Edward Conze - Legacy

Legacy

Conze was a Middle European intellectual refugee, fleeing from Germany before the war like many others. However, he wasn't representative of the dominant strains in 20th-century intellectual life, being very critical of many trends in modern thought. He was a self-confessed elitist. Indeed, he entitled his autobiography Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic, believing as he did that Gnosticism was essentially elitist. Neither did he approve of democracy or feminism.

He is certainly representative of a Western pre-war generation that became disillusioned with Marxism, especially in its Soviet form. Where he differed from others was in the fact that he did not really lose religious beliefs. He transferred his idealism from politics to Buddhism.

Dr. Conze was one of the great Buddhist translators, comparable with the indefatigable Chinese translators Kumarajiva and Hsuan Tsang. He has been called "the foremost Western scholar of the Prajnaparamita literature." It is especially significant that as a scholar of Buddhism he also tried to practice it, especially meditation. This was very unusual at the time he started his work, and he was regarded as eccentric in the 1940s and 1950s – objective scholars were not supposed to have any personal involvement in their subject. He was hence a forerunner of a new strain of Western scholars in Buddhism who are practicing Buddhists.