Zen Buddhism; Germany; Sixteenth century; Otto; Rudolf; Buddhism
摘要
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 related to the New Age movement. The reception of Zen Buddhism, as well as the collateral 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 reporting about the strange religion of Fo. The reports of the Jesuit missionaries were translated in Europe, censored and then circulated by means of letter collections, the Jesuit theater and 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 political interests. 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 individuals 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 reduce “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 developments of the 19th century.
