ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the connections between Vedanta, Schopenhauer, The Perennial Philosophy, and Iris Murdoch, and finally how the influence of the first three influenced Murdoch's view of ethics and aesthetics. Vedanta writings initiated the idea that human beings have an intuitive Great Yearning for feelings of mystical transcendence. The influence of Vedanta travelled East and West to inform the mystical aspects of the world's religions as well as the secular derivations and has come full circle with the twentieth-century resurgence of the worldwide Vedanta Society. Schopenhauer was devoted to the Vedantic text, The Upanishads. Murdoch was preoccupied with the nature of goodness and believed that art was a vehicle for learning about goodness. Art is the emotional outcome of life experiences, which is to say art is the true synthesis of the spirit and zeitgeist of particular eras and generations. Morality has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism.
