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Offermanns, Jürgen (2002)" Der lange
Weg des Zen-Buddhismus nach Deutschland." Vom 16. Jahrhundert
bis Rudolf Otto. Lund Studies in History of Religions. Volume
16. Almqvist&Wiksell ,International. ISBN 91-22-01953-7. ISSN
1103-4882. 355 pages.
Abstract
At the beginning of the 21st Century, Zen Buddhism is no longer
an unknown religion in the West. Zen-meditation enjoys great popularity,
the books regarding the subject are among the bestsellers and
the auditoriums are crowed if the topic concerns the bringing
home of Zen Buddhism to a Western audience. At the same time Zen
Buddhism today is by no means merely the religion of Zen Buddhists,
but practices and teachings of Zen Buddhism are being integrated
into a Christian context or find themselves incorporated in the
practice of religious groups that can be counted to the New Age
movement. The reception of the East Asian religion, as well as
the related adaptation to Western ideas and conditions of life
are however of an older date. It began already during the 16th
Century with the first letters from the Jesuit missionaries in
China and Japan that reported about the strange religion of Fo.
The reports of the Jesuit missionaries were translated in Europe,
censored and then circulated with help of various ways, such as
letter collections, the Jesuit theater or the scholastic literature.
Since those days the Zen-Buddhist religion in Europe has most
of all been an idea, a world of imagination, exposed to social,
economical, theological and power political calculi. The information
of the Jesuit missionaries from China and Japan, as well as the
increasingly popular travel literature not only triggered the
enthusiasm for China during the Age of Enlightenment, but were
the basis for the entire reception of Buddhism during the 17th
and 18th Century. These sources of information, formed the understanding
of Zen-Buddhism of people like Athanasius Kircher, G.W. Leibniz,
Immanuel Kant or the French deist Francois Marie de Marsy. Only
in the beginning of the 19th century the first Buddhist writings
were translated and thus made available to a wider public. In
particular during the 19th Century the reception of Zen Buddhism
was exposed to the continuously changing influence of power political
interests and diverging theological arguments. Among other things
two occurrences were of particular importance for the reception
of Zen-Buddhism in Germany; the Meiji-restoration in Japan (1868)
and the attempts of various theologians, philosophers and psychologists
to lead back "religion" to a universal essence, which
is not accessible to rational reason. The Zen interpretations
of both D.T. Suzuki and Rudolf Otto were decisively determined
by these political and intellectual alterations of the 19th century.
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