Karl Eugen Neumann

Who was Karl Eugen Neumann?

Karl Eugen Neumann was the first translator of large parts of the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures from the original Pali into a European language and one of the pioneers of European Buddhism. When Neumann was born, his father, Angelo Neumann, was a tenor at the Vienna Court Opera. His mother Pauline née Mihalovits was the daughter of a Hungarian noble family. He received higher education in Leipzig, where his father had become manager of the Leipzig City Theatre in 1876. Soon after starting a banker's career in Berlin in 1882, Neumann came across the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. From 1884 he became absorbed in philosophical works and showed great interest for the Indian sources that had inspired Schopenhauer. He turned his back on banking and started to attend a college in Prague. By 1887 Neumann was back in Berlin, studying Indology, Religion and Philosophy at the university there.

Soon after his marriage to Camilla née Nordmann from Vienna, Neumann went to Halle and in 1891 finished his thesis on a Pali text. In the same year he published Zwei buddhistische Suttas und ein Traktat Meister Eckharts.