Shopenhauer

It was Shopenhauer who helped make Buddhism something of a household word among the educated classes of the 1850s. Shopenhauer was particularly impressed by Buddhism�s denial of God. He believed that Eastern religion had shown great brilliance by moving both beyond the concept of God, and beyond the notion of earthly or heavenly happiness. Buddhists recognized the all important fact of human suffering and did not shrink from it. They also recognized that morality did not derive from godly commandments but from the capacity of individuals to identify with one another and that the highest morality was one where the barrier between self and others was totally annihilated. Another aspect of Buddhist genius was the notion that the �will� or �spiritual force� in the universe was totally unknowable. Because people thought that they knew God�s will, they were constantly striving to achieve unrealizable goals.
The payoff for Shopenhauer, and presumably for many Germans, was that this purposeless striving could be suspended by contemplation. For him, the contemplation was on art, music and other forms of culture than through meditation. But it allowed him to appreciate the moment without necessarily clinging to it. Other romantics also dipped into the Buddhist manner of relating to a transparent world. The artist Van Goth was impressed by the way that Buddhist artists could focus on something as simple a single blade of grass rather than having to elaborate a system.
Westerners were beg