Arthur Schopenhauer

The German philosopher who read the Oupnek'hat from about 1814 and never stopped — keeping a copy at his bedside, calling it the most rewarding reading of his life and the consolation of his death, and building a system in which the world of appearances is a veil (he took the word māyā straight over) across a single underlying will.

Where the confluence surfaces in the West. Through him it reaches Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud's milieu, and eventually a great deal of what Europe thinks it thought up by itself — arriving by way of a Mughal prince's Persian and a Frenchman's Latin.