Buddhism vs Schopenhauer: The Closest Western Echo

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-08-27

Arthur Schopenhauer is often called the Western philosopher closest to Buddhism — and he embraced the comparison, even keeping a gilded statue of the Buddha in his study. His vision of a world driven by a blind, restless “Will” echoes the Buddhist teaching that craving is the root of suffering; his ethics of compassion and renunciation run parallel too. Yet he reached these ideas largely on his own, and real differences remain.

The short answer

No major Western thinker sits nearer to Buddhism than Schopenhauer (1788–1860). At the heart of his philosophy is a bleak and powerful idea: beneath the orderly world we perceive lies a single, blind, insatiable striving he calls the Will, which drives all things and can never be satisfied — so existence is shot through with suffering. The resonance with Buddhism’s diagnosis — that craving (taṇhā) is what binds us to suffering — is immediate and deep, and Schopenhauer knew it, praising Buddhism as the finest of religions. But two cautions frame everything that follows: he did not take his system from Buddhism (he arrived at it through Kant, Plato and the Hindu Upaniṣads, and met Buddhism more fully afterward), and for all the affinity, his philosophy and the Dharma finally diverge. His case is the most rewarding in any comparison of Buddhism with Western thought. (Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)

A philosopher who loved Buddhism

Schopenhauer’s admiration was open and lifelong. In the second volume of his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, he wrote that if he were to measure religions against the conclusions of his own philosophy, he would have to grant Buddhism the highest place among them — an extraordinary judgment for a European philosopher of his era. He kept a gilded bronze figure of the Buddha in his study, honored almost as a shrine, and delighted in what he saw as the convergence of Eastern wisdom with his own hard-won conclusions.

This was not a fashionable pose. Schopenhauer was one of the first serious Western philosophers to take Indian thought as a genuine partner in the search for truth, at a time when most of European philosophy ignored it. That openness alone makes him a landmark in the meeting of East and West.

The deep affinities

Read side by side, the parallels are genuinely striking.

• The Will and craving. Schopenhauer’s Will is a blind, endless striving with no goal beyond more striving — and because it is never satisfied, life is marked by lack, restlessness and pain. This maps closely onto the Buddhist teaching that craving (taṇhā) drives the round of suffering (dukkha): we suffer because we ceaselessly want. Scholars such as Peter Abelsen have drawn out the comparison in detail.
• Salvation as letting go. Schopenhauer’s way out is the “denial of the will-to-live” — a turning against blind craving through asceticism, renunciation and resignation. The structural echo of the Buddhist path — the cessation of craving as the door to freedom — is unmistakable.
• Compassion as the ground of ethics. In On the Basis of Morality (1840), Schopenhauer made compassion (Mitleid, “suffering-with”) the true foundation of morality, rooted in the insight that the boundaries between selves are less real than they seem. It is hard not to hear an echo of Buddhist compassion (karuṇā) and the teaching of not-self.

Three of the deepest notes in Buddhism — suffering born of craving, freedom through release, and compassion as the heart of ethics — all sound, in a Western key, in Schopenhauer.

But he did not get it from Buddhism

Here a common and tempting error must be corrected, because it reverses the actual history. It is easy to assume Schopenhauer derived his pessimistic system from Buddhism — but he did not.

Schopenhauer worked out the core of his philosophy between roughly 1814 and 1818, drawing chiefly on Kant (whose “thing-in-itself” he reinterpreted as the Will), on Plato, and on the Hindu Upaniṣads, which he read in a Latin translation (the Oupnek’hat) and revered all his life. In these formative years his Indian influence was Upaniṣadic and Vedāntic, not Buddhist. His fuller knowledge of Buddhism came later, deepening across the successive editions of his work as European scholarship on Buddhism grew — and he welcomed it as a confirmation of conclusions he had already reached, not as their source. As he himself put it, his system could not have arisen before the Upaniṣads, Plato and Kant could all cast their light at once. The affinity with Buddhism is real; the derivation is a myth.

Where they part ways

For all the resonance, Buddhism and Schopenhauer are congenial cousins, not twins, and two differences matter most.

The metaphysics. Schopenhauer’s Will is a single underlying reality — a thing-in-itself behind all appearances, in the Kantian sense. Buddhism deliberately avoids positing any such ultimate essence or ground; it explains the arising of experience through dependent origination, without a metaphysical substrate beneath it. Where Schopenhauer offers one Will as the hidden truth of the world, Buddhism offers no such single reality — a real philosophical divergence.

Pessimism versus a path that ends. Schopenhauer is usually read as a pessimist: for him, existence is something whose least-bad outcome is quiet resignation. Buddhism is not, in the end, pessimistic in that way. Its third noble truth insists that suffering can genuinely cease, and it offers a middle way — not mere resignation but a positive freedom and even joy. Abelsen notes that Buddhism is, in this sense, “less severe” than Schopenhauer. The Buddha diagnoses suffering in order to cure it; Schopenhauer often seems to counsel enduring it.

A side-by-side

The closest echo — and its limits

Schopenhauer remains the West’s most Buddhist-sounding philosopher, and reading him is one of the best ways for a Western mind to feel, from the inside, why Buddhism finds suffering woven into unchecked desire. His compassion-centred ethics and his path of renunciation are genuine parallels, honestly arrived at. But he is best met as a fellow traveler who took a different road — a Kantian pessimist who glimpsed something the Buddha taught, rather than a Buddhist in Western dress. For the philosopher he influenced, who turned against Buddhism where Schopenhauer embraced it, see Buddhism vs Nietzsche; and for the teaching his “Will” so resembles, the truth of suffering.