Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 2 - East–West Dialogue via Schopenhauer

  • Angela Moorjani, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Book:
    Beckett and Buddhism
    Published online:
    08 July 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021, pp 38-63

  • Summary

    The second chapter explores in more detail the Buddhist concepts relayed by Schopenhauer cycling through Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the Beckett of the 1930s and writers and artists with whom he was conversant, the chapter chronicles what their works owe to the Buddha and Schopenhauer’s teachings. Subsequent sections probe the analogies that are evident for Schopenhauer between Eastern and Western mysticism – the Buddha and Meister Eckhart’s teachings in particular – resulting in Beckett’s allusions throughout his oeuvre, over six decades, to both Buddhist and Christian Neoplatonic thought. The Buddha and Schopenhauer’s two-world view of the empirical and the metaphysical serves to interrogate nihilistic interpretations of the Buddhist absolute and to focus closely on Schopenhauer’s rescue of nirvāṇa from such misreadings. A short disquisition on the unknowable and silence, values Beckett shared with Eastern and Western thinkers, concludes this chapter.