The Buddhist Connection

Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Eastern thought. He kept a Buddha statue on his desk and called the Upanishads his greatest consolation.

His philosophy of the Will maps closely onto the Buddhist idea of craving as the root of suffering. Both traditions treat desire as the source of dissatisfaction, the separate self as an illusion, and detachment as the path to peace — conclusions he reached through Western reasoning alone.