“Vedanta and Buddhism: A Comparative Study” — Glasenapp, Helmuth von, 1950.
Bibliographic note
Originally published in German in 1950 in the Proceedings of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur (Mainz). The English text used here is the abridged Buddhist Publication Society edition (Wheel Publication No. 2, Kandy, 1978; transcribed 1995), drawn from translations that appeared in The Buddhist (Colombo 1951) and The Middle Way (London 1957). Glasenapp (1891–1963) held the indological chair at Tübingen and wrote across Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and comparative religion.
Thesis
Vedanta and Buddhism, although sharing soteriological grammar (saṃsāra, karma, rebirth, liberation through insight), are at their origins diametrically opposed metaphysical systems: Vedanta posits an ens realissimum (Ātman / Brahman) as the primordial ground of reality, while Buddhism’s Anātman doctrine denies any persisting substance whatever, including in nirvāṇa. Mutual influence is later (post-Christian era), historically asymmetric, and confined to specific schools — principally Yogācāra (which approaches Vedanta) and Gauḍapāda’s later Vedānta (which absorbed Buddhist illusionism). Madhyamaka, by Glasenapp’s reading, remains true to the Buddhist no-substance principle.
Key claims
- The two principal Upaniṣadic concepts — Ātman and Brahman as “primordial ground of the world, ens realissimum” — do not appear anywhere in the early Buddhist texts with that meaning (p. 3). Their absence in the Pāli canon and in early Jaina literature suggests early Vedānta was of little importance in Magadha at the time of the Buddha.
- Atta / ātman in Pāli usage means either (i) the reflexive “self” of daily speech, or (ii) the philosophical “substance” — “something existing through and in itself, and not through something else” — denied by the Buddhists of the Jainas and other heretics (p. 4). It is not used in the Upaniṣadic sense of “universal soul.” The Buddha’s anatta therefore denies independently existing entities, not the Upaniṣadic Ātman that Vedānta would later make central.
- Nirvāṇa is itself called anatta (Udāna 8.2; Vinaya V.86); Dhammapāla’s commentary glosses this as atta-virahita (“without a self”). Attempts (Guenther, Grimm, Jennings) to read Nirvāṇa as a transcendental Ātman are textually arbitrary and produce manifestly absurd consequences when their translation principles are applied consistently (pp. 5–6).
- Mahāyāna’s drift toward monism is concentrated in Yogācāra, not Madhyamaka: “Asanga and Vasubandhu, however, in their doctrine of Consciousness Only, have abandoned the Buddhist principle of denying a positive reality which is at the root of all phenomena, and in doing so, they have made a further approach to Vedānta” (p. 2). Even so, Yogācāra qualifies the relation between the absolute and phenomena as “neither different nor not different” rather than asserting outright identity.
- Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, by contrast, is read as remaining within the Buddhist no-substance principle: Nāgārjuna “sees the last unity as a kind of abyss, characterized only negatively, which has no genetic relation to the world” (p. 2). Glasenapp’s classification: Madhyamaka shows the form of monism (Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa as two aspects of one reality) but not its content (no positive ens realissimum from which the world arises).
- The historical direction of influence is also reversed: Gauḍapāda and “later Vedānta” absorbed Buddhist illusionism (the world as unreal appearance against an unchangeable background, “comparable to the white screen on which appear the changing images of an unreal shadow play,” p. 3). The structural similarity between later Advaita and Mahāyāna therefore tells against, not for, the claim that Madhyamaka was Vedānticised.
- The denial of an imperishable Ātman is common ground for all systems of Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna; even the Pudgalavādins, who admit a quasi-personal entity, never appeal to passages proclaiming an Upaniṣadic Ātman (p. 5). The unanimity of the post-Buddha tradition against an Ātman doctrine is itself evidence that the Buddha did not teach one.
Methodology
German Indologie in the comparative-philology tradition: close reading of the Pāli canon (Saṃyutta, Aṅguttara, Dhammapada, Udāna, Vinaya), philological argument about the meaning of atta and anatta (noun vs adjective declensions, singular vs plural usage in sabbe dhamma anattā), and historical-critical reasoning about which texts could have influenced which. Glasenapp situates himself in the lineage of Otto Rosenberg, Stcherbatsky, and La Vallée Poussin’s Abhidharmakośa translation — i.e. the early-twentieth-century German/Russian/Belgian Indological consensus that all Buddhist schools rest on the anātma-dharma theory. He explicitly polemicises against Guenther’s Soul Problem of Early Buddhism (1949) and Jennings’s Vedantic Buddhism of the Buddha (1947) as scholarly attempts to read Buddhism as Vedānta-derived.
The essay is short (the Wheel pamphlet runs to about seven pages of substantive text), oriented to general readers, and does not engage Sanskrit-language Madhyamaka literature directly. Its evidentiary base is principally Pāli; its remarks on Nāgārjuna and Yogācāra are programmatic.
Notable quote
“Nāgārjuna sees the last unity as a kind of abyss, characterized only negatively, which has no genetic relation to the world.” (p. 2)
Connections
- Indirect rebuttal of kalupahana-mmk-1986 (specifically the Preface p. vii claim that Candrakīrti led MMK toward Vedānticism, and the broader 1986 reversal) and of Kalupahana’s scholar-page-recorded position that “Candrakīrti’s interpretation moved Buddhist philosophy toward Vedāntic absolutism.”
- Convergence with the structural argument made on Candrakīrti (and articulated in westerhoff-candrakirti-2024) that Candrakīrti’s primary polemical target is vijñaptimātratā and the ālayavijñāna, i.e. the Yogācāra moves Glasenapp identifies as the genuine Vedānta-approaching elements in Mahāyāna. Glasenapp and Westerhoff converge on Yogācāra-not-Madhyamaka as the locus of any monistic drift.
- Engages with the older Indological canon: Otto Rosenberg (1918/1924), Theodor Stcherbatsky (1932 Buddhist Conception of Nirvana and Buddhist Logic), Louis de la Vallée Poussin (Abhidharmakośa 1923–31). Glasenapp inherits their anātma-dharma theory reading. The Stcherbatsky lineage is also the one Kalupahana criticises in his earlier work (Causality 1975) for “equating Sarvāstivāda with early Buddhism” — see Kalupahana — so there is some irony in invoking it against his later reversal.
- Engages with Gauḍapāda (8th c.) as a documented case of Vedānta absorbing Buddhist illusionism — a thesis later developed in detail by T.M.P. Mahadevan, Richard King, and others. Not yet in the wiki; would be worth adding King’s Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism (1995) if we want to harden the historical-direction-of-influence argument for of this wiki.
- Connects to Tathāgatagarbha: Glasenapp’s treatment of “later Buddhist systems of the Far East” in which “the undivided, absolute consciousness is taken to be the basis of the manifold world” (p. 2) tracks the East Asian tathāgatagarbha / yixin tradition, not Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka. Useful as one more datum that Madhyamaka and the substance-leaning tathāgatagarbha line are distinct trajectories within Mahāyāna.