Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.
In antiquity, the Greek philosopher Pyrrho traveled with Alexander the Great's army on its conquest of India (327 to 325 BCE) and based his philosophy of Pyrrhonism on what he learned there.Diogenes Laërtius Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Book IX, Chapter 9, Section 69 Christopher I. Beckwith has identified a translation of the Buddhist three marks of existence in Pyrrho's teachings.
In the modern era, a few European thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche engaged with Buddhist thought. Likewise, in Asian nations with Buddhist populations, there were also attempts to bring the insights of Western thought to Buddhist philosophy, as can be seen in the rise of Buddhist modernism.
After WWII spread of Buddhism to the West scholarly interest arose in a comparative, cross-cultural approach between Eastern and Western philosophy. Much of this work is now published in academic journals such as Philosophy East and West.
Hellenistic philosophy
According to Edward Conze, Pyrrhonism has similarities with Buddhist philosophy, especially the Indian Madhyamika school.Conze, Edward. Buddhist Philosophy and Its European Parallels . Philosophy East and West 13, p.9-23, no.1, January 1963. University Press of Hawaii. The Pyrrhonist goal of ataraxia (the state of being untroubled) is a soteriological goal similar to nirvana. The Pyrrhonists promoted suspending judgment (epoché) about dogma (beliefs about non-evident matters) as the way to reach ataraxia. This is similar to the Buddha's refusal to answer certain metaphysical questions which he saw as non-conductive to the path of Buddhist practice and Nagarjuna's "relinquishing of all views (drsti)".
Adrian Kuzminski argues for direct influence between these two systems of thought. In Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism, Kuzminski writes: "its origin can plausibly be traced to the contacts between Pyrrho and the sages he encountered in India, where he traveled with Alexander the Great."Kuzminski, Pyrrhonism How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism; for a recent study see Halkias "The Self-immolation of Kalanos and other Luminous Encounters among Greeks and Indian Buddhists in the Hellenistic World" Jocbs. 2015 (8): 163–186. https://www.academia.edu/12679460/The_Self-immolation_of_Kalanos_and_other_Luminous_Encounters_Among_Greeks_and_Indian_Buddhists_in_the_Hellenistic_World According to Kuzminski, both philosophies argue against assenting to any dogmatic assertions about an ultimate metaphysical reality behind our sense impressions as a tactic to reach tranquility and both also make use of logical arguments against other philosophies in order to expose their contradictions.
Hume and Not-Self
The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote: "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section VI: Of Personal Identity According to Hume then there is nothing that is constantly stable which we could identify as the self, only a flow of differing experiences. Our view that there is something substantive which binds all of these experiences together is for Hume merely imaginary. The self is a fiction that is attributed to the entire flow of experiences.Giles, James. The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 175-200, University of Hawai'i Press. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv'd; and consequently there is no such idea...I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. This 'Bundle theory' of personal identity is very similar to the Buddhist notion of not-self, which holds that the unitary self is a fiction and that nothing exists but a collection of five aggregates.Gopnik, Alison. Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles Francois Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network. Hume Studies, Volume 35, Number 1&2, 2009, pp. 5–28. Similarly, both Hume and Buddhist philosophy hold that it is perfectly acceptable to speak of personal identity in a mundane and conventional way, while believing that there are ultimately no such things. Hume scholar Alison Gopnik has even argued that Hume could have had contact with Buddhist philosophy during his stay in France (which coincided with his writing of the Treatise of Human Nature) through the well traveled Jesuit missionaries of the Royal College of La Flèche.
British philosopher Derek Parfit has argued for a reductionist and deflationary theory of personal identity in his book Reasons and Persons. According to Parfit, apart from a causally connected stream of mental and physical events, there are no "separately existing entities, distinct from our brains and bodies". Parfit concludes that "Buddha would have agreed."Parfit, Reasons and Persons 1984, p 273 Parfit also argues that this view is liberating and leads to increased empathy.
Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my lives and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.Parfit, Reasons and Persons 1984, pp. 280-81
According to The New Yorker'''s Larissa MacFarquhar, passages of Reasons and Persons have been studied and chanted at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery.MacFarquhar, Larissa. HOW TO BE GOOD, An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula. Is he right? 2011
Other Western philosophers that have attacked the view of a fixed self include Daniel Dennett (in his paper 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity') and Thomas Metzinger ('The Ego Tunnel').
Idealism
Idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Some Buddhist philosophical views have been interpreted as having Idealistic tendencies, mainly the cittamatra (mind-only) philosophy of Yogacara BuddhismTola & Dragonetti, Philosophy of mind in the Yogacara Buddhist idealistic school, History of Psychiatry, 16(4): 453–465. as outlined in the works of Vasubandhu and Xuanzang.Butler, Sean. Idealism in Yogācāra Buddhism, The Hilltop Review, Western Michigan University. Metaphysical Idealism has been the orthodox position of the Chinese Yogacara school or Fǎxiàng-zōng.Chan, Wing-cheuk, Yogacara Buddhism and Sartre’s Phenomenology. According to Buddhist philosopher Vasubhandu "The transformation of consciousness is imagination. What is imagined by it does not exist. Therefore everything is representation-only." This has been compared to the Idealist philosophies of Bishop Berkeley and Immanuel Kant. Kant's categories have also been compared to the Yogacara concept of karmic vasanas (perfumings) which condition our mental reality.
Buddhism and German Idealism Immanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism has also been compared with the Indian philosophical approach of the Madhyamaka school by scholars such as T. R. V. Murti.T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism Both posit that the world of experience is in one sense a mere fabrication of our senses and mental faculties. For Kant and the Madhyamikas, we do not have access to 'things in themselves' because they are always filtered by our mind's 'interpretative framework'.Burton, David. Buddhism, Knowledge and Liberation: A Philosophical Study, 107. Thus both worldviews posit that there is an ultimate reality and that Reason is unable to reach it. Buddhologists like Edward Conze have also seen similarities between Kant's antinomies and the unanswerable questions of the Buddha in that "they are both concerned with whether the world is finite or infinite, etc., and in that they are both left undecided."Conze, Edward. Spurious Parallels to Buddhist Philosophy , Philosophy East and West 13, no.2, pp105-115 January 1963.
Arthur Schopenhauer was influenced by Indian religious texts and later claimed that Buddhism was the "best of all possible religions."Urs App, Richard Wagner and Buddhism, pg 17 Schopenhauer's view that "suffering is the direct and immediate object of life"Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the world and that this is driven by a "restless willing and striving" are similar to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha.oregonstate.edu page on Schopenhauer & Buddhism http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/module/Philosophers/Schopenhauer/schopenhauer.html Schopenhauer promoted the saintly ascetic life of the Indian sramanas as a way to renounce the Will.Wicks, Robert, "Arthur Schopenhauer", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/schopenhauer/> His view that a single world-essence (The Will) comes to manifest itself as a multiplicity of individual things (principium individuationis) has been compared to the Buddhist trikaya doctrine as developed in Yogacara Buddhism. Finally, Schopenhauer's ethics which are based on universal compassion for the suffering of others can be compared to the Buddhist ethics of Karuṇā.Hutton, Kenneth Compassion in Schopenhauer and Śāntideva. Journal of Buddhist Ethics Vol. 21 (2014) and (2009) Ethics in Schopenhauer and Buddhism. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow http://theses.gla.ac.uk/912/.
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche admired Buddhism, writing that: "Buddhism already has - and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity - the self-deception of moral concepts behind it - it stands, in my language, Beyond Good and Evil."Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, R. J. Hollingdale (Trans and Ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin), No. 20, p.129. He further stated: "Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) – It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.” Nietzsche (as well as Buddha) accepted that all is change and becoming, and both sought to create an ethics which was not based on a God or an Absolutist Being.Panaïoti, Antoine; Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy, p 3 Nietzsche saw himself as undertaking a similar project to the Buddha. "I could become the Buddha of Europe", he wrote in 1883, "though frankly I would be the antipode of the Indian Buddha".Panaïoti, Antoine; Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy, p 2