Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.

The colonial encounter with India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the British in contact with new ideas, philosophy, and a new religion. This interface between Britain and India and the subsequent interest in, study, and translation of Hindu and Sanskrit texts by British officials and scholars greatly influenced British Romantic poets writing in the nineteenth century. This engagement also shaped Indians writing in the English language. This essay examines this interface and the influence of Hinduism on British Romantic literature.

The first chapter of this twenty-first-century reassessment of Beckett’s dialogue with Buddhist concepts investigates Beckett’s early source of Buddhist philosophy in Schopenhauer’s transmission of Eastern thought. The chapter addresses the doubt expressed by some Beckett exegetes about Schopenhauer as a viable source by detailing recent archival findings and the judgment of scholars of Buddhism on this question. Building on these findings, a section on Schopenhauer’s understanding of Upanishadic and Buddhist concepts counters doubts about his ability to distinguish between the two. The brief survey of what these two systems of Indian thought share and where they part ways is intended to lessen the chance of mistaking one for the other or singling out one, when it could be either, thereby setting the stage for the next chapters. An example of such a mistaken identity by Beckett scholars at the end of the chapter is intended as a cautionary tale.

Chapter 8 describes the development of the various forms of monism (material, personal, mental, abstract) after the Rigveda. The traditional correspondences, between ritual and what ritual controls, tend to collapse into a single identification, of subject with object, making for the prominence and coalescence of mental monism and abstract monism in the early Upanishads – under the influence of universal abstract value. Awareness of the unity of all things (monism) is associated with immortality. The monistic tendency is illustrated by focus on a single passage of the Chandogya Upani?ad.