A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s7.60

v2.c19.s7.60

Under the influence of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner felt strongly attracted towards the Buddhist doctrine of salvation and morality of pity. "You know that I have become a Buddhist in spite of myself," he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk on the 22nd February, 1859; and on the 9th July of the same year, he wrote to the same friend, full of enthusiasm about Buddhism: "Yes, child, this is a philosophy compared with which all other dogmas must appear petty, narrow and inadequate!"⁴ Three years prior to that, he had already sketched out a Buddhist musical drama "The Victors," in which he intended to dramatise the legend of Ānanda and the Caṇḍāla girl Prakṛti. A year later he embodied the ideas of this sketch, which was never completed, in "Parsifal." Not only here, but in others of Wagner's works, too, we have sufficiently frequent instances of a perfectly clear expression of the Buddhist view of life.