Did Beckett know Buddhism? When asked, he always answered no. But Angela Moorjani’s new study reveals undeniable Buddhist resonances in Beckett’s corpus. There have been book-length publications on this topic, beginning with Paul Foster’s Beckett and Zen (1989). Whereas the earlier phase of research focused on parallels between some of Beckett’s writings and the writings of Zen masters, Moorjani’s study combines comparative and empirical approaches, diving deep into Beckett’s corpus to unearth historical and intertextual ties to the spiritual traditions. Placing Beckett in this new context of East-West dialogue, Moorjani makes a landmark contribution not only to Beckett and Irish studies but also to global literary studies and world literature.It is not easy to track Buddhist resonances in Beckett’s works. Setting aside his own caginess on such questions, metaphysical ideas of emptiness, nonduality, void, and nirvana are shared by multiple strands of Eastern and Western philosophical systems, and Beckett was broadly familiar with both. Moorjani savvily handles the either-or dichotomy by situating these potential influences in the interwoven East-West context, thus revealing the “kinship” between multiple traditions (55). Through this comparatist lens, for example, Belacqua’s inclination toward retreating into his dark mind, sealed from the outside, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women evokes not just Buddhists and Zen masters but Arthur Schopenhauer, Christian mystics, and other thinkers from the Western tradition. The gesture is itself quite Schopenhauerian because Schopenhauer, a major source of influence for Beckett, constantly juxtaposes Eastern and Western mystic traditions in his works. Adopting this more holistic approach to allusion, reference, and exemplarity, Moorjani deftly moves to center stage the East-West dialogue in Beckett’s works.Beckett and Buddhism is organized thematically, with each chapter addressing one or two strains of Beckett’s dialogic practice. An introduction establishes the affinities between Beckett, Schopenhauer, and Buddhism. Chapter 1, “Schopenhauer’s Buddhism Revisited: Recent Archival Evidence,” seeks to dispel skepticism about Schopenhauer as a viable source of influence. Using archival and published materials, Moorjani presents a compelling account of Schopenhauer’s knowledge of Buddhism, the Upanishads, and Christian mysticism. The account lays the groundwork for chapter 2, “East-West Dialogue via Schopenhauer,” which explores Beckett’s early works, Dream and Proust, alongside Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and links the Buddhist and Schopenhauerian resonances in these texts to the writings of mystics such as Meister Eckhart and William Inge. Chapter 3 extends the East-West probe in more depth in Beckett’s early fiction: Dream, “Echo’s Bones,” and Murphy. Along the way, Moorjani illuminates Buddhist allusions such as “wombtomb” and “dreamlike existence” in these texts in a sustained “contrapuntal” dialogue between spiritual traditions (77, 79, 5).Chapter 4 takes up a driving element in Beckett’s thinking and writing: paradox. His works are notoriously difficult to pin down because of their gravitation toward self-negation. Situating this feature in the East-West context, Moorjani argues that paradox is Beckett’s way of “flout[ing] classical [Western] logic” that degrades contradictory thinking (115). Such thinking pervades Buddhist and Western mystic writings, as Moorjani shows by drawing connections between the ideas of Buddha, Eckhart, and Fritz Mauthner (114). Chapter 5 is devoted to Beckett’s deployment of “contraries within contraries” drawn from Noh drama (116). Moorjani compellingly aligns Beckett’s Noh-like experimentation with the turn to the East ushered in by modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. From such connections emerges a clear trajectory in which Beckett parodies the stability of discourse using just about any philosophical or literary tool he can get a hold of: Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Noh drama, Eckhart, Inge, Jacques Derrida, Dante, Yeats, James Joyce, and other modernists. A central aspect of this trajectory is Beckett’s dismantling of the stable self by reducing it to a body part, a voice, or a dreamlike entity, which constitutes the central theme of the next chapter: Moorjani shows that Not I and later The Unnameable exemplify this metaphysical dispossession, collapsing such major contraries as subject and object, male and female, speaker and listener. “Among the spectral storytellers that Beckett himself imagined for the stage,” Moorjani writes, “the one that has intrigued theater practitioners, audiences, and critics most intensely is the disembodied Mouth of . . . Not I” (139). But whose mouth, voice, and suffering are represented in this work? Moorjani argues that the typical Beckettian ambiguity echoes the Buddhist and Eckhartian notion of the simultaneity of contraries expressed by a mystic precept: “I am not, I am, I both am and am not, I neither am nor am not” (90). One glimpses here the reason why Beckett’s paradoxical discourse is so difficult for those acculturated to Cartesian modes of self-knowing. When Beckett, like a Buddhist, pushes paradox to the extreme, the meaning becomes a mysterious “elsewhere” (139), an emptiness symbolized by the Ensō circle on the book cover.The last two chapters analyze recurring allusions to Buddhist and mystical concepts of birth and death in Beckett’s works. Again, this is no easy task: when one looks at the multiple schools of thought that share these concepts and that Beckett was exposed to, it becomes difficult to determine the nature of his debt to individual spiritual traditions. Puzzlingly intertextual concepts are everywhere in Beckett’s works, such as the birth-in-death or birth-as-death in such texts as A Piece of Monologue, Company, The Unnameable, and How It Is. Moorjani concludes in her thorough investigation of such intertextuality that Beckett appropriates more from Buddhism in this domain than from Christian mysticism, which seems to prefer unity: “My argument for Beckett’s congruence with the Buddhist view is based on his emphasis from his first novel through his late texts on emptiness rather than on a return to the One or Eckhart’s attainment of ‘oneness and blessedness in your soul’s spark’” (190). A final chapter looks at the related concept of dreamlike existence in such later texts as Stirrings Still, Company, Night and Dreams, and Happy Days. Moorjani notes the dreamlike setting, often “a dimly lit room” (191), in some of these texts and argues that “the dreams and visions of the personas in a darkened room associate these late pieces with the earlier mindscapes situated in the timelessness outside consciousness, the site of imaginative and creative contemplation” (191). This offers a final reminder to the reader that Beckett’s dialogue with Buddhism and Christian mysticism runs throughout his writing career.Moorjani’s readings frequently move back and forth among primary texts and involve cross-references to material in other chapters; in their own intertextuality they may be challenging for readers who are not very familiar with Beckett’s works. More discrete foci for each chapter might have made the book more accessible to the nonspecialist. The study does go a long way toward illuminating things that have previously and notoriously puzzled readers of Beckett, from the paradoxical style to the seeming pessimism that pervades his works. When viewed solely or primarily from Western cultural and metaphysical perspectives, these aspects of Beckett’s craft do not seem richly meaningful. Yet, when framed as philosophical exchanges between the East and the West, they open up and bear new fruit. For this reason, Moorjani’s study deserves to be known to readers not only in twentieth-century literary studies but also in world literature, comparative literature, and beyond.