Woods, James Haughton, , Massachusetts 1864 1935 Male Professor professor of philosophy, son of Joseph Wheeler and Caroline Frances (Fitz) Woods, was born in Boston, Massachussets The family tradition on both sides was clerical and academic.
He was prepared for college at the Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard in 1887.
After graduation he studied at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachussets, and was for a year in charge of St. Paul's Church, Natick.
He was at Oxford during the spring of 1891 and spent five semesters at various times in the University of Berlin, working in medieval and ancient history, epigraphy, philology, philosophy, and theology.
He received the degree of Ph. D. at Strassburg in 1896.
In the course of these years and the five which followed, he held minor academic positions at Harvard, as assistant in ecclesiastical history, instructor in anthropology, and instructor in philosophy.
He also continued his studies in the Harvard graduate school in philosophy, in anthropology, and in Sanskrit and Indic philology under Charles R. Lanman.
At the suggestion of William James [q. v. ] he went to Kiel in the spring of 1902 for work on Oriental subjects with Paul Deussen.
After a second brief period with Deussen, he returned to Harvard, and in the autumn of 1903 he became a member of the department of philosophy, as instructor in the philosophical systems of India.
In 1907 he spent two semesters at the University of Bonn with Hermann Jacobi, to whom above all his teachers he ascribed his understanding of Indian philosophy.
A third trip to the East in 1929 was devoted to Harvard-Yenching affairs and to the study of Chinese.
In 1914 he published The Yoga System of Patañjali, a translation of the Yoga Sutra together with a commentary and supercommentary.
This was followed in 1915 by a translation of the Mani-Prabh03, another commentary on the Yoga Sutra.
In 1922 and 1928, with the collaboration of D. Kosambi of the University of Bombay, he published for the Pali Text Society an edition of the first part of the Papañca605dan15, a commentary on the Majjhima Nih19ya.
For many years he was engaged with Kosambi, and later with P. V. Bapat of Fergusson College, Poona, in the translation of the Visuddhimagga, a great compendium of Cinghalese Buddhism dating from the fifth century.
His interest in the texts was essentially philosophical.
Indian thought, as he interpreted it, acquired meaning without losing anything of its exotic flavor.
His other courses were ordinarily in the history of philosophy, with a growing emphasis on Plato.
His courses on Plato were peculiarly suited to his genius.
[Harvard Coll. , Class of 1887: Fiftieth Anniversary Report (1937); Who's Who in America, 1934-35; Harvard Alumni Bull. , Jan. 25, 1935, Oct. 22, 1937; N. Y. Times, Jan. 14, 1935. ]
At this time he became interested in later Buddhism, and went to Japan, where for three months or more he studied Buddhist Chinese and Mahayana Buddhism.
He was twice married: first, in 1907, to Gertrude Baldwin; second, in 1927, to Elizabeth Robinson, who survived him.
A fourth trip took him, in December 1934, to Japan, where, continuing a project begun by his friend, William Sturgis Bigelow, he engaged in the study of Tendai Buddhism.
