The Buddha- Egon Bondy

This book represents a highly original philosophical reconstruction of the core of the Buddha’s teaching, “Four Noble Truths”, as interpreted by Egon Bondy (real name Zbynek Fiser), one of the most prominent Czech philosophers of the twentieth century. Bondy, with indisputable academic erudition, complexly analyses the Four Noble Truths from historical, ontological, epistemological and ethical perspectives, showing that the Buddha’s teachings offer a highly stimulating and valuable intellectual contribution to the contemporary world. Bondy’s extensive body of work also includes a History of Indian Philosophy and a History of Chinese Philosophy, both of which are highly respected by Czech scholars, and a co-authored translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. His opus magnum The Consolation of Ontology: On the Substantial and Nonsubstantial Models is already available in English translation.

With this translation, Bondy’s Buddha has finally been made accessible to readers of English around the world.

In the age of a globalised world and ever greater interconnection of countries whose economic, social and cultural development only a few centuries ago took place more or less in isolation, a gradual shift is occurring in a direction toward disputing the Eurocentric viewpoint. This is naturally accompanied by a growing need for a deeper understanding of those cultural traditions that have their origin outside of Europe and are not historically linked with the development of Europe or the West. We can say that the philosophy is in certain sense a quintessence of cultural traditions. It reflects the social, religious, political and cultural conditions of miscellaneous societies, and transforms them into a form of more or less contemplated and systematic discourse. However, if we take a look at how the history of philosophy is usually taught at universities, and examine the comprehensive histories of philosophy that are currently being published in book form, we find that the histories of Indian and Chinese philosophy have been practically entirely ignored, while Arabian philosophy is reflected only to the degree to which it is projected into the European philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the extent to which it influenced European medieval history.

At the time when the ascetic Gautama came to his spiritual awakening and became the Buddha, i.e. the Awakened One, thus at the time when he set out for Varanasi in order to embark upon the forty year period of his missionary activity, spreading the teachings which to this day we listen to with admiration. India already had a history of extraordinary cultural development stretching back several thousand years. The Buddha's teaching is therefore not merely a further phase of this development, but is at least in the domain of thought- a certain climax there of, as well as an answer to the entire preceding period. If we overlook, fail to fully appreciate or understand what preceded the Buddha, we then fail to appreciate or understand also the Buddha himself and his own teaching. If we misrepresent in one way or another his actual significance and cogency, then we fail to grasp the substance of his teaching. The Buddha will then appear to us either as a pessimistic eccentric or an inexplicable genius, but in either case we lose sight of the aspect of his teaching that is a manifestation of a natural historical and logical regularity, and which makes Buddhism a vital and topical challenge to our thought to this day. The Buddha did not create his teaching as a loose conceptual speculation, unbound to anything, alongside which or in opposition to which it would be possible to speculatively posit a range of other noncommittal, merely theoretical constructions.