In Memoriam: Robert A.F. Thurman, Expert on Tibetan Buddhism

Robert A.F. Thurman, a former Buddhist monk who became an author and an academic, and whose erudite and enthusiastic efforts to expand the West’s understanding of Tibetan Buddhism earned him a reputation as “the Dalai Lama’s man in America,” died on June 16, 2026, at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 84.

Widely considered the foremost expert on the religion in the United States, Thurman also went by the Tibetan given name Tenzin, which means “the holder of Buddha Dharma.” He received training from the Dalai Lama and became the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk to be ordained by him.

Thurman was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1941, the son of stage actress Elizabeth Dean Farrar and Beverly Reid Thurman Jr., an AP editor and U.N. translator. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy from 1954 to 1958 but was expelled weeks before graduation; having already been accepted at Harvard, he left the academy without permission to join Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army in Cuba. After being stopped in Florida, Thurman worked for a brief time in Mexico before marrying 26-year-old oil heiress Marie-Christophe de Menil GS’69 in spring 1959, when he was 18.

Thurman entered Harvard that fall. Two years into his studies, after suffering an accident that caused him to lose his left eye, he embarked on a spiritual quest through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His marriage to de Menil ended in divorce in 1961; she died in 2025.

Thurman made his way to India, where he taught English to young reincarnated Tibetan lamas in exile. He immediately took to their language and beliefs, and first saw the Dalai Lama in 1962. (He completed his Harvard B.A. the same year.) Thurman was ordained in 1965, and returned to the U.S. in 1967.

Back at Harvard that same year to pursue a Ph.D. in Sanskrit Indian studies, Thurman was in Upstate New York when he met Nena von Schlebrügge, a model who was soon to be Timothy Leary’s ex-wife. They married shortly after.

After completing his Ph.D. studies at Harvard in 1972, Thurman founded Columbia’s American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a nonprofit dedicated to the publication of translations of Tibetan treatises. Soon after, he offered up his monk’s robes to instead work in academia. Thurman was a professor of religion at Amherst for 15 years before joining the Columbia faculty in 1988. Two years later he was named the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West; he retired from that position in 2019.

Thurman pushed for a historically grounded, intellectually rigorous understanding of Eastern religions. David Kittay GSAS’11, a former student and now an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Religion, said in Thurman’s New York Times obituary: “His translations went to the depths of the sophistication of the Tibetan exploration of consciousness. Yet he could explain it so anyone could get it.”

At the request of the Dalai Lama, Thurman co-founded the nonprofit Tibet House US in 1987 with Tibetan politician Tenzin Tethong, Richard Gere and Philip Glass; he and von Schlebrügge also operated the Menla Retreat and Dewa Spa in Phoenicia, N.Y., west of Woodstock. A charismatic speaker, Thurman lectured all over the world in the “public intellectual” tradition, with special concern for ethics and human rights in general, and the fate of the endangered Tibetan culture and people in particular. He wrote, edited and translated more than 20 books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture; founded the series Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences; and was a stalwart champion of the translation of the Tibetan Tengyur.

Thurman was awarded the Padma Shri award in the field of literature and education in 2020 for his help recovering India’s ancient Buddhist heritage. TIME magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.”

His daughter Uma said, “My father was a magnificent, charismatic, passionate, curious, alive, vibrant human being. He never stopped investigating the world in all its facets. He was obsessed with the power of compassion.”

Thurman survives her father, as does his wife; their sons, Ganden, Dechen and Mipam; a daughter from his first marriage, Taya; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by a grandson in 2009.