Philosophers Under the Bodhi Tree: The Meeting of Western Thought and Buddhism

A sweeping intellectual journey exploring the resonances between Buddhism and Western thought—with chapters on Romanticism, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, deep ecology, engaged Buddhism, and postmodernism.

Buddhism didn’t arrive in the West in a vacuum. From its first reception in the Romantic era, its study and practice in the West have been shaped by multiple streams of culture and thought. In turn, modern Buddhism has been influenced by its contact with the West. 

Beginning with the intellectuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who first brought Sanskrit and Buddhism into European consciousness and spanning to the present day with discussions of environmentalism and social justice, Peter Oldmeadow reveals the connections between Western philosophy and Buddhism, challenging our assumptions about both traditions along the way. 

Philosophers Under the Bodhi Tree traces how universal ideas about suffering, identity, and transcendence evolve over time and across cultures—and how we might reexamine our own fundamental beliefs about the nature of existence.