Like reviewer B J Devlin, I have been confounded by Buddhism for a long time, starting with Alan Watts' lecture series, which I listened to on public radio in junior high school. Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening is the most clear exposition I've seen yet, although it is very singular and its accuracy from a scholarly and orthodox doctrinal perspective is up in the air.
The key to understanding Evola's position on Buddhism is understanding his underlying metaphysical outlook. Evola is a Traditionalist (see
Against the Modern World
) but with his own unique perspective on Tradition that emphasizes activity. As a result, he sees Buddhism not as an original development away from Hinduism but as a re-establishment of spiritual truths found in the older Vedas (Hindu reglious texts) that had been diluted and warped by the time of the Buddha. Evola subscribes to the idea of a universal spiritual degeneration throughout recorded history. For him, the Vedas represent a golden age, when gods walked with men so to speak, parallel to the Iliad and age of heroes in ancient Greece. In this golden age, which he calls "normal civilization," it was easy for men to realize their true spiritual natures through acts of heroism within the context of their own cultures and societies. However, by the time of the Buddha, "normal civilization" had degenerated and "foreign influences" had affected Hinduism so that society and religion were no longer meaningful or useful for men to achieve real spiritual growth. This was the historical context in which, says Evola, the Buddha rejected the religious teachings of the time and engaged in the heroic act of finding his own path to spiritual liberation.
Although this general outline of Buddhism's cultural context (according to Evola) doesn't sound revolutionary on its face, some of the specifics are. For example, Evola contends that reincarnation is not part of the original Vedic or Buddhist teaching. Having read several of Evola's books, I am still not entirely clear what his metaphysical or ontological outlook is, but he seems to think that men are "gods" who have forgotten their true nature and that "this world" is a phase of spiritual development that men pass through in an "upward" journey to greater degrees of power. As a result, the two pinacles of spiritual development possible in this world are (1) for men to realize their nature through conquest (becoming the "universal sovereign"--think Alexander of Macedon) or (2) for men to realize their fundamental difference from and lack of place in the world (becoming liberated--think Prince Siddartha). So, for Evola, reincarnation is a heresy that sees man as fundamentally tied to this world, and he understands Buddhism's references to multiple lives to be about multiple forms, or phases, of existence and not multiple reincarnations on earth. So, he says, the Buddhist idea of extinction is not nothingness (and he claims the Buddha never described the nature of extinction) and that nirvana is not escape from the wheel of reincarnation but the final escape from the ability to be affected ("conditioned," I think Evola would say) by earthly existence. (Remember, Evola is not "correcting" Buddhism but says this is the original and authentic teaching of Buddha before it was changed by generations of Buddha's less than stellar followers.)
For Evola, then, Buddhism is a very "this-worldly" teaching, in that it is completely separate from theological or religious ideas (e.g., karma) and entirely based in experience, the experience of discovering through progressive forms of training the true nature of man's relationship to the world. Evola's book is an explanation of this training, although it is not a how-to manual. It discusses such topics as the general idea of spiritual training, the type of person most likely to benefit from training, and the Buddha's description of the various progressive levels of insight and liberation from the constraints of the world that the trainee goes through while following the Buddha's instructions.
Is Evola's perspective on Buddhism believable? He has used the Pali Canon, the oldest set of Buddhist scriptures, to try to capture the original Buddhist teaching transmitted to the original sangha school that gathered around the Buddha. He has rejected any Buddhist teaching that derives from later scriptures (the various sutras) or from later schools (such as Tibetan Vajrayana). First of all, scholars are undecided to what extent the Pali Canon represents original Buddhism. Second, if you look at the Pali Canon, it is huge, and must contain a lot that is not represented in Evola's work. Since he doesn't discuss his research or his methodology of interpretation, it's hard to know whether he has basically cherry-picked or effectively summarized the Pali Canon. I don't have enough background to make a guess. However I can say that Evola's work on Zen (the Religion of the Samurai), while not an outright distortion, shows signs of lack of exposure to source materials and scholarship. I suspect the same is true here. However, my intuition here is also that Evola has corrected some distortions, such as the idea that Buddhism is fundamentally about universal compassion or is radically egalitarian.
If there is a major contribution to Buddhist study in this book it must be the emphasis on training. Evola is never willing to compromise with modern society and his instance on the importance of preparation and method seems to me a strong corrective to the "Buddhism-lite" idea many people seem to have of gaining "peace" by using certain types of artwork, visiting spiritual centers, and believing themselves above orthodoxies of various kinds.
The book is produced well and the prose of the translator perfectly adequate. I would definitely recommend this book to those interested in practicing Buddhism, although not to those interested in Asian history per se. As Evola says, each one should look inside himself to find out what he really desires, and so this is a book the Buddhist spiritual seeker should contend with.
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