The second chapter explores in more detail the Buddhist concepts relayed by Schopenhauer cycling through Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the Beckett of the 1930s and writers and artists with whom he was conversant, the chapter chronicles what their works owe to the Buddha and Schopenhauer’s teachings. Subsequent sections probe the analogies that are evident for Schopenhauer between Eastern and Western mysticism – the Buddha and Meister Eckhart’s teachings in particular – resulting in Beckett’s allusions throughout his oeuvre, over six decades, to both Buddhist and Christian Neoplatonic thought. The Buddha and Schopenhauer’s two-world view of the empirical and the metaphysical serves to interrogate nihilistic interpretations of the Buddhist absolute and to focus closely on Schopenhauer’s rescue of nirvāṇa from such misreadings. A short disquisition on the unknowable and silence, values Beckett shared with Eastern and Western thinkers, concludes this chapter.

For centuries, Buddhism was said to be the main source of law in Buddhist kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia, as seen in the prevalence of the cult of Dhammasastra. But what is Buddhist about these Buddhist laws? Buddha had never taught a legal code, only dhamma and vinya for monastic life, so the relationship between Buddhism and law is not straightforward. Dhamma itself is cosmic law. Vinya is a monastic code of conduct. This chapter aims to explore how the three types of ‘law’, dhamma, vinya, and Buddhist law, related with one another in ancient Siam. How did Buddhism shape legal, and political, arrangement in Siam? More importantly, when the service of Buddhist law officially came to an end in the early 20th Century, is there any residue of the idea left in the modern legal thought and culture of today Thailand?