ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, a characteristic debate about the nature of Buddhism took place in Germany. Felix Knobeloch, founding member of the Buddhist Society Berlin, emphatically argued for a ‘German Buddhism’ as a religion grounded in reason, science, and rational insight in particular. A German Buddhism would solely rest on the ‘purged canon’ of Pāli texts, freed from later mythological insertions (Knobeloch 1960: 21, translation by MB). The Majjhima-Nikāya (middle-length treatise) in the translation by Berlin Buddhist Dr Kurt Schmidt would constitute the ‘bible of German Buddhism’ and reveal afresh the ‘original teaching’ of the Buddha (ibid.: 20, 19). ‘As the Koran is the fundament of Islam, the bible the one for Jews and Christians, in a similar way German Buddhists must rely on a firm basis, and this is the purged [Pāli] canon,’ Knobeloch argued (ibid.: 21). This self-convinced attitude based on an exclusively cognitive and rational approach to the understanding of Buddhist ideas and practices had dominated the self-conception of most Buddhists in Germany since the late nineteenth century.
