Philip Boas Yampolsky (October 20, 1920 – July 28, 1996) was an eminent translator and scholar of Zen Buddhism and a former director of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University.
[1] Yampolsky was born in New York City on October 20, 1920, and was one of a pair of identical twins (his brother, Robert, died in 1987).
Yampolsky took his secondary education at the Horace Mann School and graduated with his undergraduate degree in 1942 from Columbia College.
The Fulbright scholarship supported him for two years; then, after a year on his own, he was employed by Ruth Fuller Sasaki as an active member of a group of scholars and writers who studied Zen,[4][5] including scholar Burton Watson, poet Gary Snyder and Japanese academics Seizan Yanagida and Yoshitaka Iriya.
In the summer of 1957, through his friendship with Snyder, he met Kyoto Women's University student Yuiko Takeda, who became Yampolsky's wife the following year.
[1][7] Yampolsky's translations included the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (1967) and The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings (1971), both published by Columbia University Press.