Jean-Noël Robert (b. 1949) is Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France, where he held the Philologie de la civilisation japonaise chair from 2011 to 2022, and at the Religious Sciences section of the École pratique des hautes études, where he teaches a seminar on Japanese Buddhism. In particular, he has studied the history of the doctrines of the Tendai Buddhist school (Tiantai in Chinese), which was the intellectual foundation of the classical age of Japanese culture, the Heian period (from around 800 to 1200). Through his research into the development of Japanese Buddhist poetry, he has broadened his field to include the whole range of linguistic relations between classical Chinese and Japanese as mediated by Buddhist thought, before the emergence of a national philology that challenged this heritage at the turning point of Japan's modernization. Based on the Sino-Japanese model, his research has led him to develop the notion of " hieroglossia ", which aims to describe the evolution of cultural and linguistic areas where the role played by the religious factor through translation is predominant. He has organized four international conferences at the Collège de France, which have resulted in three publications, with a fourth in preparation.
He is also in charge of the Hôbôgirin project - Encyclopedia of Buddhism according to Chinese and Japanese sources, preparing a thematic monograph on the monk Jien to be published in 2025.
Jean-Noël Robert is also Chairman of the Scientific Board of ILARA (Institut des langues rares) and a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.
