Tibet House Cofounder and Academic Robert Thurman Has Died

Internationally lauded scholar, professor, Tibet hand, and author Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman, one of the most prominent and outspoken voices of Buddhism in America—and certainly the most colorful—died suddenly on June 16, 2026 in Woodstock, New York. Known to nearly everyone as Bob, he was 84.

Highly regarded as the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University until he retired in 2019, Thurman held the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the West. It was far from his only first. He was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by no less than His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Time magazine named him one of the “25 most influential Americans” in 1997—just one of many honors he received here and abroad. Though in 1967 Thurman disrobed—renounced his role as a monk—and returned to civilian life in America, he and the Dalai Lama, only six years apart in age, remained lifelong friends. Thurman was deeply committed to the Tibetan people and their cause. “What I have learned from these people has forever changed my life,” he once wrote, “and I believe their culture contains an inner science particularly relevant to the difficult time in which we live. My desire is to share some of the profound hope for our future that they have shared with me.”At the Dalai Lama’s request, in 1987, Thurman, along with his wife Nena, actor Richard Gere, and composer Philip Glass, founded the nonprofit Tibet House US to support the preservation of Tibetan culture. He served as president of the board.

A defining moment in Thurman’s life was an accident in 1961, when he was 20: He was changing a tire when the jack slipped and took out his eye. After that, he wore a glass eye that disconcerted many who were transfixed by his intense stare. The accident led Thurman to completely change his life. He ended a brief marriage to Marie-Christophe de Menil, an art collector and oil heiress eight years his senior, with whom he had one daughter, Taya. (Their grandson is artist Dash Snow.) A “deep dissatisfaction and questioning” prompted Thurman to drop out of college—he was an undergraduate at Harvard at the time—and embark on a pilgrimage to India. (He had been kicked out of Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school, in his senior year for going AWOL in a failed attempt to join Castro’s Cuban Revolution, but Harvard had admitted him anyway.) 

On his return from India in 1964, Thurman met Geshe Wangyal, a Kalmyk Buddhist monk from Mongolia, who became his first Buddhist teacher. In 1965, Geshe Wangyal introduced Thurman to the Dalai Lama, describing him as “a crazy American boy, very intelligent and with a good heart (though a little proud), who spoke Tibetan well and had learned something about Buddhism [and] wanted to become a monk.” After Thurman’s ordination, the Dalai Lama met with him weekly, referring his questions about Buddhism to another teacher so he and Thurman could discuss “Freud, physics, and other ‘Western’ topics of interest to him.” According to Thurman’s bio, he later said of that time, “All I wanted was to stay in the 2,500-year-old community of seekers of enlightenment, to be embraced as a monk. My inner world was rich, full of insights and delightful visions, with a sense of luck and privilege at having access to such great teachers and teachings and the time to study and try to realize them.” 

On his return in 1967, Thurman found it too difficult to remain a monk and disrobed. That year, he married the German-Swedish model Nena von Schlebrugge, former wife of Timothy Leary, and resumed his education at Harvard. He earned a master’s degree in 1969 and a PhD in 1972, then went on to Amherst, where he served as professor of religion from 1973 to 1988, before assuming his post at Columbia, where he stayed for the rest of his career. Respected by students and scholars, as Thurman became a public figure, teaching to a wider audience, his popularity grew exponentially. By the time of his death, he had become the most influential American-born Tibetan Buddhist.

Thurman was the author of some twenty-three books. He earned praise from colleagues for his translations and scholarly works like The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Scripture and The Central Philosophy of Tibet: A Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa’s Essence of True Eloquence, but he was known as well for books on the Tibetan people and Tibetan art and culture. His books for a more general audience included The Tibetan Book of the Dead and inspiration for Buddhism in daily life, such as Infinite Life: Seven Virtues for Living Well and Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness. Works like Why the Dalai Lama Matters, and even a graphic-style biography, Man of Peace, reflect his longtime connection to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause. 

Impressive as Thurman’s CV is, it doesn’t begin to capture the breadth of his rich and varied life. Arguably, he was always destined for a singular path. He was born in 1941 in New York City to Elizabeth Dean Farrar, an actress who played a maid in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and Beverly Reid Thurman Jr., an Associated Press editor and translator for the United Nations. Thurman’s Tibet House biography suggests that his outsized personality and flair for the dramatic might have been influenced by his participation in the weekly Shakespeare readings his parents hosted for guests like Laurence Olivier.

In recent years, Thurman and his wife Nena have spent much of their time at the Menla Retreat & Dewa Spa, their meditation and holistic wellness center in the Catskill Mountains of New York that offers Tibetan Medicine practices and other healing modalities.   

In addition to his daughter Taya, Thurman had four accomplished adult children with Nena—actress Uma Thurman; Ganden, executive director of Tibet House; Dechen, an actor and massage therapist; and Mipam, an actor turned real estate agent—as well as eight grandchildren, among them Uma’s daughter, Maya Hawke, and son Levon Hawke, who are both actors.