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Chapter Four: Schopenhauer’s Indian Sources: Buddhism
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Chapter four Schopenhauer’sIndianSources:Buddhism Schopenhauer’s Earliest Contacts with Buddhism Reliable sources for a knowledge of Buddhism became available to Europe later than did those for Hinduism. Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gītā was published in 1784; William Jones’s translation of the Gītā Govinda appeared in 1792 and his translation of the Hindu legal code (Manusmr ti) in 1794; the Oupnek’hat appeared in 1801–1802, Colebrooke’s essay“OntheVedas”involume8ofAsiatickResearchesin1805,andFriedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians in 1808. In contrast, the first substantial works on Buddhism did not appear until the middle of the 1820s. As a result, it has been widely assumed that Schopenhauer’s encounter with this religion did not begin until that time. This, however, is not correct. We saw in the previous chapter that in 1811 Schopenhauer was attending the ethnography lectures of Arnold Heeren at Göttingen and showing a marked interest in the information he received on Eastern religion . Almost fifty pages of Schopenhauer’s notes from these lectures survive, and among them can be found references to the Buddha, Lamaism in China and Tibet, the religion of Fo (i.e., Buddha) in China, the Pāli language and texts, and Japanese religion.1 A second common misunderstanding regarding Schopenhauer’s knowledge of Buddhism has its origin in the emphasis placed by nineteenthcenturyscholars (sometimesundertheinfluenceoftheProtestantpreference for early religious forms as against later and more developed stages) on the Pāli texts and the Theravāda tradition. This has carried over to later times; for example, Arthur Hübscher, in his study of Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in Its Intellectual Context: Thinker against the Tide, asserts that even when, later in life, Schopenhauer had access to the works of 38 schopenhauer’s encounter with indian thought Abel Rémusat, Schmidt, Burnouf, and Spence Hardy, his knowledge of Buddhism remained very imperfect since these works conveyed “only a vague understanding of Buddhism in its distorted variant, extant in Nepal, Tibet and China.” They do not provide, Hübscher continues, a clear insight into “the original Buddhism” and fail to make “a clean separation” between Buddhism and Brahmanism.2 Such a view is hardly acceptable today, and the fact that much of Schopenhauer’s knowledge of Buddhism relates to the Mahāyāna rather than to the Pāli tradition in no way invalidates it.3 Moreover , while it is true that Schopenhauer sometimes (but certainly not always) does not make a “clean separation” between Brahmanism and Buddhism, there is ample evidence that he understood the distinction and could apply it with precision when he wished.4 It was, rather, that he considered what the two religions held in common to be of greater importance and interest than what separated them, and his failure to engage in the “boundary thinking” of a later generation may be accounted as much a merit as a demerit. Schopenhauer’s next encounter with Buddhism, so far as we know, took place some two years after Heeren’s lectures, while he was staying in Weimar. Here, while moving in the circle of Goethe at the end of 1813, and possibly at the latter’s suggestion, he withdrew from the Ducal Library the two volumes of the Das Asiatische Magazin of 1802. Besides extensive material relating to Hinduism, these contained an article entitled “On the Religion of Fo in China.”5 “Fo” was a Chinese corruption of the name “Buddha,” and the article was a German version of a Chinese Buddhist text known as The Fortytwo Chapter Sūtra.6 A reference to this text occurs in the 1818 edition of The World as Will and Representation and shows beyond doubt that Schopenhauer had access to at least one Buddhist text prior to that date.7 Most probably , it was the first Buddhist text that he read. It was believed at the time to be the oldest Buddhist work known to the Chinese, for the text claims to be the translation of an Indian original brought to China in AD 65; in reality , however, this was not the case, and The Forty-two Chapter Sūtra was a Ch’an (i.e., Zen) text, composed in fifteenth-century China. Consequently, Schopenhauer’s—and the whole of Germany’s—earliest contact with an original Buddhist source had about it a definite Zen flavor. [34.201.37.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:05 GMT) Schopenhauer’s Indian Sources: Buddhism 39 Two years...