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There are some good reasons to believe that Nietzsche was interested in Eastern philosophy. While still at Schulpforta, he refers to it in his first philosophical essay. He thereafter became a follower of Schopenhauer, the philosopher with most interest in and similarity to Eastern philosophy. In his notebooks and books, he refers to different aspects of Asian philosophy on more than four hundred occasions, and in several of these he claims to be interested in it. In 1875, for example, he refers to his desire to read Indian philosophy, and he speaks of his increasing thirst to look toward India. Such an interest goes well with his interest in pessimism and cultural health. Nietzsche also assumes that many of the fundamental cultural influences on ancient Greece and on Europe had their origin in Asia. In the 1880s he frequently compares Christianity and modernity negatively to different aspects of Eastern philosophy and he chooses the saying "There are so many days that have not yet broken" from the Rig-Veda as the epigraph for Dawn. At the onset of his mental collapse, he even came to identify himself with Buddha: "I have been Buddha in India, Dionysos in Greece."1 However, on the whole, this impression is deceptive. Nietzsche did have some interest in and knowledge of Eastern thought, primarily Indian philosophy, but I believe that it was less than most commentators have assumed, and less than one would expect from someone who had been philosophically brought up on Schopenhauerian philosophy (and less than that of most of his friends and acquaintances). Much has been written about Nietzsche and Eastern philosophy, but remarkably little effort has been spent on determining Nietzsche's knowledge of and reading about different aspects of it, though this is somewhat less true for his relation to and knowledge about Buddhism.2 It is my intention here to make a new attempt at discussing the extent of Nietzsche's reading about Eastern philosophy and literature. Knowledge of this seems to me to be a precondition for correctly analyzing and understanding Nietzsche's relation to, use of, and references to Asian thought. I will mention more than twice as many titles as has previously been mentioned, and will give a fairly detailed chronology of when Nietzsche read the different books. For some of the more well known works, I will also be able to show that he read them more than once, sometimes up to three times (and in several cases that he read them at all, since that has been doubted), and provide new information about the annotations he made in his copies. [End Page 3] Previous discussions of Nietzsche's knowledge of Eastern philosophy have missed many sources and said almost nothing about when Nietzsche read relevant works, which has prevented a closer understanding and better examination of their role and importance. The main problems with most earlier examinations have been several: They have lacked knowledge about Nietzsche's reading and library, which have made them miss a number of relevant books and studies. They have concentrated too much on Nietzsche's possible reading of original Indian texts and thus have paid too little attention to the secondary accounts that Nietzsche read. They have falsely assumed that Nietzsche had not read a number of relevant books in his library that do not contain annotations (Sprung, for example, states that the books in Nietzsche's library by Böhtlink, Oldenberg, Deussen's Sutras, and Müller's Essays "bear no sign of having been opened," when Nietzsche actually had read all four of them carefully and excerpted from them in his notebooks). They have lacked knowledge of Nietzsche's habit of rereading books, which is true for several of the books discussed here. Several of them, especially Sprung, began their examinations with too high expectations and therefore overreacted in the other direction, that is, underestimating Nietzsche's reading and knowledge of Indian thought...
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