Tang Yongtong

Tang Yongtong (; 4 August 1893 – 1 May 1964) was a Chinese educator, philosopher and scholar best known for studying Chinese Buddhism. Tang was proficient in Sanskrit, Pali, English and Japanese.

Tang attended the Tsinghua School and Shuntian School before he pursued advanced studies in the United States. While studying at Harvard University, he became known as "one of the three Outstanding Persons of Harvard" along with Chen Yinke and Wu Mi.

He was an academician of the Academia Sinica. He was a member of the 1st National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He was also a delegate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.

Biography

Tang was born in Weiyuan County, Gansu on August 4, 1893, while his ancestral home in Huangmei County, Hubei. His father Tang Lin was a scholar in the late Qing dynasty. In 1908 he attended the Shuntian School. In 1911, he enrolled at the Tsinghua School, where he graduated in 1916. Tang arrived in the United States in 1918 at the age of 25 to begin his education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their elder son, Tang Yijie (1927–2014), was a Peking University professor, who had been described as China's top scholar on philosophy and Chinese studies.