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 Philology scholars focusing on Buddhism, a
guardian of the philological heritage of European scholarship on
Buddhist Asia.
Jan Willem de Jong was born in 1921 in Canberra,
Australia.
Following his own interests in philosophy, he studied from
1939-45 in wartime Leiden. He studied the classical languages of
Buddhist Asia: Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and Classical Tibetan,
on top of a number of others including Dutch, German, English,
French, Russian and Italian. Was a visiting scholar at Harvard
University for a year in 1946 and met the great US expert in
Buddhist Sanskrit, Franklin Edgerton as well as the late Daniel
Ingalls, both of whom he respected greatly for the rest of his
life. He returned to Europe and traveled from the French port of
landing straight to Paris where he stayed from 1947-50,
attending the University of Paris and the College de France.
From Paris he returned to Leiden where he was appointed Research
Assistant (1950-53), Lecturer (1953-56) and Professor of Tibetan
and Buddhist Studies (1956-1965). Joined Australia National
University (1965) where he founded the South Asian and Buddhist
studies.
One of his most lasting contributions is the series of survey
papers written over several years and reprinted in Japan in
1997, ‘A brief history of Buddhist studies in Europe and
America’. The Indo-Iranian journal was one of the lynchpins of
his career. He founded it with life-long colleague, F. B. Kuiper
in 1955. He remained one of the two editors-in-chief from the
beginning until 1998 (volumes 1-41). Published mostly from the
Netherlands this is one of the premier journals in Buddhist
studies. Between 1949 and 1997 he produced more than 820
publications in English and French and many articles were also
translated into other languages, notably into Japanese. |