Remembering Robert A.F. Thurman (1941-2026) | Lion’s Roar
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Remembering Robert A.F. Thurman (1941-2026)<br>Robert A.F. Thurman, renowned Buddhist scholar, activist, teacher, and co-founder of Tibet House US died on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 in Woodstock, New York. He was 84. In this profile from our archives, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong shares his story.<br>Jennifer Keishin Armstrong<br>16 June 2026
Robert Thurman is the author of many scholarly and popular books on Buddhism, Tibet, art, politics, and culture, including “Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” “The Central Philosophy of Tibet,” and “Love Your Enemies” (co-authored with Sharon Salzberg). Photo by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
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A white marble statue of the Buddha, a crack across its smooth face and two fingers of its right hand missing thanks to an encounter with a candle years ago, presides over the fireplace in Robert and Nena Thurman’s charmingly Bohemian home in Woodstock, New York. The statue is special, Nena explains, because when the aforementioned candle toppled over, the statue did, too. And falling just so, so the story goes, it snuffed out the flame and saved their home, which is girded by visible wooden beams, from burning down.
Robert points out another sacred statue in the living room—this one of Songtsen Gampo, the first Buddhist king of Tibet, depicted with a tiny second head on top of his own, to represent his guru. That was a gift from the Dalai Lama, who also happens to be a lifelong “buddy” of Robert’s and the man who in 1965 ordained him as the first American monk in the Tibetan tradition.
Robert gave up monkhood two years later to marry Nena, but has remained close enough to His Holiness, as he often calls him, to joke with him when they’re together. The Dalai Lama once, for instance, referred to Robert as his “ogre,” which Robert explains is “kind of an in-joke among Tibetans about Westerners.” But Robert objected: “You don’t call me your ogre. You call me the king of the ogres!”
To talk with Robert and Nena, who have been married for fifty-one years, is to hear many such stories. Particularly when it comes to the loquacious Robert, every knickknack, every thought, unlocks another thought, another story, each one as interesting, funny, or surprising as the next. It’s this charisma that has made him one of America’s most famous Buddhists and a rock star of a religious studies professor at Columbia University, where he has taught Indo-Tibetan studies for thirty years.
The seventy-six-year-old, whose many books include Why the Dalai Lama Matters and a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is retiring from that storied career next year. But it’s hard to imagine him or Nena—as much his professional and spiritual partner as his wife—slowing down. They’ll still have Tibet House, their cultural center in New York City, and Menla, their Tibet-inspired spa and retreat facility in the Catskills, to keep them busy.
The Thurmans’ abundant energy is apparent even as they do their version of relaxing. In their mountain home, on this sunny spring day, they enjoy goat cheese, rice crackers, and dandelion tea, while they trade reminders about life’s mundanities—picking up the car from the shop, the kids coming to visit—and Robert holds forth. About the future of Buddhism in America: we need more dharma knowledge, belief in past and future lives, and a stronger monastic tradition. About the Tibetan cause: he’s optimistic. And about secular mindfulness meditation centers: he’s cool with them.
Friends and allies, Robert Thurman was twenty-three and the Dalai Lama was twenty-nine when they met.
Robert Thurman cuts a striking figure with his swath of thick, silver hair perched above his wire-rimmed glasses and blue eyes, the left one a prosthetic replacing the eye he lost in a 1961 accident involving a racecar and a car jack. He’s clear about what his main contribution to Buddhist thought over the past five decades has been: “It’s that meditation will not solve the problem if you don’t learn something.”
In American Buddhism, he says, “the main thing has been to just meditate and it will all be solved. That is a bunch of b.s., as far as I’m concerned. Meditation is essential, but only after learning something. My contribution has been to maintain that, which is less visible than people building these dharma empires facilitated by lobotomizing people’s thinking process, if you want to put it in a negative, critical manner. You do it for years and then you think, ‘Gee whiz, the buzz I got from shutting down my thinking process was not enlightenment.’”
Robert certainly doesn’t mince words. But it follows that a professor would passionately emphasize the dissemination of knowledge, and his contribution to spreading knowledge of the dharma goes beyond established Buddhist...