Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is a fictional account of a spiritual quest by his protagonist, Zarathustra, who after ten years of meditative retreat in the wilderness, descends from the mountains to teach what he has learned to awaken the spirit of humanity. Written in archaic, scripture-style language, Nietzsche considered this creative narrative his most important statement on the possibility of human enlightenment and on the reactionary human resistance to higher evolutionary forms of life.

The story below, written by Dale Wright and narrated by Krzysztof Piekarski, follows Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in both archaic style and its focus on spiritual awakening but brings a fictional Buddhist named Nagarjuna into dialogue with Nietzsche’s spiritual pilgrim. In the same sense that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is not the same as the ancient Persian Zoroastrian by that name, our fictional Nagarjuna is not to be identified with the famous second century Buddhist logician of that name, even though the two share Buddhist perspectives and concerns. In our story, Zarathustra, Nagarjuna and the mayor of a local village debate each other on what might be at stake in waking up to the realities of life. All quotations are from one section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a section called “the Three Evil Things.”