• A Short History Of Buddhism

• Buddhism. Its Essence And Development

• Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies

• Further Buddhist Studies

• Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom

• A Short History of Buddhism

• Buddhist Thought In India. Three Phases Of Buddhist Philosophy

• Buddhist Meditation

• Buddhist Texts Through The Ages ( (Ed.) with I.B. Horner (Ed.), D. Snellgrove (Ed.), A. Waley (Ed.) )
  Buddhist Scriptures (Tr.Co.)

• The Buddha's Law Among The Birds (Tr.Co.)

• Perfection Of Wisdom In Eight Thousand Lines And Its Verse Summary (Tr.)

• The Large Sutra Of Perfect Wisdom (Tr.)

• The Short Prajnaparamita (Tr.Ed.)

• The Way Of Wisdom

• Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic (2 volumes)

Pioneer British Buddhist scholar, translator of Mahayana texts, writer.
 

Eberhart (Edward) Julius Dietrich Conze was born in London of mixed German, French, and Dutch ancestry. His father belonged to the German landed aristocracy, and his mother to what he himself would have called the 'plutocracy'. His background was Protestant, though his mother became a Roman Catholic in later life. He was educated at various German universities and with a flair for languages picked up a command of fourteen of them, including Sanskrit, by the age of twenty-four. Obtained his PhD in Cologne in 1928. Like many other Europeans, he came into contact with Theosophy quite early on. But he also took up astrology. He took it seriously, remaining a keen astrologer all his life.

And while still a young man, he wrote a very substantial book called The Principle of Contradiction. During the rise to power of Hitler, he made a serious study of Marxist thought and joined the Communist Party as he is strongly opposed to the Nazi ideology.

Left for England in 1933 at age twenty-nine and later became a member of the Labour Party and then the socialist movement, and eventually he became disillusioned with politics. At the age of thirty-five he found himself in a state of intellectual turmoil and collapse.

At this point he discovered - or rather rediscovered - Buddhism. At the age of thirteen he had read Gleanings in Buddha Fields by Lafcadio Hearn. However, his first significant contact with Buddhism was at this mid-point in his life, at the beginning of the Second World War, and it was through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. They were literally his salvation. After this there was no turning back. He devoted the rest of his life to Buddhism, and in particular to translating the Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which are the fundamental scriptures of the Mahayana. But he wasn't just a scholar in the academic sense. During the war he lived on his own in a caravan in the New Forest and practiced meditation, following very seriously the instructions given by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga, and achieving some degree of meditative experience. Held academic posts at universities of Wisconsin, Lancaster, California, Bonn and at Manchester College, Oxford. Also sometime Vice-President of the Buddhist Society and custodian of Central Asian manuscripts at Indian Office Library.
After the war he moved to Oxford and re-married. In 1951 he brought out Buddhism: Its Essence and Development, a very successful book which is still in print. However, his real achievement over the following twenty years was to translate altogether more than thirty texts comprising the Prajnaparamita sutras, including two of the most well-known of all Buddhist texts, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. In the sixties and seventies he lectured at several universities in the United States, and he went down well with the students. However, he was very outspoken, and gained the disapproval of the university authorities and some of his colleagues. With the combination of his communist past and his candid criticism of the American involvement in Vietnam, he was eventually obliged to take his talents elsewhere. He died in 1979.

He was a forerunner of a whole new breed of Western scholars in Buddhism who are actually practising Buddhists. He died on September 24 1979 at his home in Sherborne, Dorset. His autobiography – Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic.