Fyodor Shcherbatskoy

Who was Fyodor Shcherbatskoy?

Fyodor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoy or Stcherbatsky, often referred to in the literature as F. Th. Stcherbatsky, was a Russian Indologist who, in large part, was responsible for laying the foundations in the Western world for the scholarly study of Buddhist philosophy. He was born in Kielce, Poland, and died at the Borovoye Resort in northern Kazakhstan.

Stcherbatsky studied in the famous Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, and later in the Historico-Philological Faculty of Saint Petersburg University, where Ivan Minayeff and Serge Oldenburg were his teachers. Subsequently sent abroad, he studied Indian poetry with Georg Bühler in Vienna, and Buddhist philosophy with Hermann Jacobi in Bonn. In 1897, he and Oldenburg inaugurated Bibliotheca Buddhica, a library of rare Buddhist texts.

Returning from a trip to India and Mongolia, in 1903 Stcherbatsky published the first volume of Theory of Knowledge and Logic of the Doctrine of Later Buddhists. In 1928 he established the Institute of Buddhist Culture in Leningrad. His The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana, written in English, caused a sensation in the West. He followed suit with his main work in English, Buddhist Logic, which has exerted an immense influence on Buddhology.