Louis de La Vallée-Poussin

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Étienne Joseph Marie de La Vallée-Poussin earned his doctorate at the age of nineteen. He grew up to be a Belgian Indologist, a scholar who studied the cultures and texts of India, and a specialist in Buddhist Studies. His path ran through Liège, Louvain, Paris and Leiden, and it ended in a long professorship at Ghent. How did a young man from Belgium come to master such distant subjects? Which teachers shaped him, and which languages did he need? And what did he finally set down in the books that carry his name?

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• 2. Liège and Louvain

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  Liège was where Louis de La Vallée-Poussin was born, on the 1st of January 1869, and where he received his early schooling. From 1884 to 1888 he studied at the University of Liège.

  The years 1888 to 1890 took him to the University of Louvain. There Charles de Harlez and Philippe Colinet guided him through Sanskrit, Pali and Avestan. In July 1891 he received a docteur en langues orientales, a doctorate in Oriental languages. Paris was his destination that same year.

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• 3. Paris and Leiden

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  At the Sorbonne in Paris in 1891, La Vallée-Poussin began a new round of study under Victor Henri and Sylvain Lévi. Over 1891 and 1892 he also held the chair of Sanskrit at the University of Liège, so his student years and his teaching years overlapped.

  Hendrik Kern was his teacher at Leiden University. Under Kern he kept working on Avestan and on the Zoroastrian Gathas, the sacred hymns of that tradition. At Leiden he also took up two more languages, Chinese and Tibetan.

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• 4. Ghent

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  Ghent University gave La Vallée-Poussin a professorship in 1893. The subject was the comparative grammar of Greek and Latin, which is notable for a man trained so heavily in Asian languages. He kept the post until his retirement in 1929. That date closed his teaching life but did not end his writing.

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• 5. Buddhist Studies

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  Six volumes of L'Abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu appeared in Paris between 1923 and 1931. The work centers on a text by Vasubandhu, and it stands as the largest item on his list of major publications.

  In 1928 and 1929 he published Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi: La Siddhi de Hiuan-Tsang. His other titles on Buddhism include Nirvana, La Morale bouddhique, and Bouddhisme. Opinions sur l'histoire de la dogmatique. A further volume, Documents d'Abhidharma, opens its subtitle with the controversy of time. Not every title on his list concerned doctrine, though. Several traced the political and ethnic history of India.

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• 6. India's Past

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  Indo-européens et indo-iraniens, published in 1924, follows the story of India up to about 300 BC. The title pairs two peoples, Indo-Europeans and Indo-Iranians, and so places India inside a wider family of languages and cultures.

  L'Inde aux temps des mauryas et des Barbares, Grecs, Scythes, Parthes et Yue-Tchi names the Mauryas and then a string of outside peoples. In 1935 came Dynasties et histoire de l'Inde depuis Kanişka jusqu'aux invasions musulmanes, which runs from Kanishka to the Muslim invasions. The dated entry closest to the end of his life, however, returned to questions of doctrine.

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• 7. Musila and Nārada

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  Musila et Nārada, published in 1937, is described as an influential study of two ways of reaching nirvana. Each way is embodied by a monk, Musila for one and Nārada for the other.

  La Vallée-Poussin died in Brussels on the 18th of February 1938, at the age of 69. The study of the two monks had appeared the year before, and it stands as the last dated book on his list.

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