Messages From Bob

Why The Dalai Lama Matters As The Leader of the Tibetans

March 27, 2015

The Dalai Lama continues to inspire restraint and nonviolence among the Tibetan youth in exile and all the Tibetans in Tibet, in spite of their mounting frustration at the lack of progress made in achieving economic self-sufficiency, religious freedom, and human and other rights due to the Chinese government’s oppressive and destructive policies. Dalai Lama […]

What Tibet’s Dalai Lama Means for Today

March 24, 2015

When I have attended His Holiness the Dalai Lama giving Buddhist teachings to large assemblies, I have had an odd sensation lately: it feels as if I have entered a time warp, and am actually witnessing Shakyamuni Buddha himself in all his glory as a teacher. As the Noble Vimalakirti Sutra puts it, “Dominating all […]

Nagarjuna & Evolutionary Skill: Bob Thurman Podcast

March 18, 2015

One of the main leaders of the enlightenment movement in India was a great monk-teacher called Nagarjuna, who lived sometime between the first century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. By this time, India had developed enormously, with large numbers of enlightened individuals working to transform the whole society gradually. Nagarjuna became a monk as […]

Buddhist Belief in Past & Future Life: Bob Thurman Podcast

March 17, 2015

When some people hear the word “reincarnation,” they automatically think that the person speaking is a nut, a weirdo, or some kind of New Age hippie. It’s so ingrained in our heads by our scientific, materialistic culture that the idea is absurd. Carl Sagan thought the belief in future lives was wishful thinking by religious […]

Introduction to HH Dalai Lama’s My Appeal To the World by Robert Thurman

March 12, 2015

I am deeply honored to present to the English-speaking world His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s fifty-year-long, sustained, emergency appeal to the world community for help, on behalf of his beloved people of Tibet, skillfully arranged and powerfully elucidated by Sofia Stril-Rever, originally published in French, and ably translated by Sebastian Houssiaux. The brave people of […]

Support Tibetan Culture: AIBS & The Buddhist Canons Research Database

February 23, 2015

The American Institute of Buddhist Studies, nonprofit 501c3, was founded in 1972, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama and the late Geshe Ngawang Wangyal with the mandate to translate and publish the originally Indian Buddhist scientific, spiritual, and artistic works collected in the Tengyur (bstan ‘gyur) collection of Tibetan translations from Sanskrit and […]