Christmas Humphreys

Christmas Humphreys was born in London in 1901, the descendant of a line of lawyers. He was called to the Bar on leaving Cambridge, and in due course became Senior Prosecuting Counsel at the Old Bailey, like his father before him. He sat as a Circuit Judge from 1968 until his retirement in 1976.

Interested in Buddhism at an early age, in 1924 he founded the Buddhist Society, London, which is now the oldest and largest Buddhist organization in Europe. As publisher to the Society, he was responsible for its wide range of publications, including six of his own. His interest was in world Buddhism as distinct from any of its various Schools, and he believed that only in a combination of all Schools could the full grandeur of Buddhist thought be found. In 1945 he expressed the consensus of such doctrines in the now famous “Twelve Princples of Buddhism” which, already translated into fourteen languages, are in the process of being accepted as the basis of World Buddhism. In 1962 he was made Vice-president of the Tibet Society, and Joint Vice-Chairman of the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society. Christmas Humphreys died in 1983.