Jens Braarvig - Biography#

Jens Braarvig was a Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo since 1st of May 1995 until 31 of January 2018, born in Oslo 17th of January 1948; Master degree, Religious Studies, University of Oslo 1978; Doctoral degree, University of Oslo, 1989; Research Fellow and Assistant Professor until 1995.

He is founder and director of Network for University Cooperation Tibet-Norway from 1992 until 2001; founder of Akkado-Sumerian Seminar 1997; editor in chief of Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection from 1998; founder and director of the Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology from 2003 (renamed as the Norwegian Institute of Philology in 2017). He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 2004. In 2011 he was conferred a Honorary degree by the Mahachulalongkorn University in Thailand. From 2018 he is employed at MF Norwegian School of Theology as the Director of The Norwegian Institute of Philology, and from 2021 President of the World Philology Union, an organisation which is based on his initiative.

Braarvig’s main subject is the history, literature and languages of Buddhism. Among his publications on Buddhism are “The Akṣayamatinirdeśasutra and The Tradition of Imperishability in Buddhist Thought,” the main topic of which is the morality of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and “Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection,” containing a rather recent find of manuscript fragments from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, being thus a specialist on the palaeography of the Indian Brahmi writing systems. He also works with other Indian religious and philosophical traditions, as well as Greek and Mesopotamian religion in a comparative perspective and in a general setting of global and macrohistoric cultural study.

His research projects for the time being are 1) Bibliotheca Polyglotta, internet application for historical multilingual studies, of which the Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae is a part, 2) Edition of ancient Buddhist manuscripts, 3) the project Multilingualism, Linguae Francae and the Global History of Religious and Scientific Concepts, which is sub-project of 4) Globalization of Knowledge, 5) The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity, and several other projects.

Braarvig has taught various forms of historical religions and historical philologies, among them, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Akkadian, Sumerian such, as well as establishing a number of philological research groups.