Abstract

Schopenhauer did not believe in the existence of God or the soul, yet he thought Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism to contain some of the profoundest of all truths, in symbolic form. He is the only major Western philosopher to take account of the Hindu and Buddhist religions and he shares a number of fundamental doctrines with them. Perhaps surprisingly, some of these have been confirmed by modern science. So there are three‐way comparisons to be made between Schopenhauerism, Buddhism, and modern science.