Karl Eugen Neumann

Karl Eugen Neumann ( born October 18, 1865 in Vienna, † October 18, 1915 ibid ), the first translator of large parts of the Pali canon of Buddhist scriptures into a European language ( German ) and thus a pioneer of Western and European Buddhism.

Life

As Neumann was born, his father, Angelo Neumann, tenor at the Vienna Court Opera. His mother Pauline Aurelie born of Mihalovits was the daughter of a Hungarian noble family.

His higher education receives Neumann at the St. Thomas School at Leipzig, where his father was in 1876 became director of the Leipzig Opera. After graduation, he traveled to England and Italy. Significantly more than the bank apprenticeship began in Berlin in 1882 to inspire young Neumann Arthur Schopenhauer's writings. He immerses himself in 1884 often half the night in philosophical writings, and shows great interest in the Indian sources, who had also inspired Schopenhauer. He returns his banking career in the back and studied at upper secondary school in Prague. In 1887 he began his studies at the Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. However, the study of Indology at Hermann Oldenberg and Albrecht Weber, religious studies with Paul Deussen and philosophy does not meet his expectations.

After his marriage to Camilla born Nordmann from Vienna Neumann goes to Richard Pischel to Halle and his doctorate in 1891 with a thesis on a Pali text of Dr. phil. at the University of Leipzig. In the same year he published in Leipzig in the work: "Two Buddhist Suttas and a tract of Meister Eckhart ." 1892, returned to Vienna, Neumann published a German -language anthology from the Pali Canon Schopenhauer 104th birthday. 1893 will see a translated version of the von Neumann Dhammapada. 1894, met Neumann desire to travel to the country of origin of Buddhism. He considers himself a few months in India and Ceylon. There he also applies to members of the Sangha, as the monk Sumangala Maha Thera and Lama Dondamdup. Although he very much appreciated the knowledge and scholarship of some monks, appeared to him many a distortion and dilution of the original Buddha teaching. In the fall of 1894 returned to Vienna, he went back to the study and translation of the Tipitaka and took a post as assistant at the Oriental Institute at the Indologist Georg Buhler.

The next few years were marked by translation in the " Middle Collection" and their publication in three volumes in Leipzig and Berlin ( 1896-1902 ). This period also saw the eager correspondence and friendship coincides with the congenial Giuseppe De Lorenzo (1871-1957) from Bari, brings out some Italian translations of the work of Neumann and is the pioneer of the Italian Buddhism. After a brief interlude in Germany Neumann returns in 1899 returned to Vienna and translates to "The Songs of the monks and nuns ." 1906 Neumann loses in a bank crash his entire fortune and must (temporarily) even sell the prized Siamese edition of the Tipitaka, which had been bequeathed to him by the Siamese king. The inheritance after the death of his father fixes for the first financial emergency. 1907 appears (completed 1912) at Piper in Munich, the first of three volumes of " prolonged Collection".

Although Neumann has the merit to have translated the first very large parts of the Pali Canon into German and therefore launched a broad effect on the Formative to Buddhist movement in German-speaking, his translation is due to lack of precision in detail today philological controversial.

1915 dies Neumann on his 50th birthday and is buried in the Viennese central cemetery ( 82B -2 -18) in an honorary grave dedicated.

A complete edition of his work published in 1957 in the Paul Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna. The growing interest in Buddhism in the German-speaking world brings a new edition of the Neumann translations of the Pali Canon in Beyerlein and Steinschulte and 2003, the digital edition of the complete works published by Direct Media Publishing ( Digital Library ).

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