An intercultural dialogue: the Buddha, Schopenhauer and Beckett. Angela Moorjani in Colloquy with Asijit Datta

Abstract

This colloquy between two Beckett scholars, one Western, one Eastern, scrutinises the twenty-first-century reassessment of Buddhist resonances in Beckett’s writing and the consequent interconnections between Eastern and Western thought. The introduction describes the recent archival evidence linking Beckett’s knowledge of the Buddha’s philosophy to his early reading of Arthur Schopenhauer and establishing that, beyond affinity, Beckett knowingly secreted Buddhist allusions into his texts. The subsequent discussion probes Beckett’s writing practice in the light of: the Buddha’s teachings on suffering and guilt, on the renouncing of desire and self and on an ultimate non-nihilist plenum void, entailing the critique of language, logic and dichotomising thought; the correspondences between Beckett’s posthumous and pre-birth voices and the spectrality of many of his ‘creatures’ and the Buddhist doctrine, of which Beckett was aware, of an immanent, timeless unborn; the two philosophical vantage points of Beckett’s ‘ideal real’, combining the empirical and the metaphysical; the parodic appearance of pseudo-divine figures in his texts in contrast to his ‘elsewhere’ parallel to an unknowable nirvanic beyond; the apocalyptic settings of some of his plays; and his concepts of homelessness and ‘unspeakable home’. Beckett’s negative aesthetics receives special attention in its convergence with Buddhist thinking.