Robert Thurman, whose erudite, exuberant efforts to expand the West’s understanding of Tibetan Buddhism earned him a reputation as “the Dalai Lama’s man in America,” died on Tuesday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 84.
His daughter, the actress Uma Thurman, confirmed the death.
Widely considered the foremost expert on Tibetan Buddhism in the United States, Dr. Thurman was a former Buddhist monk who had been ordained and partly trained by the Dalai Lama himself. He later earned a doctorate in Indic studies from Harvard and taught at Amherst and Columbia.
He wrote, edited and translated more than 20 books on Buddhism. Some of them were centuries-old texts intended for scholars and advanced practitioners; others, like “Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness” (1998), were written for the broader public and sold briskly.
As the 1970s counterculture embraced Eastern religious ideas, and Buddhism in particular, Dr. Thurman pushed for a historically grounded, intellectually rigorous understanding of the tradition.
“His translations went to the depths of the sophistication of the Tibetan exploration of consciousness,” David Kittay, a former student of Dr. Thurman’s at Columbia who now teaches religion there, said in an interview. “Yet he could explain it so anyone could get it.”
Tall, sturdily built and with a shock of reddish-blond hair, he brought an infectious energy to the many lectures and conferences he organized around Buddhism and the plight of Tibet under Chinese rule.
People were often surprised by how sociable he was, given his years as a monk.
“I don’t think he considered those to be contradictions,” Rodger Kamenetz, an expert on Buddhist-Jewish relations and the author of “Seeing Into the Life of Things: Imagination and the Sacred Encounter” (2025), said in an interview. “He viewed meditation not as quietism, but as a release of energy, and he just had great energy.”
In 1972 he founded the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia; the organization translates and preserves classical Indian Buddhist texts.
In 1987, at the Dalai Lama’s request, he and his wife, Nena, joined the actor Richard Gere and the composer Philip Glass in founding Tibet House U.S., a sort of cultural consulate in Manhattan for the Tibetan nation. Dr. Thurman later served for decades as its president.
He and his wife also operated a Buddhist retreat west of Woodstock, the Menla Retreat and Dewa Spa.
“My father was a magnificent, charismatic, passionate, curious, alive, vibrant human being,” Ms. Thurman said. “He never stopped investigating the world in all its facets. He was obsessed with the power of compassion.”
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman was born on Aug. 3, 1941, in Manhattan. His parents — Beverly Thurman, a journalist, and Elizabeth Dean Farrar, an actress — hosted regular salons in their home; Robert once read lines alongside Laurence Olivier, one of their guests.
He enrolled in boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. He was expelled in 1958 — weeks from graduation, having already been accepted at Harvard — after leaving without permission to join Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army in Cuba. He was stopped in Florida and worked for a brief time in Mexico.
In 1959, he married Christophe de Menil, an oil heiress. In 1961, while changing a flat tire, the tire iron slipped and destroyed his left eye, a freak accident that left him questioning his own mortality.
He dropped out of Harvard to travel across Asia. His wife, uninterested in his wanderings, left him. He arrived in Turkey close to broke.
“I was already by about that time like St. Francis,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1996. “I had an empty socket, long hair and a scraggly beard. I wore black baggy Afghani pants, a T-shirt with a white shawl thrown around me and leather sandals.”
He continued on through Iran to India, where he got a job teaching English to young reincarnated Tibetan lamas in exile. He immediately took to their beliefs and culture — “I was in heaven, because the minute I met the Tibetans, I knew they had what I wanted,” he told The Times.
He returned home when his father died, in 1962 but continued his pursuit of Buddhist knowledge with Geshe Wangyal, a Buddhist lama in New Jersey. Adept at languages, he learned Tibetan in a matter of months and eventually spoke it without an accent.
He decided to become a monk and persuaded his teacher to accompany him to Dharamshala, India, the home in exile of the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Thurman and the Dalai Lama became fast friends: He studied under the Tibetan spiritual leader and, in turn, gave him lessons in Freudian psychology, nuclear physics and other Western ideas.
“He would say, ‘Forget about the teaching, you can go and talk to some old lama,’” Dr. Thurman told The San Francisco Examiner in 1997. “‘But now what I want to know is how does the bicameral American constitutional system work? What is a gene, how does it work?’”
The Dalai Lama ordained Dr. Thurman but, when he returned to the United States, Geshe Wangyal persuaded him that he could better serve Buddhism by doffing his robes and becoming a professor.
He returned to Harvard and, in 1972, received a doctorate in Indic studies — an interdisciplinary degree now known as Sanskrit and Indian studies. He taught at Amherst College from 1973 to 1988, when he transferred to Columbia. There, he held the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the West. He retired in 2019.
Soon after returning to Harvard, Dr. Thurman went to Millbrook, the estate in upstate New York where the psychiatrist Timothy Leary and his circle were experimenting with LSD; he was there in an attempt to get Dr. Leary to tone down the drug use.
In the kitchen, he met Nena von Schlebrügge, a model who was soon to be the ex-wife of Dr. Leary. They married in 1967.
She survives him along with their daughter Uma and three sons, Ganden, Dechen and Mipam; a daughter from his first marriage, Taya Thurman; seven grandchildren, including the actress Maya Hawke; and three great-grandchildren. Another grandchild, the artist Dash Snow, died in 2009.
Across his many lectures, translations and books, Dr. Thurman tried to communicate a few key ideas about Buddhism, above all that it was not just a religion in a narrow sense, but a system of ethical education.
“Buddhism is not primarily religious,” he told The Believer magazine in 2020. “It deteriorates if someone believes they will get to nirvana if they just worship the Buddha. But the Buddha was saying, ‘Worshipping me is not going to get you there; you have to do something.’”
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