Mahinda College - Frank Lee Woodward

Frank Lee Woodward

Frank Lee Woodward (1871–1952) was born in Saham Toney in Norfolk, England, as the son of a vicar of the Anglican religion. He had an archetypal Victorian boyhood and attended a traditional English public school. He won a scholarship to Cambridge and later turned to teaching, which secured him a deputy headmastership. He joined the London Theosophical Society and was a great friend of Col. Henry Steel Olcott. Col.Olcott offered him the principalship of Mahinda College, which he accepted and nursed for 16 years.

He was the principal of Mahinda College from 1903 to 1919. Woodward’s work at Mahinda College included taking classes in English, Latin, Pali, Buddhism and Art, in addition to the administrative duties associated with the position of principal of the school. With the assistance of Mudaliyar Gunaratne, Muhandiram Thomas Amarasuriya, Muhandiram Wickremasinghe and the benevolent Buddhist public, Mr. Woodward shifted the College to its present site and made it one of the leading colleges in the Southern Sri Lanka. His involvement went much further. He was the designer and architect of its buildings, personally supervised their construction, and often worked alongside with the masons.Mr. Woodward who has not only built buildings for Mahinda College gave it a soul – the Woodward tradition. This was done through precept and practice. He decided to leave the college in 1919.

Frank Lee Woodward spent his retirement in Rowella, Tasmania, translating Buddhist scriptures from Pali to English. A vegetarian, a mystic and a man of whimsy, he practiced yoga, wore a turban and lived alone, surrounded by Buddhist scriptures on thousands of palm-leaves. He has translated eighteen of the forty-two volumes of the Pali texts into English and compiled the vast concordance of the Pali canon, which occupied the last fifteen years of his life. He was an erudite Pali scholar and translator. Mr.Frank Lee Woodward died in 1952.