Messages From Bob

I first met Robert Thurman at a repurposed Boy Scout camp in the middle of the Michigan woods in the early ’90s. It was the annual summer retreat for the Tibetan Buddhist center Jewel Heart. My lama, Gelek Rimpoche, and he were old friends, and Thurman—as everyone, including Rimpoche, affectionately called him—was there to give […]

For nearly 2,500 years, the world has heard about a man called the Buddha, a prince who gave up his kingdom to become a monk and is said to have awakened to a new and transformed human consciousness. Today it is believed that more than 535 million people practice Buddhism worldwide. We will explore the […]

Explore an overview of the history and philosophy of Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, featuring the basics of the Buddhist view of reality and its educational principles of sciences, mind and social ethics with Robert A.F. Thurman. “The Indian & Tibetan River of Buddhism” EdX Online course with Robert […]

I want to open by quoting Einstein’s wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the ‘universe,’ — a part limited in time […]

The essence of the human being is that it is a form of life that has the opportunity to evolve to a new state of being — a non-egotistical, enlightened state of being. This is why Buddhism invented the institution of monasticism : the monastic lifestyle is the least cumbersome for an individual. You have […]

We all think that fear is awful and painful, yet the Buddhists — the master psychologists for thousands of years—don’t include fear in the long list of mental afflictions contained in the Abhidharma, the core teachings on Buddhist psychology. Anger is mentioned. Impatience is mentioned. Many other familiar afflictions are mentioned. But not fear. I’ve […]