Infinite Life: Seven Virtues for Living Well
New York City · 2004
R
Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman
1941 CE–2026 CE · Modern · New York City
b. 3 August 1941, New York City – d. 16 June 2026, Woodstock, New York
Robert Thurman (1941–2026) was an American scholar and translator of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Gelug tradition. In the mid-1960s he became, briefly, the first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk before returning to lay life and an academic career; he later held the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and co-founded Tibet House in New York. He is widely known for translations and popular books and for his association with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He died on June 16, 2026, in Woodstock, New York, at age 84. He is presented here as a scholar-translator and advocate rather than a lineage master.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
New York CityUnited States
What they did here
Born in New York City in 1941; in the mid-1960s became, for a time, the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk (he later returned to lay life).
About New York City
New York City, in the US state of New York, began as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1620s, was renamed by the English in 1664, and took its present five-borough form in 1898. Its universities, Columbia among them (founded 1754), made it a major centre of science and scholarship; B. R. Ambedkar earned his doctorate in economics at Columbia. Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, counted Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its faculty and hosted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a fellow in 1930, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky also worked in the city. In 1930 Sokei-an founded what became the First Zen Institute of America there, an early landmark of Buddhism in the United States.
In New York City at the same time
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki), B. R. Ambedkar, Alan Watts, Pema Chödrön, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzberg
Across the traditions, in New York City at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Robert Thurman’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki), B. R. Ambedkar, Alan Watts, Pema Chödrön, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzberg
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Robert Thurman’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness
New York City · 1998