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Chapter one Introduction Those who have read Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks will remember the episode toward the end when the protagonist, Thomas, now sensing the approach of death and close to despair, takes from his shelf a volume of philosophy, purchased years before but never opened, and as he turns its pages for the first time is overwhelmed by its contents. That book, it is generally supposed (although Mann does not actually say as much), was Schopenhauer’s principal work, The World as Will and Representation, and the description of the powerful (if temporary) impact it has upon Thomas Buddenbrook tells us much about the effect it had upon the educated public oflatenineteenth-andearlytwentieth-centuryEuropeandAmerica.Thelist of significant figures who at this time came under the influence of Schopenhauer ’s thought—in some cases for a time only, in others lastingly—makes remarkable reading: not only Thomas Mann, but also Conrad, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Melville, Strindberg, Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Proust, Turgenev , Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Wagner, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Nishida, Freud, Schrödinger, and many others. What drew people to Schopenhauer was his deeply felt concern with issues that matter not only to philosophers but to every man and woman: the nature of the world in which we find ourselves; the degree of reality it has; the cause of the suffering in it; the question of our own salvation and the meaning of our life. In Schopenhauer’s own words, “For if anything in the world is desirable . . . it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity.”1 Schopenhauer was fascinated by Indian thought and the ways in which it seemed to anticipate and confirm his own ideas, and this book seeks to explore the relationship. In passages dating from all periods of his writing 2 schopenhauer’s encounter with indian thought he tells us of the importance that Indian philosophical thought had for him; to take only two examples, in the 1818 preface of his principal work he invites his readers to compare his teachings with those of the Indians, suggesting that such a comparison will assist in correctly grasping his own doctrines: “If, I say, the reader has already received and assimilated the divine inspiration of ancient Indian wisdom, then he is best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. It will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue.”2 And toward the end of his life, referring to the Oupnek’hat—the translation of the Upanis.ads that was his lifelong reading—he writes in words that became widely known and did much to open the minds of Europeans and Americans to Asian thought: “With the exception of the original text, it is the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.”3 Since those words were written, many scholars have commented on the relation of Schopenhauer’s thought to Indian philosophical ideas. Nevertheless , a reassessment is overdue. It is well over a hundred years since the last comprehensive study of this kind, Max Hecker’s Schopenhauer und die indische Philosophie, was published.4 After a period of neglect, not least in the English-speaking world, the last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a vigorous renewal of interest in Schopenhauer’s thought that raised new issues and brought with it fresh perspectives.5 During the same century research into the philosophical and religious thought of India made great advances. In the early decades scholars such as Sylvian Lévi, L. de La Vallée Poussin, T. Stcherbatsky, and E. Lamotte began to examine the Vijñānavāda and Yogācāra texts. The important contributions of Paul Hacker, H. von Glasenapp, Edward Conze, and T. R. V. Murti belong to the 1950s and ’60s, and the studies of G. M. Nagao, C. Lindtner, L. Schmithausen, M. Sprung, J. L. Garfield, and others, aimed at clarifying the teachings of the Mahāyāna schools, to more recent decades. Very little of this considerable body of more recent knowledge has been utilized to reassess Schopenhauer’s position vis- à-vis Indian philosophical ideas. Thus new understandings are available on both sides of the equation—with regard to Schopenhauer and...

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