde dans la ction populaire franaise aux XIXe et Xxe sicles, in Denys Lombard, ed., Rver lAsie (Paris: HSS, 1993), 54. 27. Louis Jacolliot, Le Coureur des Jungles (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1888). First published serially. 28. Le Coureur des Jungles, 4. 29. Ibid., 19. 30. Ibid., 607. 31. Le Spiritisme dans le Monde. LInitiation et les sciences occultes dans lInde et chez tous les peuples de lantiquit avec un aperu du spiritisme et du magntisme au moyen ge et jusqu nos jours (Paris: Lacroix, 1875). Translated into English by Willard L. Felt as Occult-science in India and among the ancients, with an account of their mystic initiations and the history of spiritism (London and New York, 1884). 32. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 23. 33. Caracostea, Louis-Franois Jacolliot (18371890), 21. 34. Nietzsche, Lettres Peter Gast, trans. Louize Servicen (Monaco: ditions du Rocher, 1957), 2:11415. 35. La Bible dans lInde, vie de Iezeus Christna (Paris: Lacroix, 1869). Many reprints. Translated into English as The Bible in India: Hindoo Origin of Hebrew and Christian Revelation (London, 1870). Several reprints. 36. Jules Michelet, The Bible of Humanity, translated from the French by Vincenzo Calfa (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), 8. 37. Comte de Charencey, review of Pedro Gual, A India Christan, ou Cartas biblicas contra los livros de Luis Jacolliot, translated from Spanish into Portuguese by J. Pinto de Campos (1882), Revue des questions historiques, 1888, 31012. 38. Satyarth Prakash, 333.

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39. William Ewart Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (London: Macmillan, 1869), 343. 40. John Fiske, (1872) Myths and Myth-makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology (Boston and New York: Fiske Houghton, Mifin and Company, 1900), 2056. 41. Michael Ahlsdorf, Nietzsches Juden, diss. Berlin 1990, cited by Andreas Urs Sommer, Friedrich Nietzsches Der Antichrist: Ein philsophisch-historischer Kommentar (Basel: Schwabe, 2000), 563. 42. Littells Living Age, no. 1366, August 6, 1870, p. 329. (I quote from the form of the text available to me.) However, most of the references Jacolliot makes to Manu are correct; it is the references to the Krishna Christ story that are forgeries. 43. La femme cest lme de lhumanit, La Bible dans lInde, 242. 44. Victor Hugo, Notre-dame de Paris (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1880), 425. 45. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 195; Meta von Salis-Marschlins, May 1887ff., 200. 46. Guyau, LIrrligion de lavenir, 301. 47. GM III.21, KSA 12:10[155]; GM I.6 and III.17, EH Wise, 6, KSA 13:14[102]. 48. The Atlantic Monthly, October 1884, 498; Brobjer, The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsches Writing. 49. Sander L. Gilman, Nietzsches Reading on the Dionysian: From Nietzsches Library, Nietzsche-Studien 6 (1977): 29394. 50. L. Jacolliot, Voyage au pays des perles, 5th ed. (Paris: Dentu, 1879), 18790. 51. Michel Hulin, Nietzsche and the Suffering of the Indian Ascetic, in Parkes, ed., 69. 52. Brobjer, The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsches Writings. 53. Sprungs comment is important: Nietzsche read it and his subsequent comments, as recounted by Meysenbug, are, for myself, the single most revealing episode in the entire documentary evidence available to us concerning his stance in matters of European and transeuropean philosophy and culture (Nietzsches Trans-European Eye, 86). 54. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mllendorff, Zukunfstphilologie (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1872), trans. Hlne Poitevin in Michle Cohen-Halimi, ed., Querelle autour de La Naissance de la Tragdie (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 95. 55. It is not clear which verse of the Rig-Veda the line is taken from. 56. See editors notes, KSA 14, p. 203. 57. [D]ie Dichter des Veda Priester sind und nicht einmal wrdig, die Schuhsohlen eines Zarathustra zu lsen (KSA 6, p. 343). 58. Renan refers to Anthony Bynaeus (165498), De calceis Hebrorum libri duo (Dordraci: Ex ofcina vidu Caspari, & Theodori Goris, mdc lxxxii)well over 400 pages in the duodecimo edition. 59. Figl, Nietzsches Early Encounters with Asian Thought, in Parkes, ed., 5354. He refers to the Z.D.M.G., and books by Lassen and Albrecht Weber. 60. J. Michelet, La Bible de lhumanit (Paris: F. Chamerot, 1864); H. Wagenvoort, Die Entstehung von Nietzsches Geburt der Tragdie, Mnemosyne 12 (Leiden, 1959), cited by Curt Paul Janz: Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1993), 1:431. 61. Jules Michelet, The Bible of Humanity, trans. Vincenzo Calfa (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), 7. 62. Jules Michelet, Le peuple (Paris: Hachette et Paulin, 1846), 229. 63. KSA 11:26[403]. 64. Lou Salom, Nietzsche, translated from the German and edited by Siegfried Mandel (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 25. 65. Marco Brusotti, Opfer und Macht: zu Nietzsches Lektre von Jacob Wackernagels ber den Ursprung des Brahmanismus, Nietzsche Studien 22 (1993): 22242.

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66. Salom, Nietzsche, 144. 67. Paul Deussen, Souvenirs sur Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Jean-Franois (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) (Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1901]), 172. 68. Deussen, Souvenirs sur Friedrich Nietzsche, 17378. 69. Gary Shapiro, Nietzsche contra Renan, History and Theory 21, no. 2 (1982): 193222, referring to Brandess pamphlet Friedrich Nietzsche: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, 3637. In 1904 Jean Bourdeau declared, le dva de Renan, cest lbermensch de Nietzsche, in Les Matres de la pense contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1904), 129. For Renans speculations about the future development through science of some of mankind into dvas, see Dialogues Philosophiques, in H. Psichari, ed., Oeuvres compltes de Ernest Renan (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1947), 1:61618; see also Guiliano Campioni, Les Lectures Franaises de Nietzsche, translated from the Italian by Christel Lavigne Mouilleron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 51108. 70. Lionel Gossman, review of Harold W. Wardman, Renan: Historien, Philosophe, History and Theory, 21, no. 1 (1982): 10624, at 107. 71. Campioni, Les Lectures Franaises de Nietzsche, 202. 72. Gossman, review of Wardman, 123. 73. M. Hulin, Schopenhauer et la mort-renaissance, in Roger-Pol Droit, Prsences de Schopenhauer (Paris: Grasset, 1989), 13. 74. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:28384. 75. Brobjer notes in his piece in this issue that Nietzsche made a marginal line beside the passage just mentioned in Schopenhauer (Brobjer, Nietzsches Reading About Eastern Philosophy). But the impact of the passage on Nietzsche, I believe, was very transitory. 76. World as Will and Representation, 1:276. 77. Ibid., 1:275. Nietzsches request is referred to by Figl, Nietzsches Early Encounters with Asian Thought, 52. Figl also mentions that Nietzsche requested at the same time Feuerbachs Essence of Christianity and Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Note, in passing, that the former work mentions with approval the Laws of Manu; the latter closes with a strange epigram about Maya driving away the depression of Brahma (last epigram but two). 78. Wollheim gives a brief but interesting account of Sivas wild tandava dance, and tries to nd an etymological link between tandava and tanzen: A. E. Wollheim da Fonseca, Mythologie des alten Indien (Berlin: Gustav Hempel, 1857), 7879. 79. KSA 13:11[245], 11[255], and 14[190]. 80. Renan in LAvenir de science mentions Jagannath twice, pp. 87 and 489; sati, p. 489. In the notebook where he makes excerpts from Mllers essays, Nietzsche refrains from transcribing details of Jagannath and sati even where they are contiguous to the sections that he does choose. 81. For instance, in Der Gottesdienst der Griechen, Nietzsche puts Sanchi, the great Buddhist site in central India, in Central Asia. Nietzsche, Le Service Divin des Grecs, trans. Emmanuel Carrin (Paris: LHerne, 1992), 66. 82. Leo Delibes, Lakm, act 2, scene 10. 83. Cf. Nietzsches use of the term Buddhist. Marcel Conche begins his book on Nietzsche and Buddhism by noting two instances of the term Buddhist being favorably applied to Europeans: Re spoke of Lou Salom to Oldenberg in 1882 as a great Buddhist; and Nietzsche in 1888 describes to Peter Gast a publisher keen to help him as a Buddhist. Conche, Nietzsche et le bouddhisme, 1415. As Brobjer notes at the beginning of his essay, Nietzsches Reading About Eastern Philosophy, Nietzsche in a letter to Cosima Wagner claimed to be himself the Buddha. 84. Letter of January 24, 1889, quoted by Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Paolo DIorio (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 105.