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

Last updated: October 19, 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.

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.

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”.

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.