awareness and translations of Kierkegaard were appearing at least 30 years before any English translations. There is also extensive Japanese scholarship on Kierkegaard, a scholarship that interprets Kierkegaard's philosophy in terms of Asian thought. This interpretation is understandable when one sees that Kierkegaard's central concerns of subjectivity, anxiety, freedom, despair, and self-deception, are also of central concern to Buddhism and, consequently, that there is nothing exclusively Christian about such concerns. Both Kierkegaard and Zen Buddhism, for example, have seen the predicaments of existence in very similar ways. A specific example of the similarities here can be seen in Purity of Heart where Kierkegaard describes the state of awareness that one must enter in order to partake of confession. Kierkegaard's description of this state is similar to the state of meditation described by Buddhist philosophers. It is distinct, however, in that the aim of confession, for Kierkegaard, is "to center itself upon this relation to itself as an individual who is responsible to God" (cf. Kierkegaard, "Purity of Heart"). Kierkegaard aims to claim back the subject from the "crowd" mentality of Christendom (cf. Kierkegaard, "On the Dedication to 'That Single Individual' ") and reaffirm the absolute responsibility to God, which is our telos (cf. Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling"). Harald Hoffding (1843–1931) helped introduce Kierkegaard to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century. He compared Kierkegaard to Eastern philosophy in his 1914 book The Philosophy Of Religion in this way: See also Attributes of God in Christianity References Further reading Dru, Alexander. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, 1938. Duncan, Elmer. Søren Kierkegaard: Maker of the Modern Theological Mind, Word Books 1976, Garff, Joakim. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, Princeton University Press 2005, . Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, New edition 2003, . Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton University Press, 1981, Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Princeton University Press 1989, Kierkegaard. The Sickness Unto Death, Princeton University Press, 1983, Lippit, John. Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, Routledge 2003, Ostenfeld, Ib and Alastair McKinnon. Søren Kierkegaard's Psychology, Wilfrid Laurer University Press 1972, Westphal, Merold. Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript'', Purdue University Press 1996, External links D. Anthony Storm's Commentary On Kierkegaard Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Søren Kierkegaard 19th-century philosophy Kierkegaard, Søren Continental philosophy Existentialist concepts Philosophical schools and traditions Postmodernism Søren Kierkegaard