Fritz Hungerleider

Fritz Hungerleider (* 1920 ; † 1998 in Vienna ) was an Austrian religious scholar and Zen teacher and from 1955 to 1976 President of the Austrian Buddhist Community .

Hungerleider, who grew up as a “Jewish Catholic child” in Vienna and attended the commercial academy there, had to leave Austria as a Jew after the Anschluss and went into exile in Shanghai , where he stayed from 1938 to 1947. When he returned to Vienna, Hungerleider became one of the central figures of Buddhism in Austria .

Buddhism

In exile in Shanghai, Hungerleider discovered Arthur Schopenhauer and first came into contact with Buddhism. In the post-war years he deepened his knowledge of Buddhism on trips to Sri Lanka and Japan . He received Zen training in the Rinzai monastery Daitoku-ji in Kyōto , where he also studied at Buddhist universities ( Ryūkoku , Ōtani ). He held his first mediation seminar (“Satipatthana and Zen”) in 1961 in the German Buddhist monastery Roseburg, the House of Silence near Hamburg. From 1962 he devoted himself to the organization of Zen seminars in addition to his extensive lecturing and course activities, also in the field of Catholic educational institutions and monasteries. During these years he also maintained regular contact with the Department of Japanese Studies of the Ethnological Institute of the University of Vienna (later the Institute of Japanese Studies) and its then chairman, Alexander Slawik .

Hungerleider was President of the Buddhist Community of Austria for more than 20 years and for years from 1974 carried out efforts to obtain state recognition of Buddhism in Austria, which finally took place in 1983. In addition to his numerous seminars and lectures all over Austria, it was in particular his lectures on Austrian radio that made him an important pioneer of Buddhism in Austria.

Always striving for interreligious dialogue , he succeeded in bringing him into contact with Archbishop Franz Cardinal König in 1973 on the occasion of a visit by the Dalai Lama .

Works (selection)

• Conversation between a Buddhist and a Christian on the issue of tolerance . OW Barth, Weilheim 1969.
• My way to mysticism. a religious autobiography . Herder, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-210-24908-3 .
• Mysticism, Tao and Zen. Light trail to the source of being . Kristkeitz, Heidelberg 1992, ISBN 3-921508-44-4 .
• The Zen seminar. A guide for practitioners and teachers . Herder, Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-210-24518-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Hungerleider in the catalog of the German National Library
• Encounter with Buddhism in the West