Chapter 8 focuses on Beckett’s poetics of elsewhere in his final texts, in which, as intimated in two of his late poems, the impression of going ‘where never before’ is contradicted by the feeling of having always been there. Because Beckett’s texts dating from the last decade of his life allude to his entire writing career in the manner of the life reviews he lends many of his creatures, a close scrutiny of three of Beckett’s late works – his penultimate play (for television) Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams), his final prose piece Stirrings Still, and his last poem ‘Comment dire’ / ‘What Is the Word’ – permits recapitulating many of the elements investigated in the previous chapters Finally, this concluding chapter, reiterating Beckett’s engagement with the philosophical, religious, and mystic traditions on which he drew throughout his career, argues for Beckett’s strong consonance with Schopenhauer and the Buddha’s teachings he first learned from the German philosopher.

The first chapter of this twenty-first-century reassessment of Beckett’s dialogue with Buddhist concepts investigates Beckett’s early source of Buddhist philosophy in Schopenhauer’s transmission of Eastern thought. The chapter addresses the doubt expressed by some Beckett exegetes about Schopenhauer as a viable source by detailing recent archival findings and the judgment of scholars of Buddhism on this question. Building on these findings, a section on Schopenhauer’s understanding of Upanishadic and Buddhist concepts counters doubts about his ability to distinguish between the two. The brief survey of what these two systems of Indian thought share and where they part ways is intended to lessen the chance of mistaking one for the other or singling out one, when it could be either, thereby setting the stage for the next chapters. An example of such a mistaken identity by Beckett scholars at the end of the chapter is intended as a cautionary tale.

Continuing the investigations of Beckett’s posthumously published first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women begun in the previous chapter, the third chapter probes in greater detail the family resemblances (in the Wittgensteinian sense) between Dream’s creative asylum and space of writing in the mind and Schopenhaurian Buddhist-infused philosophy and Christian mystical thought. Further examined, beginning with his first novel, are the forerunners of Beckett’s aesthetics of emptiness and creation from nothing. The chapter’s discussion of the 1933 short story ‘Echo’s Bones’, posthumously published in 2014 and the final story about the author's fictional persona Belacqua, uncovers the Buddhist allusions kept out of sight by the story’s burlesque drift. In contrast, the reading of Murphy in this chapter counters some early commentators’ Buddhist analysis of Beckett’s second novel. This chapter concludes the investigation of Beckett’s fiction of the 1930s in relation to Schopenhauer’s relay of Eastern thought.

The three sections of Chapter 7 explore (1) the collapse of the birth and death contraries; (2) the rebirth topos; and (3) the Buddhist doctrine of the unborn. The first section concentrates on A Piece of Monologue of the late 1970s, noting its allusions to cycles of rebirth and scenes of wall gazing and repeated evocations of a ‘beyond’ resonating with Schopenhauerian will-lessness and Buddhist scriptures. In the second section, probing the drama of rebirth throughout Beckett’s writings, allusions to a Schopenhauerian hellish existence are linked to parallels between Dantean and Buddhist conceptions of hell and purgatory. In contrast, Ill Seen Ill Said’s last pages are seen to allude to an end to rebirth in a coming home to the void via detachment from illusion. This chapter’s third and longest section concerns the convergence of the Beckettian theme of unbornness with the Buddhist doctrine of an original and immanent state of mind beyond birth and death.

In Chapter 6, the parallels with the Buddhist no-self and dream noh’s purgatorial telling of traumatic life stories are pursued in an in-depth analysis of Beckett’s 1972 play Not I. Analyzed is the startling dramatic situation of a spotlit Mouth, spoken through by a ghostly inner voice telling her tale of woe and a second voice correcting her story. The inner voice is linked to earlier scenes of the dispossession of Beckett’s narrators by voices whose dissociative nature is investigated in light of the findings by cognitive scientists that counter claims identifying such voices as ‘schizoid’. The second interfering voice is tied to the social scripts that serve to ventriloquize subjects and authors, leading to postmodern theories of their eclipse that resonate with the Buddhist no-self doctrine. Finally, in the last part of the chapter, the discussion of two of Beckett’s late plays situated in the liminal space between life and death – That Time and Ohio Impromptu – concentrates on the emptying out of memories leading to resignation and the solace of going into timelessness and mindlessness resonating with Buddhist śūnyatā (emptiness) and Zen ‘no-mind’.

On my asking Beckett how he goes about writing, his answer was unexpectedly brief: ‘One decides what elements to use and puts them together’. Audiences and scholars of his work, hard put to keep up with Beckett’s erudition, have observed the extraordinary number of elements he stitches into his texts while taking care to conceal them, cast doubt on them, parody, or unravel them. In engaging with Beckett’s poetics of indirectness, exegetes have not failed to note the Buddhist threads that pervade his works.

Chapter 5 extends the previous chapter’s exploration of Beckett’s embrace of contradiction into the domain of the dynamic blend of contraries, among which, laughter and weeping and, most insistently, birth and death in their consonance with philosophical thought of the East and West. Further examined are Beckett’s adoption of the posthumous voice in his four postwar nouvelles of 1946 and his subsequent fictions and dramas. The chapter argues that the life-in-death ghostliness of Beckett's spectral voices and the harrowing tales they tell to attain peace in the mind are analogous to the Buddhist purgatorial dramas of Japanese dream noh. This art form, it is claimed, provided a channel for Beckett’s indirect postwar witnessing. Beginning with the nouvelles, the chapter introduces Beckett’s vision of an ‘elsewhere’ or ‘a way out’, further pursued in the 1961 radio play Cascando, staging the author’s mind fashioning the play and distilling the postwar fiction’s explorations of an ‘elsewhere’, a topos taken up by the imaginative cylinder-world of Le Dépeupleur / The Lost Ones of 1970.

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.

With the fourth chapter, the focus pivots from the introductory investigation of the major Buddhist and mystic concepts Beckett secreted into his early fictions to engage with the paradoxical, aporetic (insoluable), and apophatic (negative) procedures of his early and subsequent writing and their disorienting effects on audiences. The chapter begins with examining Beckett’s involvement with what he himself qualified as the Buddha’s folle sagesse (mad wisdom) (Disjecta 146). Further, interrogating Mādhyamika philosopher Nāgārjuna’s paradoxical logic serves to examine Beckett’s similar challenges to the principles of noncontradiction. Introducing the Mādhyamika view of language as a veil that prevents experiencing śūnyatā, or emptiness, the chapter’s second section reexamines Beckett’s proposed ‘literature of the unword’ and the controversy raging about the role of Fritz Mauthner’s Indian-tinged nominalist critique in this view. Beckett’s commonalities with the French literature of silence of the 1940s and an exploration of Beckett’s paradoxical ethics of emptiness bring this chapter to an end.