Name A. Warder | Died January 8, 2013 | |
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Books Introduction to Pali | ||
Anthony Kennedy Warder (September 8, 1924 - January 8, 2013) was a scholar of Indology, mostly in Buddhist studies and related fields, such as the Pāḷi and Sanskrit languages. He wrote 15 books and numerous articles. He held the title of Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit in the School of East Asian Studies in the University of Toronto.
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Warder spent several years in India exploring manuscript libraries in connection with his work on Kavya, a literary style created by Ashvaghosha in the 2nd century AD. He also published on the subject of Indian Philosophy of all the religious schools in India.
Academic career
Warder studied Sanskrit and Pali at the University of London (SOAS). His doctoral thesis, later published under the title Pali Metre: A Contribution to the History of Indian Literature (Pali Text Society, 1967), was supervised by John Brough. He was active for some years in the affairs of the Pali Text Society, which also published his first book, Introduction to Pali (1963; 3rd revised edition, 2005). In this textbook, Warder took the then revolutionary approach of treating Pali as an independent language, not just a derivative of Sanskrit.
Warder's first academic appointment was at the University of Edinburgh in 1955. He joined the University of Toronto in 1963, where he was to remain until his retirement in 1990. As Chairman of the Department of East Asian Studies he built up a programme in Sanskrit and South Asian Studies, which for some years existed as a separate Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies.
Warder is best known for his Indian Buddhism (1970) and for his eight-volume study of Indian Kavya Literature (Motilal Banarsidass, 1972-2011). He also wrote other books and articles on Buddhism, Indian philosophy and Indian literature.
A volume of studies in his honour was edited by N. K. Wagle and F. Watanabe (1993).