Schopenhauer and Buddhism
by Peter Abelsen
Amsterdam, Holland
Philosophy East & West, Volume 43, Number 2
April 1993
by University of Hawaii Press
If I were to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I would have to consider Buddhism the finest of all religion.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer [1]
1. Introduction
When the tenets of Buddhism became known in Europe during the third and fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer was delighted with the affinity they showed to his own philosophy. Having completed his main work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung as early as 1818, he considered it an entirely new (and thus pure) expression of the wisdom once taught by the Buddha-at times he even called himself a "Buddhaist."2
This conviction of being an original European Buddhist kept Schopenhauer from making a detailed philosophical comparison between his system and those of the Buddhist schools he had read up on.3 To him, the connection was obvious. In reprints of the main work and later writings, he did point out certain similarities, making comments on Buddhism that astonish the present-day reader with their adequacy (considering the immaturity of Indology in his time), but he never bothered to explain the exact philosophical nature of the link he put forward, causing it to remain a matter of atmosphere rather than content.
As a matter of fact, it can be disputed if Schopenhauer's philosophy and Buddhism do indeed breathe the same atmosphere. Schopenhauer often put emphasis on Buddhism's pessimistic outlook on earthly existence, 4 but compared to his world view, which is very severe, Buddhism seems almost cheerful. The Sanskrit word duhkha, by which existence is typified in the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, is usually translated as 'suffering', but it also has the connotation of 'unrest'. In fact, the first Truth is about the transitoriness of life, and how this deprives man of inner peace. To be sure, this is not opposed to anything Schopenhauer said, but it lacks the sheer disgust of life that is characteristic of his doctrine. Yet again, it may be unfair to compare the mood of one man's philosophy with the blended mood of Buddhist literature, with its countless authors. There will undoubtedly be Buddhist texts in which life is depicted in a Schopenhauerian or even more horrifying way. Still, this all goes to show that atmosphere, however crucial to any philosophy of life, should not be too big a factor in comparing two doctrines.
Both Schopenhauerian and Buddhist philosophy express a certain Weltanschauung; therefore cerebral analysis alone will not reveal the real meaning of either-a fair amount of hermeneutical proficiency is also required. But this does not alter the fact that both lines of thought should be compared as specifically as possible if philosophical connections or differences are to be established.
For one thing, the comparativist should be dealing with more than Buddhism as such,5 since there exists a variety of philosophical views within this religion. It is not even enough when a distinction is made between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism,6 because the history of the latter contains such diverging schools of thought as the Madhyamika and the Yogacara, both of which had a long and irregular development out of their common root, Prajnaparamita literature. Any worthwhile comparison must involve these four basic forms of Buddhist philosophy in their own right.
At the same time, the comparativist should only be concerned with the substantial features of these philosophies (there is no point, for instance, in mentioning details like the shared love of animals in Buddhist and Schopenhauerian philosophy).7
All of this considered, I take as a set of criteria for my own comparison the following account of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
1. It is based on a critique of the intellect, from which it follows that time, space, and causality (the tripartite framework of the world of subjects and objects) are not real in an absolute sense.
2. This leads to the assumption of a transcendental reality (automatically making this a religious world view but, because of the ultimate unreality of any subject, and so, too, the unreality of a divine subject, not a theistic one).
3. This ultimate reality is by its nature incomprehensible to the intellect, yet is supposed to be 'sensible' in our experience of life (in other words: a reality transcending thought but immanent in life itself).
4. This 'recognition' of ultimate reality is related to the fact that life is inescapably ruled by passion, need, pain, and fear, all being promptings of the will, which therefore symbolizes the Real.
I will elaborate on these points as I use them in the following paragraphs.
II. Schopenhauer and the Old Wisdom School
"Old Wisdom School" is a collective name for the first group of sects to evolve out of early Buddhism. The most prominent of these, the Sarvastivada, fixed its philosophical attention on the Buddha's teaching that the five skandhas, or 'transitory factors of worldly existence', namely, material form (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sa.mjina), impulses (samskara), and awareness (vijnana) were not the self. Whereas the Buddha left it undiscussed whether a self exists at all (obviously regarding the question as pointless),8 the Sarvastivadins radicalized his teaching into a doctrine that flatly denies all substance. All that we experience in the world and in our minds is restless change; therefore, the idea that things have an imperishable essence 'behind' their ever-changing qualities (like the atman of Hinduism) is untenable. But if there is no lasting self, then every change must involve total destruction. Everything comes into being as it wholly is, to vanish completely after an infinitesimally short moment. After this, something comes about that may look the same but is entirely new.9
In this doctrine, the skandhas are interpreted as five groups of dharmas, discrete existence-points constituting the internal and external world. Material things, feelings, thoughts, apperceptions, and impulses are nothing but swarms of dharmas, which, because they arise each time in more or less the same configuration, create the illusion of things that last while they change-and of a persistent 'I' beholding these changes and thus being tormented by transitoriness.
Salvation comes when ascesis and meditation bring about the ego-dissolving realization that reality is but a turbulence of dharmas.
In arguing that Buddhism could not have been influential on the writing of his main work, Schopenhauer stressed that, if anything, only the Burmese form was known at that time.10 From this, one gathers that he considered this form the least interesting.
Burmese Buddhism accords with the Old Wisdom School.
It is indeed hard to imagine that he could have found anything in his line in the doctrine above. Because of the rigorous empiricism that it basically is, the reality of time and space, for the dharmas to come about in, is a necessary presupposition. This goes directly against criterion (1), referring to the epistemological basis of Schopenhauer's philosophy -- which I will now summarize in my own words.
"Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung" read the opening words of the main work. Something can only be said to exist if it is in some way perceptible; to exist is to be an object to a subject. And since I am the only subject the existence of which I cannot doubt, the world is my representation (in using this term in stead of 'perception' Schopenhauer wanted to stress the activeness of the subject).
At the same time, however, there is no subject without object. 'Subject' and 'object' are correlative concepts, deriving their meaning from each other; therefore, the one cannot be more real than the other. If the not-I is a mere representation, something to which no absolute reality can be attributed, this also goes for the I. Therefore, the world as representation embraces both the things that I behold and myself as their beholder. Or, in Schopenhauer's words: the opposition of subject and object is the "first, general and essential form" of the Vorstellung11.
Who or what, then, is the true representer of this world in which I am an individual being? To find an answer, we must take a closer look at how the world is known.
Just how is the world in which I am an individual subject of objects represented? -- as a spatiotemporal universe, ruled by the fourfold Law of Sufficient Reason (Satz vom zureichenden Grunde). Whatever I perceive is in space and time, and for anything to exist or happen there must be either a physical, logical, mathematical, or motivational reason. My entire experience of the world, from discursive ideas down to basic perceptions, is based on these a priori conditions. Even the notion of being a physical entity is basically no more than the immediate assumption that vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste are the temporal effects that an outside world has on 'my body'.
Thus, for anything to be empirically real, it must be spatial, temporal, and causal. Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves! If space is thought of as an empirical entity, the insoluble problem arises whether it is finite or infinite. In the first case, there would have to be something 'outside' space, a metaspace, which is an absurd notion; but in the second case it could never be differentiated of anything and would therefore have no identity. If time is finite, there would have to be something 'before' and 'after' it, which again is absurd; but if it is infinite, it would take an eternity to arrive at the present moment, which therefore could never come about. Finite causality would enhance an unimaginable 'first cause' of all events in the universe, while infinite causality poses, mutatis mutandis, the same problem as infinite time.
This antinomic character of time, space, and causality shows them to be not 'things' but the very cadres of our sensory and intellectual experience of the world. They are not experienced themselves, but the tripartite way in which we experience. Schopenhauer adheres to Immanuel Kant's maxim: empirical reality is transcendental ideality: as long as we consider ourselves personal beings (and we cannot do otherwise without going mad), we must take the empirical world to be quite real. But ultimately this causal universe in space and time must be seen as ideal, of intellectual origin.
Ultimate reality, or the Ding an sich as Schopenhauer calls it in tribute to Kant, must be transcendent to space, time, and causality -- a transcendent One -- having the world, including my person, as its representation.
True, the epistemology above shows the 'I' to be a mere representation, but it leads up to a monistic conclusion with which the utter pluralism of the Old Wisdom School is totally incompatible.
III. Schopenhauer and the Prajnaparamita
The Mahayana (Great Vehicle) first started as a countermovement to the Old Wisdom School, calling it Hinayana (Small Vehicle) because of its elitist character. Maintaining the doctrine of no-self only as a theory of empirical phenomena, the reformists produced a vast body of sutras, the Prajnaparamita ('Wisdom Gone Beyond'), which were claimed to hold the true exegesis of the Buddha's teachings.
Although most nineteenth-century Orientalists shunned Prajnaparamita literature because of its mysteriousness, Schopenhauer, a thinker of notorious independence, equated it to the gist of his doctrine.
Whatever remains after the Will12 has vanished must seem to those who are still filled by it nothing. But to the man in whom the Will has turned and negated itself, this world, so real to us with all its suns and Milky Ways, is -- nothing.
In the third edition, a footnote is added to these concluding words of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:
This is precisely the "Pradschna-Paramita" of the Buddhists, the 'Beyond All Knowledge', i, .e., the point where subject and object no longer exist. (See I. J. Schmidt, Ueber das Mahayana und Pratschna-Paramita.)
The exact words of Isaak Jacob Schmidt13 are no longer ascertainable, but these sutras indeed reflect the insight that the world of subject and object is but a restless shadow play of true reality. Still, this alone is no proof of a specific relation (after all, the unreality of subject and object has been held by others, such as Hegel; and "Hegelei" was the very last thing Schopenhauer felt close to).
I will now comment on some characteristic excerpts of the Prajnaparamita, with regard to the criteria mentioned in section I above.
(A) The Lord: One who perceives form [feeling, perception, impulse, or consciousness], has duality. One who perceives anything has duality. As far as there is duality, there is existence. Insofar as there is existence, there are the karma-formations. And as far as there are karma-formations, beings are not liberated from birth, decay, sickness, death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness and despair.14
This summary of the consequences of our 'skandha fallacy' clearly shows the idea that earthly existence is based on the mutuality (duality) of subject and object.
Whereas Schopenhauer's world as Representation is governed by the Satz vom Crunde,'5 the world according to the Buddhists is also causal to the core, insofar as it is karmic: no action or occurrence is without cause, or without effect on future actions and occurrences.
Schopenhauer made several remarks on the belief in reincarnation, which is quintessential for the karma doctrine. He assumed there had to be some truth in a belief as widespread as this, but he could not accept the idea of metempsychosis: the transmigration of a soul with personal hallmarks. He argued that one's personality, consisting mainly of opinions and memories, was basically intellectual and as such tied to the Vorstellung that is human existence. Thus it could never be carried over the threshold of death. Reincarnation could only be true in the sense of a palingenesis of the Ding an sich into the individual beings of the world as Representation.16 He was convinced, however, that the Buddhists used the concept of metempsychosis only as a myth for the common herd and, like him, really held the idea of palingenesis of the Absolute, especially since he had read about an "esoteric Buddhist doctrine"17 -- undoubtedly the doctrine of the metaphysical alaya consciousness of the idealist Yogacara school (discussed at length in § 5).
In fact, the matter is more complicated. Surely, knowing that the skandhas are not the self, no learned Buddhist could ever believe in the transmigration of an unchanging core bearing the imprint of his personality. In the narrow sense of the word, metempsychosis was never seriously considered in Buddhism. But it never completely abandoned the idea of rebirth, either. Even in the Milindapaniha, a Hinayana text, the idea of rebirth for those who do not achieve nirvana is somehow retained. The Yogacara sects, in their turn, linked the skandha vijinana to the idea of a subtle nucleus at the center of unenlightened mental activity, remaining within time and space after death and engaging a new mother's womb at the moment of conception.
The Buddhist combination of the skandha critique with the ancient idea of rebirth may seem something of a tour de force, but within the context of the Prajnaparamita, more so than in Hinayana literature, it becomes clear that ideas like this were not just maintained as moral incentives for the common man. The philosophy of the Mahayana shows a fundamental and well-considered ambivalence toward the notion of self -- and the relation between phenomenal and absolute reality.
(B) Form is like a mass of foam, it has no solidity, it is full of cracks and holes, and it has no substantial inner core. Feeling is like a bubble, which swiftly rises and swiftly disappears, and it has no durable subsistence. Perception is like a mirage. As in a mirage pool absolutely no water at all can be found [so there is nothing substantial in that which is perceived]. Impulses are like the trunk of a plantain tree: when you strip off one leaf-sheath after another nothing remains, and you cannot lay hand on a core within. Consciousness is like a mock show, as when magically created soldiers, conjured up by a magician, are seen marching through the streets.18
Again, an ambivalent attitude toward the notion of self can be detected. This survey of the skandhas shows the inner and extramental world to be wholly ephemeral. But who is fooled by the "mirage"?
It would be wrong to consider these texts the products of naive minds, trying to make a purely nihilistic statement but, by putting the matter in an overly poetic way, inadvertently leaving open the possibility of a 'dreamer' of the dream of life. It is not without significance that no more is said than that the constituents of the person are insubstantial. 'Someone' is still watching the bursting bubble that once was feeling, grasping the foam which was believed to be material form, and finding out that the impulses of the will stem from nothing.
And who is putting on the "mock show"?
A similar kind of deliberate ambiguity is found in the philosophy of Will and Representation.
Schopenhauer found it simply too unsatisfactory to stop short (as Kant had done) at the epistemological finding that the Ding an sich, transcending the a priori forms of the intellect, was unknowable.19 He insisted that a clue to the suprapersonal 'me', having the I-and-the-world as a Vorstellung, was to be found in an examination of the empirical 'me'.
So, to gain metaphysical insight, he resorted to introspection!-the results of which I will now summarize.
Commonsensically, I think of myself as a body, endowed with reason, within the world. But prior to this objective self-image, preceding thought, action, and even the notion of 'I', my self-consciousness consists only of desires, emotions, and physical promptings (lumped together by Schopenhauer as manifestations of one thing: will).
Prereflectively, I am will.
As a mental phenomenon, the will has no extent in space, but unlike anything else it also has no cause! Whatever I desire may be explainable in some way or other, but this must be distinguished from the blunt fact that my will is continually active. The intellect presents the will with motives in time and space, but the will as such, this perpetual stream that is in fact one's sheer will to live, is as unexplainable as life itself.
At bottom, will and life are one.
Coming out of nowhere, the only a priori form in which my will presents itself is that of time, since it is known in the succesion of its impulses. This makes it the most direct (that is, the least a priori mediated) of all phenomena, and therefore the preeminent phenomenon to serve as a symbol of the Real -- a symbol, not an identification. Or, in Schopenhauer's own words:
We should realize that [with the word "Will"] we are only using a denominatio a potiori [best suitable designation], by which the original meaning of 'will' is considerably enlarged.20
Here we touch on a vital clue for the correct understanding of Schopenhauer: in our will, ultimate reality glimmers through the Vorstellung -- but this is not quite the same as saying that the psychological will is the only real thing in a world of phantasms. The will to live is the most accurate representation of true reality.
As Will my will is the Real.
But it is not just its lack of a cause that gives the will its symbolic significance. Metaphysics can only be meaningful if it reflects the world we know. If the Real is to be discussed at all, this can only be done in terms of its appearance; tearing the former from the latter and dealing with it as an ens extramundanum would be stooping to dogmatism.21 Hence criterion (3).
[My philosophy] does not draw conclusions about what lies beyond experience, it only clarifies the things given in outer and inner experience; it thus restricts itself to understanding the essence of the world from its [empirical] connections. It is therefore immanent in the Kantian sense of the word.22
The will is the first and the foremost. I may sometimes be able to curb a certain desire through the knowledge that its fulfillment will cause me harm, but this only shows the subservience of my intellect to the utmost (and most unreasoned) desire of all: to live and be free of pain and need -- of which desire even suicide is an expression. I may lose all intellectual ability, but as long as I live I shall have psychological and physical needs. Therefore my will must be the closest thing to the Real. And if solipsism is to be avoided, I must presume that everybody and everything else has the same kernel of existence which in me appears as my will. Human and animal drive and vigor, the sprouting power of plants, and the sheer weight of inanimate objects are, from a metaphysical point of view, all the same thing: Will to Live.
This is why hunger, hatred, fear, and lust are the rulers of life.
Schopenhauer's observation that the impulses of the will come out of the blue is paralleled by the analogy of the samskara with a coreless plaintain tree. Yet neither fragment (A) nor fragment (B) highlights the samskara against the other skandhas. All five are mentioned in one breath, and this seems to be in stark contrast to Schopenhauer's assessment of the will.
It must be said that the early Buddhist text Samyutta Nikaya does depict the samskara as the premier existence factor, the one skandha to make the five of them together appear as a person's self.23 And this text has remained canonical throughout the history of Buddhism, so perhaps the authors of the Prajnaparamita would not have disagreed entirely with Schopenhauer's assessment, although not making it themselves. This assumption might be enhanced by the resemblance between Schopenhauer's suprapersonal Will and the Buddhist idea of an all-pervading Craving (trsna), defined in the second Noble Truth as the principle of samsara, the sorrowful world of birth and death. Some scholars indeed attach great significance to this resemblance,24 but the present writer is having his doubts.
Whereas concepts like samskara and upadana ('grasping for existence') 25 are amply discussed in Buddhist literature, remarkably little is said about trsna, which seems to be a mere description of samsaric existence rather than a theoretical concept. In any case, trsna was never presented as a straight metaphysical enlargement of the samskara as is the Will to Live of the psychological will in Schopenhauer's philosophy. All that seems safe to say about it is this: whereas Peace is the mode of nirvana, Craving is the mode of samsara; and as far as the cycle of life and death is kept going by the impulses of the mortal's will, samskara and trsna are in some way related. Taking this rather loose connection as a parallel of Schopenhauer's step from epistemology to metaphysics would, in my view, involve so much 'hermeneutical proficiency' as to render the comparison meaningless.
On the other hand, it would be a waste of time to look for distinctive, Western-style philosophical arguments in the Prajnaparamita. T.hese sutra's were meant to be meditated upon in the pursuit of enlightenment. In the context of this pursuit, philosophical findings were made, but the student was to be prevented from taking these as positive truths. According to the Prajnaparamita, ultimate truth transcends reason; therefore, all its findings and concepts are tentative and must be enfeebled and contradicted to allow students to rid themselves of intellectual fixations.
This leads to a remarkable conclusion:
(C) A fully enlightened Buddha is like a magical illusion, is like a dream.... Even Nirvana ... is like a magical illusion, is like a dream.... Even if perchance there could be anything more distinguished, of that too I would say it is like an illusion, like a dream. For illusion and Nirvana are not two different things, nor are dreams and Nirvana.26
The world, as we perceive it, consists of nothing but ephemeral phenomena; it is devoid of substance, empty. Yet this world is all we know -- which is to say that we are only fit to know what we perceive. Thus the blessed state of liberation from transitoriness transcends our mental ability; our conceptions of it are also empty.
All we ever know and imagine is empty. Therefore, nirvana and samsara are indistinguishable!
This does not mean that true reality is a Void. The concept of emptiness (sunyata) is not the final answer to the question of existence, but a guideline for meditation. In fact, one of the eighteen kinds of emptiness distinguished in the Prajnaparamita is the emptiness of emptiness.27 In the last stages of the meditation on emptiness, wisdom becomes perfect wisdom by surpassing both difference and identity of the world and the Real in contemplating the Suchness (tathata) of emptiness.28
This concept of emptiness has led many to believe that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion, but Schopenhauer knew better:
If nirvana is defined as nothingness, this only means there is no element of samsara that could be used to define or construct nirvana.29
It is easy to see why he felt close to such a view. He had put forward himself that the final truth, about the Ding an sich, could never be expressed in intellectual terms, that is, terms derived from the world as Representation.
It might look as if the sameness of nirvana and samsara is inconsonant with the picture of a Representation brought forth by a metaphysical Will, since the latter seems indicative of a dualistic view. But Schopenhauer was the strictest of monists, rejecting all theories that separate reality into different ontological regions. Any such theory, he argued, presupposed the creation of this world by either a divine person or an emanating world soul, which amounted to letting the Satz vom Grunde exceed the Representation, and involved the absurd notion of an ultimate Subject of the subject-and-object that is the world in space and time. He considered the sheer idea of creationism silly, remarking: "Why didn't Creation stay at home, where It was comfortable and to which It must return anyway?"30 Like "samsara" and "nirvana," the concepts of Representation and Will do not denote separate ontological 'spheres' but two aspects of the one reality there is. With those concepts Schopenhauer did not mean to give an overview of reality; he did not claim to have a transcendent vantage point from which the world could be seen to come about. His philosophy was the last of the great metaphysical systems of the West, but at the same time it was the first explanation of how we are always trapped within our own view. He tried to make this human view on reality as clear as possible by showing us the world both epistemologically and metaphysically -- thus the dual perspective of Representation and Will.
Still, it cannot be denied that Schopenhauer often referred to the Will as if it was a supernatural entity, an evil godhead deceiving and tormenting its creatures. This is particularly the case in the Parerga und Paralipomena, the series of additional essays that first brought him fame and has remained the most popular part of his oeuvre. Despite the many explicit instructions on how to interpret his philosophy, even in the Parerga,31 this manner of mythologizing the Will may easily confuse the reader. It has indeed confused many scholars.... But if a philosophy of life is to be vital and penetrating, a literary manner of expressing the respective thoughts and ideas is a merit rather than a demerit. The ambiguities and literary digressions in Schopenhauer's work are part and parcel of his philosophical message -- and I am sure he meant them exactly that way. Although he never wrote in so many words that his ambiguous style was intentional, he emphatically praised poets like Calderon de la Barca and such mystics as Jacob Bohme and Meister Eckhart. As a young man, he wrote:
He who speaks adversely about the paradoxicalness of a work, apparently thinks there already is a lot of wisdom about, and that all that is left to be done is to dot the i's and cross the t's.32
All in all, in concluding this paragraph it must be said that a definite equation cannot be established.
The main difficulty in relating Schopenhauer's philosophy to the Prajnaparamita lies in the fact that the latter lacks the straightforward prevalence of the will, which prevalence is the hallmark of the former. So criterion (4) poses a problem. Exactly how big a problem is difficult to say; the sutras of the Prajnaparamita may not be as nonsensical as they were once thought to be, but they do differ in style from the argumentative philosophies of the West, of which Schopenhauer's work, despite its literariness, is a true example.
But the history of Buddhism has produced a thinker whose style is very argumentative indeed: Nagarjuna -- to whom I will now turn.e negation of the Will to Live.