The Mastery of Self

Tier Translator's Foreword Of the many books published in Italy and Germany by Julius Evola, this is the first to be translated into English. The book needs no apology; the subject—Buddhism—is sufficient Suarantee of that. But the author has, it seems to me, recaptured the spirit of Buddhism in its original form, and his schematic and uncompromising approach will have rendered an inestimable service even if it does no more than clear away some of the woolly ideas that have gathered round the central figure, Prince Siddhattha, and round the doctrine that he disclosed.

The real significance of the book, however, lies not in its value as a weapon in a dusty battle between scholars, but in its encouragement of a practical application of the doctrine it discusses. The author has not only examined the principles on which Buddhism was originally based, but he has also described in some detail the actual process of "ascesis" or self-training that was practiced by the early Buddhists.

This study, moreover, does not stop here; it maintains throughout that the doctrine of the Buddha is capable of application even today by any Western person who really has the vocation. But the undertaking was never easy, and the number who, in this modern world, will succeed in pursuing it to its conclusion is not likely to be large.

M. [1948] Preface In his autobiography Il cammino del cinabro (The Cinnabar Path), Julius Evola recalled: "During the last years of the 1930s I devoted myself to working on two of my most important books on Eastern wisdom: I completely revised L'uomo come potenza [Man As Power], which was given a new title, Lo yoga della potenza [The Yoga of Power], and wrote a systematic work concerning primitive Buddhism entitled La dottrina del risveglio [The Doctrine of Awakening |."

The recent discovery of the correspondence between Evola and his publisher allows us to specify the sequence of events and modify it, at least in part. In a "It is a new book entitled La dottrina del risveglio, carrying the subtitle Saggio sull'ascesi buddista [Essay on Buddhist Asceticism].

This is a work that I have almost completed concerning the practical and virile aspect of Buddhist teachings, with particular emphasis on the striving after the Unconditioned. I believe that my book's exposition of Buddhist teachings on this basis, explained in a way that everybody will understand, constitutes something original and will be of interest to more than a handful of specialized scholars.