The Esoteric Community Tantra with The Illuminating Lamp

Robert Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor Emeritus of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. After his education at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for fifty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. As president of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, he convened the first “inner science” conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Amherst College in 1984. He is also founding trustee and president of Tibet House US, and co-founder of Tibet House’s Menla retreat center in the Catskills. Recipient of the president of India’s Padma Shri award, he has dedicated his recent efforts to translate into English the unique Tibetan treasures of ancient Indic scientific and spiritual resources in order to heighten the scholarly and general awareness of India’s ancient Sanskrit Buddhist heritage. John Campbell, PhD, is an independent scholar, accomplished yogin, and translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan texts. His main areas of research are practice systems of yoga and tantra in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. He is currently writing a book on the commentarial literature of Buddhist and Hindu tantric Buddhist practice systems in late first-millennium India. A former assistant professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, among other academic institutions, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the theory and practice of yoga (both contemporary and premodern), Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet, and surveys of culture and religion in South, East, and Himalayan Asia. He is currently the director of Sanskrit projects for the Asian Classics Input Project, developing the digitization of classical Sanskrit texts on Buddhist and Hindu spiritual sciences. He also advises the research of advanced graduate students in UVA’s renowned Buddhist studies doctoral program.