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It may be said that in the 19th century philosophy besides the arising schism between the positivist-scientistic philosophical trends on the one hand and irrationalist streams on the other, the problems of comprehending the position of European thinking and with it of the whole European culture represented a further important — and from the point of view of the objective development of „cultural decentralization“ of human awareness the most important problem emerging involuntarily between the lines of the authors of Indian studies and in the philosophical works of A. Schopenhauer and of his successors. The question of the relation between the European and Eastern culture was a question of the future. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 — 1860) was a German irrationalist philosopher whose voluntarism and pessimism had been for long years influencing the development of some streams of European philosophy. His position is exceptional also because he was the first of philosophers to make use of the achievements of East-Asian (Indian) philosophical streams; in critical evaluation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy this significant feature of his work is often ignored. In the present essay its author aims at indicating the significance of Schopenhauer’s turn from the classic eurocentrism conditioned by the development of indology and at the same time at pointing out the mistakes and inaccuracies he committed. The author supports the idea that as for the Indian philosophy and religion Schopenhauer was influenced first of all by two great intelectual complexes: the theological-philosophical view-of-the-world of Upanishads and the Buddhistic teaching. He was influenced only very generally and fragmentarily by the former, and much more consistently — first of all in the sphere of ethic theory — by the latter.