From Diplomacy to Sanskrit Scholarship

Andre Padoux began his working life as a French diplomat, a career that took him to postings in Asia and gave him direct exposure to living Hindu and Buddhist practice well before he turned to Sanskrit scholarship as a full time vocation. He went on to direct research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, the French state research body, where he spent the core of his academic career, building, alongside colleagues such as Lilian Silburn and the American scholar Harvey Alper, one of the first serious Western academic circles devoted to Hindu Tantra as a subject in its own right rather than as a suspect or marginal appendix to mainstream Hinduism.

That circle's work mattered because Tantra had long been treated in Western scholarship, and in much of colonial era Indology, as a degenerate or embarrassing survival unworthy of serious philological attention. Padoux and his collaborators instead read the Tantric commentarial literature with the same rigor previously reserved for Vedic and classical Sanskrit texts, translating and analyzing primary sources directly rather than relying on earlier polemical summaries, and in doing so helped move Tantric studies from the margins of Indology into a recognized field with its own journals, conferences and university positions.