KARPELES, SUZANNE

Suzanne Karpeles (1890-1969) was a gifted French scholar who played an   important role in the revitalization of Buddhism in Cambodia . After graduating in oriental studies from the University of Paris she was posted to the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient in   Hanoi in 1923 where  she collated Sri Lankan Pāḷi  manuscripts with Khmer ones. Two years later she moved to Cambodia , soon befriended many monks, scholars and intellectuals and went on to develop a deep love of Cambodian religion and culture. Her main interest was in trying to raise the level of Buddhist scholarship. With the help of King Sisowath Karpeles she established the Royal Library in Phnom Penh , now the National Library, and supervised the collecting, cataloguing, preserving and later the disseminating of Cambodia ’s ancient literature. She published the country’s first Buddhist periodical, started a mobile library project and arranged for the distribution of the Tipiṭaka in Khmer script in all the country’s monasteries. She also arranged  for regular programs on Buddhism to be broadcast on state radio.  With her urging and encouragement the Cambodian Buddhist Institute was founded in 1930 which was to publish and distribute dozens of works on Pāḷi Buddhist philosophy and traditional Cambodian culture. This helped the educated class to distinguish  the Dhamma  from Cambodian animistic and folk beliefs and to diminish Thai influence, allowing the Cambodian Sa  gha to emerge as a distinct and independent body. The Institute also became a meeting place for Cambodian writers, poets and intellectuals, several of who became leaders of the  independence movement. In 1940 Suzanne Karpeles was one of 15 Jews  living in Cambodia dismissed from their posts by the pro-Nazi Vichy-French government.  After the war she divided her time between her homeland and Cambodia and continued to make important contributions to Buddhism.  Amongst  her later works  were French translations of the Dhammapada published in 1960 and  Nyanatiloka’s Buddhist Dictionary, published in 1961.