Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses (from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche) concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism (the Pessimismusstreit) and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness.

黑格尔在讨论《逻辑科学》中的虚无时说：“众所周知，在东方体系中，本质上在佛教中，虚无或空无是绝对原则。” 叔本华在《作为意志和表象的世界》中讨论死亡的喜悦：“我们知道他心甘情愿地放弃的存在：他得到​​的东西在我们眼里算不了什么，因为我们的存在，就那而言，什么都不是。佛教信仰称之为涅槃，即灭。” 令人惊讶的是，19 世纪德国关于否定性、虚无和虚无的哲学论述（从黑格尔和叔本华到迈兰德、冯哈特曼和尼采）明确提到佛教，最初被基督教传教士视为“对虚无的崇拜”并卷入了欧洲关于悲观主义的辩论（Pessimismusstreit) 和虚无主义。在这篇文章中，我重新思考了叔本华和 19 世纪德国思想对否定性和虚无的解释如何影响了佛教作为一种哲学和宗教话语的接受，并追溯了在西方问题的背景下重新解释佛教空性的方式。存在与虚无。