Indian Philosophy. To celebrate International Women’s Day (8 March) we highlight the work of Caroline Rhys Davids née Foley (1857-1942) as editor, translator and commentator of Pāli Buddhist texts. She was Lecturer in Indian Philosophy in what was then our Faculty of Theology in the Department of Comparative Religion from 1910-1913. She was one of the first women in the Faculty; the first female student had only graduated in 1931. During her time at Manchester, Rhys Davids published
Compendium of philosophy, being a translation now made for the first time from the original Pāli of the Abhidhammattha-sangaha (1910) together with Shwe Hsan Aung Anuruddha, the article ‘Intellect and the Khandha Doctrine’ (1910) in
Buddhist Review, and
Buddhism: A Study of the Buddhist Norm (1912). Manchester University awarded her an honorary D.Litt. degree in 1919. She was instrumental in the Pāli Text Society and served as its President for two decades from 1922.
A campaigner for women’s suffrage, Caroline Rhys Davids’ first paper on Pāli literature, presented at the Ninth Congress of Orientalists in 1893 under her maiden name Caroline Foley, was entitled ‘Women Leaders of the Buddhist Reformation’. According to Dawn Neale (2014) , Foley was one of only two women participating in the Congress. Foley did not present her paper herself. Instead, a summary of the paper was read by her teacher and later husband, TW Rhys Davids, who was the inaugural Professor of Comparative Religion at Manchester from 1904-1915. (By
Katja Stuerzenhofecker, Lecturer in Religion and Gender)
