A. P. de Zoysa
Agampodi Paulus de Zoysa (5 April 1890 — 26 May 1968) was a Sinhalese social reformer and Buddhist scholar.
De Zoysa was born near Ambalangoda in the Southern province of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). His parents died in an epidemic when he was eleven, and thereafter he was brought up by his grandmother.
After attending Wesley College in Colombo, he taught for a time and then in 1921 went to the UK to further his education. In London he supported himself by coaching overseas students, and his wide social circle included the artist William Roberts, who painted his portrait. After taking an external London degree, in 1927 he was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn, and in 1929 he obtained a PhD in anthropology at London University for a dissertation on ‘Observances and Customs in Sinhalese Villages’.
With his wife, née Eleanor Hutton, whom he had met at the Buddhist mission in London and married in 1929, in 1934 de Zoysa returned to Sri Lanka, and began work as a lawyer. He was elected to represent Colombo South in 1936, and he continued to serve in the State Council (as an independent) until 1947. Causes which he supported included opposition to the death penalty, anti-dowry legislation, and improved state education. For many years he was also a municipal councillor in Colombo, taking up local issues and campaigning to improve the city’s amenities.
In 1939 de Zoysa bought a printing press, and began to produce a series of educational books in Sinhala; he also edited a weekly paper, the Dharmasamaya. But his greatest project, which took over twenty years, with help from Buddhist scholars, was to publish a translation of the whole Tripitaka canon of Buddhist scripture into simple Sinhala; this eventually ran to forty-eight volumes. A concise edition, in about ten volumes, was incomplete at his death. He also compiled and printed English–Sinhala and Sinhala-English dictionaries.
He died, aged seventy-eight, on 26 May 1968. He and his wife had one child, Visakha Kumari – now the feminist scholar Kumari Jayawardena. In March 2009 Sri Lanka issued a stamp commemorating his life as a social reformer and Buddhist scholar.