[1] Karpelès was born in Paris into a wealthy family of Hungarian Jews and grew up in Pondicherry on the east coast of the Indian peninsula which was a French colonial territory at that time.

[1] There her teachers included the scholars Sylvain Lévi, Alfred Foucher and Louis Finot, and she graduated after publishing her translation of the Buddhist Sanskrit and Tibetan text Lokeçvaraçataka in 1919 in the Asian Journal.

[2] Karpelès was the first female member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), with a posting in 1922 to Hanoi (then part of French Indochina, now Vietnam) followed by an appointment to Phnom-Penh (now Cambodia) in 1925.

She became the chief publications officer for the École Supérieure de Pāli,[1] and she also enabled regular broadcasts of programs about Buddhism on state radio.

[5] She published the country's first Buddhist periodical, started a mobile library project and arranged for the distribution of the Tipiṭaka (the Pāli Canon) in Khmer script to every monastery in the Cambodia.