Jean-Noël Robert

Jean-Noël Alexandre Robert (born 30 December 1949) is a French orientalist, specialist of the history of Buddhism in Japan and of its Chinese predecessors.

He is the author of the French translation of the Lotus Sutra, a seminal text of Mahayana Buddhism, from the original Chinese.

[1] Robert graduated from the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in 1970 and was a resident of the Franco-Japanese House of Tokyo in 1974–1975.

Since 1979, he has been the lecturer and director of studies at the fifth section of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE).

On 11 April 2011, he was appointed professor at the College of France where he became holder of the Chair of Philologie de la civilisation japonaise.