The Cult of Nothingness

Book excerpt: Droit traces the history of the Western understanding of Buddhism following the late 18th-century beginnings of the translation of the Buddhist canon. He reveals how major 19th-century Western philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schlegel, Hegel, and others in fact misinterpreted the Buddha's teaching of nirvana as a life-detesting and negative annihilation of the the individual.