Jens Braarvig is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oslo. His emphasis has always been on the linguistic aspects of religion, and he thus works mainly in the disipline of comparative philology. In this connection he has also worked on manuscripts cultures, in particular those of Buddhism, and he has made a number of editions and translations of classical Buddhist texts. He has also created the internet page Bibliotheca Polyglotta as a multilingual resource for the study of translation, comparative philology and knowledge diffusion, through which discipline he has a close relation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.