| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Reza Alavi Shooshtari was born in Ahvaz on 7 September 1935. After attending Alborz High School for three years-an experience he did not enjoy because he found the school's ethos too authoritarian-he left Iran in 1950 for the United States and completed his secondary education at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. He entered Harvard College upon graduation in 1953. A resident of Leverett House, he graduated in 1957 with a concentration in History. Upon his return to Iran in the same year, he studied Persian literature in the traditional manner at Tehran's Sepahsalar Madrasa. In 1959 he went up to Oxford and, as a senior undergraduate at St. Antony's College, read Sanskrit under Thomas Burrow, the Boden Professor of Sanskrit, and R.C. Zaehner, the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. He held a deep interest in early Buddhism and Upanishadic philosophy, and in the summer of 1960 first visited India to spend some time at an ashram so as to immerse himself practically in Indian philosophy. He received his second BA in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 1962. While at St. Antony's, he also collaborated with Albert Hourani on organizing seminars on Persian literature and history at that college's recently established Middle East Centre. Encouraged by Hourani and Zaehner, he decided to pursue a doctorate at Oxford, for which he was awarded one of the prestigious Boden Scholarships to study Sanskrit and Pali.
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