Buddhism in the West
With Buddhism in the West, the religious and philosophical influence of Buddhism is called the culture of so-called Western world. Likewise, it refers is defined as the spread of Buddhism in the "West " and the increasing exchange between the "Western" culture and Buddhism.
- 2.1 Literature
History
Antiquity
An intensive study of Buddhism will be held in the Western world only been around 100 years. Basic knowledge of Buddhism, however, came in antiquity in the west, and on the initiative of the Indian emperor Ashoka (reigned about 268-232 BC), who sent religious missions to Syria, Egypt, Greece and Macedonia for the first time (see also edicts Ashoka ). Also on the trade routes along the Silk Road and the conquests of Alexander the Great ( 356-323 BC) came news about Buddhism in the West. In Alexandria, Egypt, a considerable time is said to have held a Buddhist school, which is believed that it may have influenced the Greek philosophy. Eastern influences are especially Pythagoras and Empedocles, then in Gnosticism - in Basilides one has even detected a crypto Buddhists - and in Neo-Platonism ( Plotinus and Porphyry ), when Apollonius of Tyana and in Origen recognizable. Gnosticism and Neoplatonism in turn could have had effects on the formation of Mahayana Buddhism (back).
Middle Ages
A somewhat curious entrance into the Christian world held Buddha means the widespread medieval hagiography of Baarlam and Joasaph (also Josaphat ) ( originally ' Bodhisattva ') from the early 6th century, is nothing more than a Christian reworking of the Buddha legend, which was of course until centuries later unearthed. With the canonization of the two legendary figures in 1583 ( feast: November 27 ) was held as well as Buddha supposedly Christian Heros inclusion in the Holy gallery of the Catholic Church.
With the advent of Islam and the demolition of intellectual transfers between East and West ( from the 8th century) existing knowledge about Buddhism fell into oblivion. Only through the reports of Marco Polo (1251-1324), who spent many years at the court of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan Buddhist, came the first time news about Buddhism in the Western world. However, they were dismissed as fantasy, heresy and paganism, and so little notice. The Western image of Buddhism in the episode was also influenced by the reports of Christian missionaries.
Modern Times
While living in the 17th century with the Kalmyks an entire Buddhist nation in Europe, but it should in turn pass centuries before initially Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( 1646-1716 ) and as a result, especially Arthur Schopenhauer ( 1788-1860 ) as the first Western philosophers of modern times sat apart in detail with the eastern thought. Schopenhauer described himself as "the first European Buddhists ," but were his knowledge of this religion is still very rudimentary and incomplete. Nevertheless, he is seen as an essential precursor of Buddhism in the Western world. In the second half of the 19th century set in rapid succession a flurry of work as a translator of Buddhist source texts that increasingly gave an extensive and previously unknown knowledge.
20th century
At the beginning of the 20th century for the first time also attracted Europeans ( including numerous German and Austrian) to the East to study in the countries of origin of Buddhism, some stood out as a translator into German, as Karl Eugen Neumann, or even the Buddhist order of monks joined and of direct interaction and engagement with the teachings of Buddhism to the West opened ( Nyanatiloka, Nyanaponika, Lama Anagarika Govinda, Ayya Khema ). Conversely, went from the 50s of the 20th century, increasingly, Asian teachers, including the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh in the Western world, where they in turn contributed to a large reception Buddhism in the West.
Today, almost all shades of Buddhism are represented in the West, most notably: Theravada, Vajrayana and Zen, but also different European neoplasms, such as the Western Buddhist Order, founded by Sangharakshita ( in Germany: " Friends of the Western Buddhist Order " ), or the coined by Ole Nydahl Diamond Way. Less strongly than in the U.S., the teachings of the " Pure Land Buddhism " ( Amidism ) and the various schools of Nichiren Buddhism are common in Europe. Buddhism in recent decades, especially the fate of the Tibetans and their most famous representative of the 14th Dalai Lama was known.
Buddhism and Western science
The spread of Buddhism in the West also has a meeting with the Western scientific result. The principle of dependent origination (strict causality within the phenomenal world without assumption of a transcendent reality ) applies some to be more compatible with a strictly scientific worldview, as enshrined in the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition recourse to a Creator God. The dictum of many Buddhist teacher that one should follow the science, if Buddhism is wrong ( Dalai Lama, Lama Ole Nydahl, etc.) is, then, not only as a testimony of a great confidence in their own teaching, but also in the great potential of Sciences interprets. Because Buddhism is not a belief system, but an experience religion is Buddhism and science have in common the use of empirical methods. The Buddhist philosophy of Mahayana is however in contradiction to the prevailing in the natural sciences, reductionism and physicalism, as it explains the experience of a mind- independently existing reality is an illusion, and therefore considers the experience of the nature of mind as the only way the experience of the real nature of things. However, in modern Western epistemology and the philosophy of science are increasingly anti-realistic or even idealistic positions represented ( Dummett ).
The biologist and neuroscientist Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana refer explicitly to Buddhism.