In this article, I shall analyze Schopenhauer's conception of Buddhism in the context of the Western reception of Buddhism from the seventeenth century onwards. I will focus on Schopenhauer's notion of the Buddhist palingenesis and provide an overview of the Buddhist sources Schopenhauer read before the publication of the second edition of his main work The World as Will and Representation in 1844.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph of the essay: Luce Irigaray’s critics charge that her attempt to carve out a space for nature and the feminine self through an engagement with Buddhism smacks of Orientalism. Associating Buddhism with a philosophy of nature can lead to feminizing and exoticizing the non-Western other. Because she relies more on lessons learned from yogic teachers than Buddhist texts or scholarship, her work seems to be an appropriation of Buddhist ideas and (...) a critique of Western ideology 3 rather than a reflection of Buddhist philosophy. I trace Orientalist readings of Buddhism, including those of Irigaray, back to Hegel’s influence on comparative philosophy. Indeed, her analysis of the feminine self and nature often seem more like a response to Hegel than an examination of Buddhist principles. Some scholars resist Hegel’s reading by arguing that the Buddhist Absolute manifests in the indeterminately disjunctive and alternative versions of reality and self. Others suggest that the meaning of Buddhism can be found in examining its practices rather than its logic. (shrink)

Beyond vague references to his ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ influences, there exists almost no work on the impact made by Buddhist traditions on the work of Georges Bataille. This study takes a first step towards understanding this impact. It embarks upon a reading of 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' as a record of Bataille’s meditation practice infused with Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhist concepts and practices as he understood them, through the prism of European interactions therewith. The study (...) traces the evolution of what are here termed the ‘imagined Buddhisms’ emerging from such interactions, from early Euro-Buddhist encounters during the Christian missions, through the 19th-century birth of ‘Buddhist Studies’ and the related influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to an interwar avant-garde preoccupied with the rejection of the European values held to have caused WWI. Foremost of the avant-garde factions considered here is the secret society Acéphale, founded by Bataille with the stated aims of creating a new religion and waging war on ‘tout ce qui est reconnu aujourd’hui’. In the course of this investigation, a pattern of Buddhist traditions weaponised in support of European projects is established; one in which they are imagined and re-imagined alternately as equivalent and antagonist to the work of Bataille, his peers and their antecedents. 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' emerges in the light of Bataille’s ‘imagined Buddhism’ as a practical version of an inverted Nietzschean sovereignty, incorporating elements of the concepts and practices of Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhism as he understood them. In the former case, these include his method of dramatisation and the idea of Tibetan meditation as what he terms a means of ‘put[ting one] to sleep’. Such an ‘put[ting] to sleep’ is argued to be akin to the what Bataille elsewhere calls the ‘narcotic’ of the profane world and to which he offers his own practice as a solution. In the case of Japanese Zen, the process Bataille would come to call the 'opération souveraine' is shown to be present in 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' and to bear resemblance to the process of achieving the form of Zen enlightenment called satori. A momentary flash of insight, satori is also shown to be comparable to the breakthrough of sacred from profane. (shrink)

That Schopenhauer’s view of Buddhism influenced Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s Buddhism seems a commonplace among scholars. However, there seem to be no studies which actually demonstrated this, showing how Schopenhauer was their main source of Buddhism compared to the other Buddhist texts they read. In this article, I aim to fill this gap, analysing Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s Buddhism in the light of the sources of Buddhism they read. This will allow me to demonstrate how Schopenhauer was the main source of Buddhism (...) for both Wagner and Nietzsche, having a deep and long-lasting impact on their conceptions of Buddhism. (shrink)