Why the Dalai Lama Matters

Prof Thurman is no more. We are republishing his interview for Rediff.cocm 

 

Professor Robert Thurman is a well-known figure in the United States. Not only because a few years ago, he was nominated as one of the 25 most influential Americans by Time magazine, but also for being a senior scholar at Columbia University, one of the Dalai Lama's oldest supporters and Hollywood beauty Uma Thurman's father.

He speaks to Claude Arpi about as diverse subjects as his years when he was a monk in north India in the 1960s, his relations with the Dalai Lama (Thurman's latest best-seller is entitled Why the Dalai Lama Matters), but also of 'capitalist' China, the Buddhist wave in the West, his idea of a Second Renaissance, his work for preserving Indian sastras at Columbia University, the Barack Obama-Dalai Lama encounter and his vision for the future of the planet.
My interview with Prof. Robert Thurman of Columbia University is posted in Rediff.com. Click here to read...

 

Tibet Archives Project

Archives Project

I am happy to inform you that the project of cataloguing and indexing some 1,500 archival files from the National Archives of India, The Prime Ministers' Museum and Library (PMML, formerly known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library or NMML) and other State Archives has been completed. This represents a corpus of historical documents collected over the last 25/30 years.
A young Tibetan research scholar, Tenzin Dekyong, daughter of the great scholar (and friend) Thubten Samphel, former secretary of the Department of Information and International Relations of the Central Tibetan Administration, Dharamsala and first director of the Tibetan Policy Institute, has worked hard for more than two months on the project as Research Assistant.
The documents are hosted at the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture, Auroville.
A database will be released shortly, and these files will be accessible on demand for interested scholars.
I am grateful to my colleagues at the Pavilion for their constant support.