Schopenhauer and Hinduism: The Upanishads, Moksha and the Denial of the Will

Last updated: November 3, 2026

Arthur Schopenhauer put Hindu scripture on the same shelf as Kant and Plato, and he said so in the preface to The World as Will and Representation (published in December 1818, dated 1819), where he called access to the Vedas through the Upanishads “the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones”. He read them in a Latin version of a Persian translation, often, by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account, before going to sleep, and built a philosophy whose ethical climax, the denial of the will to live, looks a lot like the Indian ideal of liberation from the cycle of rebirth. How close the resemblance really is turns out to be the interesting part.

The meme has Schopenhauer making the pitch himself: “Yeah, sex is cool, but have you tried denying the will-to-live?” It is a fair summary of where book four of his main work ends up.

Why the Meme Is Not Exaggerating

For Schopenhauer, sexual desire is the strongest expression of the will to live, so renouncing it is the first step towards denying that will. The meme simply puts the two sentences side by side.

The will, in Schopenhauer’s system (more on it in our post on his free will paradox), is the blind, restless striving that underlies everything, from gravity to hunger to ambition, and it is the reason life consists mostly of wanting and suffering. He writes in section 56 of The World as Will and Representation that anyone can convince himself from the animal world “how essential to all life is suffering”. Sex matters to him because it carries the will beyond the individual into the next generation. In section 60 he calls the genitals “properly the focus of will”. In section 68 he draws the conclusion the meme turns into a joke: voluntary and complete chastity is “the first step in asceticism or the denial of the will to live”. The ascetic’s body expresses the sexual impulse, but he “denies the will and gives the lie to the body”. Schopenhauer presents it as what follows once you see what the will is, and he calls the saints and ascetics who get there rare.

A Mughal Prince, a French Orientalist and a Latin Book

Schopenhauer did not read the Upanishads in Sanskrit. He read a Latin translation of a Persian translation, published in two volumes as the Oupnek’hat in 1801 and 1802.

In the seventeenth century the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan, had the Upanishads translated into Persian with the help of pandits from Benares. As Max Müller recounts in the introduction to his own translation, the work was finished in 1657, and Dara Shikoh was put to death by his brother Aurangzeb two years later. The French scholar Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron later obtained a manuscript of the Persian version and turned it into Latin.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Schopenhauer was introduced to classical Indian thought in late 1813 by the orientalist Friedrich Majer and began reading the Upanishads in March 1814. The historian Urs App, who studied Schopenhauer’s annotated copy, notes in “Required Reading: Schopenhauer’s Favorite Book” that only about forty percent of the nearly 1,800 pages is actual Upanishad translation, the rest being commentary and notes, and that almost half of the pages carry traces of Schopenhauer’s reading. Schopenhauer’s verdict on the book, written in Parerga and Paralipomena and quoted by Müller, was emphatic: it had been “the solace of my life” and would be the solace of his death.

Borrowed, Confirmed, or Both?

Whether Schopenhauer took his philosophy from Indian sources or found them confirming ideas he already had is disputed, and he himself took a clear and slightly vain position on it.

In the same preface that praises the Upanishads, Schopenhauer writes that each of their individual aphorisms could be deduced from the thought he is about to present, though not the converse: his thought, he insists, is “by no means” to be found in the Upanishads. In public, then, his system contains everything in the Upanishads and more. In a private note from 1816, quoted by the historian Urs App in the introduction to Schopenhauer’s Compass, he sounded less proud: he did not believe his teaching could have come into being before “the Upanishads, Plato, and Kant” cast their rays into one mind at the same time. Modern scholarship is more cautious. The SEP calls the Upanishads “a subsequent, but often highlighted inspiration”, subsequent, in its account, to Spinoza’s influence on his double-aspect view of the world. App’s work on the annotated Oupnek’hat argues that any account of how Schopenhauer’s system arose has to take his reading of that book into account.

The timeline makes a clean answer difficult: he started reading the Upanishads in 1814, while the system was still taking shape, and published his main work at the end of 1818. Our best guess is that Kant and Plato supplied the frame, and the Upanishads arrived early enough to colour how he expressed it, possibly more.

Why Schopenhauer Became the Internet’s Favourite Pessimist

Schopenhauer is one of the most memed philosophers online, and it is easy to see why. He wrote about the misery of existence with a dry wit that translates perfectly into a caption. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844) he describes human life as a business whose returns fall far short of its costs. In his late essays he compared the world to a penal colony, called optimism a wicked way of thinking in the face of so much suffering, and his famous portraits, with their furious white tufts of hair and a mouth that seems to have just tasted something bitter, do the rest.

His private life supplies the punchlines. He lived alone in Frankfurt for the last decades of his life with a succession of poodles, and several of them, by the usual accounts, were called Atma, a Sanskrit word for the self or soul, which makes his dogs the most direct link between this article’s two subjects. He dined at the same hotel restaurant for years and was said to place a gold coin on the table, promising to give it to the poor on the day the English officers at the next table talked about anything other than horses, women and dogs. The coin, the story goes, never left his pocket.

Not every Schopenhauer meme quotes him correctly. The line that talent hits a target no one else can hit while genius hits a target no one else can see is genuinely his, from the second volume of his main work. The popular claim that all truth passes through three stages, first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as self-evident, is regularly captioned with his face, but nobody has found it in his writings. For a philosopher who complained bitterly that his work was ignored for decades, being famous mainly for something he never wrote would have been one more proof that the world is badly arranged.

The memes usually reduce him to a mascot of gloom, but the Indian side of his thought complicates that picture. Schopenhauer did not think suffering was the last word. He thought it could be seen through, and he believed the Upanishads had seen through it first. That conviction, more than any punchline, is why he read them every night and why the comparison in the rest of this article matters.

The Veil of Maya and “This Thou Art”

Two Hindu ideas do real work in Schopenhauer’s system. Maya explains why the world of separate individuals is a kind of illusion, and the formula tat tvam asi, “this thou art”, explains why compassion is the basis of morality.

Early in his main work, Schopenhauer lines up his own view with Kant’s distinction between appearance and thing in itself and with “the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers”, who speak of “Mâyâ, the veil of deception” that blinds mortals to the nature of the world (section 3). For Schopenhauer, space and time split the one will into countless individuals who compete and hurt each other, without knowing that they are expressions of the same thing.

Morality begins when someone sees through this. In section 66 he returns to what he calls “the formula of the Vedas”, first introduced in section 44, and says that he knows no better way to express that insight, with reference to action, than “Tat twam asi!” (This thou art!). Whoever can say this to himself about every being he meets, Schopenhauer writes, is certain of all virtue. The phrase comes from the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7 and the passages that follow), where in the Advaita reading, the most famous though not the only one, it expresses the identity of the individual self with ultimate reality, and Schopenhauer turns it into the foundation of an ethics of compassion: hurting another is, at the deepest level, hurting yourself.

Moksha, Nirvana and a Very Western Nothing

Moksha in Hindu traditions means liberation from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. Schopenhauer’s denial of the will has the same structure, an exit from endless striving, but he describes the result very differently.

Britannica defines moksha as liberation from samsara and notes that in monistic traditions such as Advaita Vedanta it is understood as a transformation of knowledge, seeing the truly real behind the fog of ignorance. Schopenhauer knew the idea and admired its popular form. In section 63 he praises the myth of transmigration and quotes the Oupnek’hat’s promise to those who reach complete resignation that they will not be born again: “Non adsumes iterum existentiam apparentem” (“you will not take on apparent existence again”). Never, he says, has a myth come closer to philosophical truth.

Yet at the very end of book four, in section 71, he declines to give what remains a positive philosophical content, beyond pointing to the states mystics call “ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God”, which he says cannot properly be called knowledge. He refuses to evade the nothingness behind all holiness “like the Indians”, through myths and meaningless words such as “reabsorption in Brahma” or the Buddhist Nirvana, and closes instead with the famous reversal: to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, “this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways” is, in his last word, “nothing”. Where Advaita, in Britannica’s description, speaks of finally seeing the truly real, Schopenhauer offers only a nothing that is nothing to us while we still want things. Calling his ideal “moksha” is therefore a useful comparison, not a translation.

Brahman Is Bliss, the Will Is Hunger

The deepest difference between Schopenhauer and the Upanishads is easy to miss, because both describe the everyday world as a kind of illusion and both point to a single reality behind the many. In Schopenhauer, that reality is the will: a blind, endless striving that never finds satisfaction, which is why life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, as he puts it in section 57 of his main work. Whenever a desire is satisfied, a new one arises, and if none does, boredom takes its place. The ultimate reality of the world, for him, is something like hunger.

In the Vedanta tradition he admired, the ultimate reality, Brahman, is described very differently. A classic formula from later Vedanta calls it sat, chit, ananda: being, consciousness and bliss. To realise that one’s true self, atman, is identical with Brahman is not to discover that the core of the world is suffering, but that it is fullness and peace. The famous phrase from the Chandogya Upanishad, tat tvam asi, “that thou art”, which Schopenhauer loved and quoted, means in its own context that you are that ultimate reality, not that you share in a universal craving.

Schopenhauer was not blind to this. He knew that his own system reached the denial of the will and then fell silent about what remains, while the Indian texts spoke positively of liberation. He simply refused to follow them there, because his Kantian training told him that nothing could be known beyond experience. The result is a striking hybrid: a Western philosophy that borrows the Indian diagnosis of the world as illusion but keeps a much darker picture of what lies behind the veil. Readers who want the Buddhist half of the comparison will find it in our article Buddha vs. Schopenhauer.

Not Suicide, and Not a Wellness Plan

The denial of the will is not a wish to die, and Schopenhauer goes out of his way to say so. It is also not a recipe for a calmer life, which is how it often reappears today.

Section 69 opens by distinguishing the two sharply. Suicide, Schopenhauer writes, “is a phenomenon of strong assertion of will”: the person who kills himself wants life and is only dissatisfied with the conditions it has offered him. He gives up the individual life, not the willing. Real denial means that the joys of life are shunned, not its sorrows, and, as section 68 describes, it shows itself in chastity, voluntary poverty and the patient endurance of whatever comes. The SEP describes how Schopenhauer took saints and ascetics, Christian as well as Indian, as his models, and notes that he recognised a positive content in the ascetic’s mystical experience even though it cannot be described. Schopenhauer would have had little patience for renunciation sold as productivity advice, the idea that minimising your needs is a route to a happier, more efficient life. Happiness in the ordinary sense of getting what you want is not his goal. He wanted the wanting to stop, the wish to be happy included, which is a hard thing to pitch with “have you tried”.

Schopenhauer’s Indian Afterlife: Deussen, Nietzsche and Wagner

Schopenhauer’s enthusiasm for India did not end with him. His most devoted disciple in the academic world was Paul Deussen, a school friend of Nietzsche’s who became one of the leading European scholars of Indian philosophy. Deussen translated sixty Upanishads into German in 1897, wrote a multi-volume history of philosophy that gave India a central place, and founded the Schopenhauer Society in 1911. For Deussen, Kant, Schopenhauer and the Upanishads were saying the same thing in three languages, a view later scholars found too neat but which helped bring Indian texts into European universities.

Nietzsche discovered Schopenhauer by chance in 1865, when he found The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig, and the book shaped his early work even as he came to reject its pessimism. Richard Wagner read Schopenhauer in 1854 and was overwhelmed; he later sketched an opera on a Buddhist legend, Die Sieger, and the influence of Schopenhauer’s idea of renunciation runs through Tristan und Isolde. Through Wagner, a philosophy partly built on a Latin translation of a Persian translation of Sanskrit texts reached the opera houses of Europe.

Nietzsche eventually turned against his first master on exactly this point. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) he describes the morality of pity that Schopenhauer had glorified as the great danger to humanity, the path to a new Buddhism, a European Buddhism, which he equated with nihilism. The Indian element that had inspired Schopenhauer became, in Nietzsche’s hands, a diagnosis of decline. Deussen, who stayed loyal to Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, who did not, remained friends anyway, which says something about both men. Deussen even published a book of recollections of Nietzsche in 1901, a year after his friend’s death, in which the two schoolboys from Schulpforta reappear as the unlikely founders of two opposite readings of the same pessimist.

The influence also reached science. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, read Schopenhauer as a young man, and in the epilogue to his short book What Is Life? (1944) he turned to the Upanishads to describe his view that individual consciousness is not many but one. He presented the Upanishadic formula that atman is Brahman, the personal self equals the eternal self, as an expression of his own conviction about the relation between mind and world. Few routes of influence in the history of ideas are stranger: from Sanskrit to Persian, from Persian to Latin, through a Frankfurt pessimist into the work of a Nobel physicist.

What the Comparison Leaves Out

Schopenhauer read Hinduism with more sympathy than most Europeans of 1818, and through a keyhole. He relied on few and indirect sources, and he tended to speak of “the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers” in the singular, as if it were one doctrine.

His main sources in those years were the Oupnek’hat and the Bhagavad Gita, which, according to the SEP, he started reading in December 1813 or soon after. He praised the Indians as “the noblest and most ancient nation” in section 63 and treated their myth of rebirth as a near-truth, yet he dismissed their positive descriptions of liberation as “myths and meaningless words”.

The slogan “all life is suffering” sounds more like a loose paraphrase of the Buddhist teaching on dukkha than of anything in the Upanishads, and Schopenhauer comes close to it himself in section 56. Hindu traditions are many, and Britannica notes that some stress ethical action within the world, while devotional ones such as Vaishnavism see love and service to God as the sure way to moksha. What reached Schopenhauer was the Upanishads filtered through a Mughal prince’s commentary and a French orientalist’s notes, and he read even that in its most world-renouncing light, as a confirmation of his pessimism. For 1818 that was a real achievement and a good reason to read him, though a poor way to learn Hinduism.

For the other Indian tradition Schopenhauer admired, read Buddha vs. Schopenhauer: Why saying “Life is suffering” could get you called into HR.