Sylvain Lévi


Sylvain Lévi was an influential orientalist and indologist who taught Sanskrit and Indian religion at the École pratique des hautes études.
Lévi's book Théâtre Indien is an important work on the subject of Indian performance art, and Lévi also conducted some of the earliest analysis of Tokharian fragments discovered in Western China. Lévi exerted a significant influence on the life and thought of Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Émile Durkheim.

Co-Founds the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi, Vietnam

Sylvain Lévi was a co-founder of the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi.
According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Lévi was the founder of the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. The École française d'Extrême-Orient's website notes that the school was founded in Hanoi in 1902.

Opinions

He was also an early opponent of the traditionalist author René Guénon, citing the latter's uncritical belief in a "Perennial philosophy", that a primal truth revealed directly to primitive humanity, based on an extreme reductionist view of Hinduism, which was the subject of Guénon's first book, L'Introduction générale a l'étude des doctrines hindoues. That was a thesis delivered to Lévi at the Sorbonne and rejected.

Works