Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

30
It is entailed by Zen that suffering is not necessary. Suffering can be cured by
Zen, so there is no need to endure it. Nietzsche has the thought that at least some
suffering is unnecessary, suffering premised on metaphysical or theological belief:
'To suffer for the sake of morality and then to be told that this kind of suffering is
founded on an error: this arouses indignation. (DD para 32 p. 24)
We can suffer not merely because we do what we think is right and then find out it
was wrong. We can discover that the distinction between right and wrong that we
were assuming in our guilt or mortification is false and only historically inherited. In
either case we now view our suffering as pointless. One can imagine cases where
people fight in a war because they think their side is right. It later turns out that their
erstwhile opponents had a much stronger moral case than their own side's
propaganda allowed. The veterans now regard their suffering as pointless.
Despite their avowedly anti-metaphysical stance, Nietzsche and the Zen Buddhists
allow that there is a disclosure of reality. It is through suffering:
'For there is a unique consolation in affirming through one's suffering a "profounder
world of truth" than any other world is' (DD para 32 p.24)
Nietzsche is not identifying the deeper world of truth with suffering. That would be
at odds with his repudiation of Schopenhaurian pessimism. Rather, the route to the
deeper world of truth is through suffering. The transfiguration of the human is
enacted in suffering. It would be the antithesis of Buddhism to discover the truth to
be the suffering (even though it is profoundly true that there is suffering). In Zen, the
route to truth is through suffering, by the overcoming of suffering: by becoming the
kind of being who no longer suffers.
In Nietzsche and Zen, the escape from suffering is difficult to achieve. We are
ironically attached to suffering. Nietzsche says
'one would much rather suffer and thereby feel oneself exalted above reality [...]
than be without suffering' (DD para 32 p. 24)
Similarly, many would prefer their ordinary life of duhkha to the severe training of
the Zen monk, even though the latter promises an escape from suffering. Our
ordinary habits of valuing and the desires they sustain cause suffering. As Nietzsche
puts it
'Men have become suffering creatures in consequence of their morals' (DD 30)
In Buddhism, pride is a form of attachment to the origin of suffering. Nietzsche
thinks pride keeps us imprisoned in the morality we have been conditioned into: