PRZYLUSKI, JEAN. Of Polish ancestry and French nationality, Jean Przyluski (1885–1944) was a linguist, Buddhologist, and historian of religions His wide-ranging interests led him to publish prolifically on topics as varied as the structure of the Vietnamese language, the development of Buddhist myths and legends, and Indo-European folk traditions (e.g., werewolf cults), and to theorize about the general evolution of human religiosity.

Przyluski began his career as a colonial civil servant in Indochina, where he perfected his competency in Vietnamese, as well as Chinese and Sanskrit, and became a correspondent for the École Française d'Extrême-Orient. In 1913 he returned to France where he soon took a post as professor of Annamese at the École des Hautes Études. He was eventually elected as an officer of the first Congress of Linguists and was chosen to write the entries on virtually all the languages of Southeast Asia...