Friedrich Max Müller

Friedrich Max Müller was born in Dessau in 1823, the son of the poet Wilhelm Müller. He studied Sanskrit and philosophy at Leipzig and Berlin, and in Paris began work on an edition of the Rig Veda. In 1848 he moved to Oxford, where the East India Company published his edition of the Rig Veda with the medieval commentary of Sāyaṇa, and where he spent the rest of his life, as professor of modern languages and then of comparative philology.

Through lectures, books and essays he became one of the best-known scholars of his time, popularizing the comparative study of languages, myths and religions. His Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) set out the programme of a comparative, historical study of religions.

His greatest monument is the Sacred Books of the East, the series of English translations of the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism and Islam that he edited from 1879; many volumes are still in use, and several appear in this Library. His theories of mythology have not survived, but his conviction that religions must be studied comparatively, and in their own texts, shaped the field. He died in Oxford in 1900.