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John Duncan Martin Derrett was Professor of Oriental Laws at the University of London, from 1965 to 1982, and afterwards Emeritus Professor.

Derrett was educated at Emanuel School, London, Jesus College, Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, before studying law at the Inns of Court School, London. He was called to the bar, Gray's Inn, in 1953. He is the author of a number of works on law and the history of systems of law, India, religion (particularly Christianity) and comparative religion. In his later life he was particularly interested in comparisons of Christianity with Buddhism. Derrett also translated works by others into English.

Johannes Rahder was born in Lubuk Begalung, now a district of Padang, Indonesia, where his father was governor of western Sumatra. He studied first in Leiden (1917-24), then in Brussels (La Vallée Poussin) and Paris (Pelliot) from 1924-28. He gained his PhD at the University of Utrecht in 1926 under the supervision of Willem Caland (1859 – 1932), the Dutch Indologist, philologist, numismatist and translator. Rahder studied the Daśabhūmikasūtra, the ‘Scripture of the Ten Stages’, the definitive scriptural account of the ten stages (daśabhūmi) of Buddhism. He completed a translation which was subsequently published.
Rahder also published, in 1929, this Glossary of the Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese Versions of the Daśabhūmikasūtra revealing something of the breadth of his research. This copy was sent to the Royal Asiatic Society by the Librarie Orientaliste, Paul Geuthner, in April 1929.

In 1929 he was in Japan as the chargé de mission scientifique at Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo, working on the Hōbōgirin, le dictionnaire encyclopédique du bouddhisme d’après les sources chinoises et japonaises, francophone scholars being keen to study texts on Buddhism from a wide range of sources. Rahder returned to Utrecht in 1929 to become Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Linguistics and in 1931 moved to Leiden to become Professor of Japanese. This post gave him the opportunity to travel in Japan and Korea. In 1937-38 he became Visiting Professor at University of Hawai’i, which eventually led to his decision to leave Leiden, in 1946, to became a full Professor in Hawai’i. However that was short-lived. In 1947 Rahder moved to Yale University where he stayed until his retirement in 1965.

Rahder had a keen interest in Buddhism and linguistics. He not only studied Sanskrit and Pali, but also Chinese, Japanese and other languages so he was better able to access original source material. He made significant contributions to the wider understanding and influence of Buddhism as well as the etymology of several languages.