GLASENAPP, HELMUTH VON (1891–1963), was a German Indologist. Von Glasenapp was born in Berlin to a "cheerful and gregarious" father who, though a lawyer and banker, was known as an expert on Goethe, and an art-loving mother who "tended to take everything in life seriously" (Glasenapp, 1964, pp. 11–12). As a scholar of Indian religions, Otto Max Helmuth von Glasenapp would come to embody these same traits of communicativeness, broadmindedness, and care, and, indeed, to prescribe them as necessary features of Indological research.

An event of such "decisive significance" that he recalled the exact date—June 30, 1908—occurred when von Glasenapp was not yet seventeen years old (Glasenapp, 1964, p. 28). He walked into a bookstore in Berlin and purchased the works of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). The impressionable young scholar was so taken by Schopenhauer's high regard for Indian philosophy and religion, especially Buddhism, that he began reading...