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Edward Conze
Life and work
Conze was born in London of mixed German, French, and Dutch
ancestry. His father belonged to the German landed aristocracy, and his mother
to what he himself would have called the "plutocracy". His background was
Protestant, though his mother became a Roman Catholic in later life. He seems to
have had a rather difficult relationship with his mother. Conze claimed to be
related to Friedrich Engels.
He was born in England because his father happened to be posted there as German
Vice-Consul, but this meant that he had British nationality. He was educated at
various German universities, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of
Cologne in 1928, he then proceeded to carry out post doctoral studies in
comparative European and Indian Philosophy at the University of Bonn and the
University of Hamburg. Conze had a talent for learning languages and picked up
fourteen of them, including Sanskrit, by age 24. Like many other Europeans, he
came into contact with Theosophy early in life. He also took up astrology, and
remained a keen astrologer throughout his life. While still a young man, he
wrote a substantial book called The Principle of Contradiction.
During Hitler's rise to power, Conze found himself so strongly opposed to the
Nazi ideology that he joined the Communist Party and made a serious study of
Marxist thought. It seems that for a while he was the leader of the communist
movement in Bonn, and his autobiography, Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic, talks
about organizing communist street gangs in Hamburg, which briefly put his life
in danger.
In 1933 he came to England, having earlier taken the precaution of renewing his
British nationality, and he arrived at the age of 29, virtually without money or
possessions. He supported himself by teaching German and taking evening classes,
and he became a member of the Labour Party. He met many prominent figures and
intellectuals in the Labour movement and was not impressed. However, Secretary
of State for Education, Chair of the Labour Party and MP Ellen Wilkinson did
impress him, and the two later published two books together entitled Why War?
and Why Fascism?.
Conze became very active in the socialist movement in Britain, lecturing and
writing books and pamphlets, until eventually becoming disillusioned with
politics. At 35 he found himself in a state of intellectual turmoil and
collapse. Even his marriage had failed. Indeed, in his memoirs he admits "I am
one of those unfortunate people who can neither live with women nor without
them."
From 1933 until 1960 he lectured in psychology, philosophy and comparative
religion at the University of London and the University of Oxford. Between 1963
and 1973 he held a number of academic appointments in England, Germany and the
United States, including a significant amount of time as a Visiting Professor in
the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster.
At this point he discovered – or rather rediscovered – Buddhism. When 13 years
old he had read Gleanings in Buddha Fields by Lafcadio Hearn. However, Conze's
first significant contact with Buddhism was at this midpoint in his life, at the
beginning of the Second World War, through the writings of D.T. Suzuki.
Once intrigued, Conze devoted the rest of his life to Buddhism, and in
particular to translating the Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom sutras,
which are the fundamental scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism. However, he wasn't
just a scholar in the academic sense. During the war he lived on his own in a
caravan in the New Forest and practised meditation, following very seriously the
instructions given by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga, and allegedly achieving
some degree of meditative experience. Being brutally honest, especially about
himself, he would confess in his later lectures in America that he was just a
Buddhist scholar and not a monk and therefore people should not be disappointed
if his actions and behaviors did not live up to the Buddhist ideal. Reflective
of Conze's prominent position as a Buddhist is the fact that he served as vice
president of the Buddhist Society.
After the war he moved to Oxford and remarried. In 1951 he published Buddhism:
Its Essence and Development, a very successful book, which is still in print.
However, his real achievement over the following twenty years was to translate
over thirty texts comprising the Prajnaparamita sutras, including two of the
most well-known of all Buddhist texts, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra.
In the 1960s and '70s he met with university students of Buddhism in Canada and
lectured at several universities in the United States; he was appreciated by his
students. However, he was very outspoken, and gained the disapproval of the
university authorities and some of his colleagues. With the combination of his
Communist past and his candid criticism of American involvement in Vietnam, he
was eventually obliged to leave. He died on September 24, 1979 at his home in
Sherborne, Dorset.
Legacy
Conze was a complex figure, and it is not easy to assess his
overall significance.[citation needed] He was a Middle European intellectual
refugee, fleeing from Germany before the war like many others. However, he
wasn't representative of the dominant strains in 20th-century intellectual life,
being very critical of many trends in modern thought. He was a self-confessed
elitist. Indeed, he entitled his autobiography Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic,
believing as he did that Gnosticism was essentially elitist. Neither did he
approve of democracy or feminism.
He is certainly representative of a Western pre-war generation that became
disillusioned with Marxism, especially in its Soviet form. Where he differed
from others was in the fact that he did not really lose religious beliefs. He
transferred his idealism from politics to Buddhism.
Dr. Conze was one of the great Buddhist translators, comparable with the
indefatigable Chinese translators Kumarajiva(鸠摩罗什) and Hsuan Tsang(玄奘). He has been called
"the foremost Western scholar of the Prajnaparamita literature." It is
especially significant that as a scholar of Buddhism he also tried to practice
it, especially meditation. This was very unusual at the time he started his
work, and he was regarded as eccentric in the 1940s and 1950s – objective
scholars were not supposed to have any personal involvement in their subject. He
was hence a forerunner of a new strain of Western scholars in Buddhism who are
practicing Buddhists.
Publications
Why War? (1934) - with Ellen Wilkinson
Why Fascism? (1934) - with Ellen Wilkinson
The Scientific Method of Thinking: An Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
(1935)
An Introduction to Dialectical Materialism (1936)
Spain To-day: Revolution and Counter Revolution (1936)
Contradiction and Reality: A Summary (1939)
Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (1951)
Abhisamayālaṅkāra (1954)
Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom (1955)
The Buddha's Law Among the Birds (1956)
Buddhist Meditation (1956 & 1972)
Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā (1957)
Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines and its Verse Summary (1958)
A Short History of Buddhism (1958)
Buddhist Scriptures (1959)
The Prajñāpāramitā Literature (1960)
The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom with divisions of Abhisamayālaṅkāra (1961)
Gilgit Manuscript of Aṣṭādaśasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā (1962)
Buddhist Thought in India: Three Phases of Buddhist Philosophy (1962)
Materials for a Dictionary of the Prajñāpāramitā Literature (1967)
Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays (1967)
The Short Prajñāpāramitā Texts (1974)
Further Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays (1975)
The Memoirs of A Modern Gnostic (1979)
Heart Sutra
郭守敬
鸠摩罗什
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