Disconnection and Connection

Abstract

In this last chapter I shall be looking first at the most important way in which Wittgenstein and the Mahāyāna are not related, and then at some important ways in which they are. A list of all the ways in which two people or things are unrelated would obviously be endless and largely trivial: only where there might be a temptation to argue for a link is there any point in showing that the link does not really exist. So the only link which I am concerned to show as illusory is one which, if it could be established, would be a philosophical bombshell: the notion, that is, that some of Wittgenstein’s ideas could have been derived, even if indirectly, from the Mahāyāna. Proof of such influence would, of course, invalidate much of what I have written, since I have been assuming that the similarities need to be accounted for in a quite different way.