Schopenhauer's Encounter with Indian Thought: Representation and Will and Their Indian Parallels

Chapter Thirteen: Conclusions: Schopenhauer’s Will and Comparable Indian Ideas

Chapter thirteen Conclusions: Schopenhauer’sWillandComparableIndianIdeas A poem written by Schopenhauer in his youth, while he was still in training as an apprentice merchant at Hamburg, opens with these lines: Voluptuous pleasure, infernal delight, Love insatiable and invincible! From the heights of heaven Thou hast dragged me down And cast me in fetters Into the dust of this earth.1 Already in these words we find the central motivation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy: the need to understand the will, this mysterious force or “love insatiable” that like some evil magician imprisons us in a world of imperfection and suffering. It is the same motivation that we find at the base of the Hindu and Buddhist thought of India: the deeply felt need to escape the power of karman and the repeated rebirths it brings, and by means of directly experienced insight (anubhava) to find the way out of the world of illusion and suffering in which we wander. We should not be too surprised, then, that the philosophical positions explored in the last few chapters, despite originating in distant spheres, should show a tendency toward convergence . It is of interest, for example, that Schopenhauer himself observed the similarity of Buddhist teaching to his own doctrine of the will. In a letter of 1856 he wrote: “Upādāna is the ‘Will-to-live,’ Karma is the individual Will without the intellect, it is what appears as the empirical character. . . . Altogether the agreement with my doctrine is wonderful.”2 Upādāna is “appropriation ,” that clinging to the idea of an individual self that is for Buddhism a kind of “original sin”; and “individual Will without the intellect” 166 schopenhauer’s encounter with indian thought is an excellent description, not perhaps of karman itself, but of the storeconsciousness or causal body through which it takes effect. Just as for Schopenhauer the empirical world is the result of a progressive differentiation of the will, so for the two Indian schools the seemingly solid and objective world is an appearance, the result of karmic impressions (vāsanās) conditioning consciousness. Let us recall Śam . kara’s words, cited above in chapter 7: “And so the whole world . . . is impure, hollow, changeful like a running river, comparable to the series of flashes that seems to constitute a steady flame, insubstantial like the stalk of a plantain, comparable to foam, to the water of a mirage, to a dream and the like, being kept in being solely by the stream of the acts and impressions of acts (vāsanās) of its teeming living beings—this whole world, thus constituted, cannot be eradicated by those who identify themselves with it, and to them it seems eternal and solid.”3 Thus the picture that emerges at this point in our study has two principal aspects. First, as we saw in earlier chapters, for both Schopenhauer and the Indian philosophers the whole of material existence, the entire world of representation, the māyā of the Upanis.ads, the sam  sāra of later Hindu thought, the parikalpita-svabāva of Yogācāra, is no more than a network of appearances existing in the minds of living beings and having no final and inherent reality. Second, in later chapters we saw that this illusory world is brought about and kept in being by a metaphysical principle enjoying a higher degree of ontological reality, a dynamic volitional energy over which we have no control but which on the contrary controls us, conceived in different terms by Schopenhauer and the Indians but nonetheless appearing to be of an essentially similar nature. Before proceeding further, let us review in greater detail this second group of affinities and seek to gauge their extent and significance. Affinities between Schopenhauer’s Will and Indian Doctrines We have seen, first of all, that for both Schopenhauer and the Indian philosophers a fundamental consideration is that there exists a metaphysical force supporting the world-appearance and providing the basis out of which it comes into being.4 Schopenhauer calls this force will. It is, he argues, the Conclusions: Schopenhauer’s Will and Comparable Indian Ideas 167 essence of every phenomenon, not only of animate but also of inanimate existence , that which makes it what it is and gives to it its energy. In its ultimate nature will is unmanifest, formless, unknowable, and devoid of knowledge. Having neither beginning nor end, it is not a...