Buddhist Student’s Manual

Travers Christmas Humphreys wrote a number of works on Mahayana Buddhism. In his day he was the best-known British convert to Buddhism. In 1924 he founded what became the London Buddhist Society, which was to have a seminal influence on the growth of the Buddhist tradition in Britain. His former home in St John’s Wood, London, is now a Buddhist temple.
Both at his home and at the lodge, he played host for eminent spiritual authors such as Nicholas Roerich and Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and for prominent Theosophists like Alice Bailey and far Eastern Buddhist authorities like D.T. Suzuki. Other regular visitors in the 1930s were the Russian singer Vladimir Rosing and the young philosopher Alan Watts. The Buddhist Society of London is one of the oldest Buddhist organisations outside Asia.
In 1945 he drafted the Twelve Principles of Buddhism for which he obtained the approval of all the Buddhist sects in Japan (including the Shin Sect which was not associated with Olcott’s common platform) of the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand and leading Buddhists of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China and Tibet. This work has been compiled and published as a souvenir of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Buddhist Society. It consists for the most part of revised and enlarged editions of three works originally published by the Society separately and at different times, and all now out of print.