In Why the Dalai Lama Matters interview on Rediff News, Robert Thurman speaks with 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.

Explore the burning questions that have intrigued humanity since the dawn of time. Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Do I need a teacher or guide? Karen Armstrong & Bob Thurman share their insights on Global Spirit, the first “internal travel” series.

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According to esteemed Tibetan scholar and Woodstock resident, Robert Thurman, “Our town should be in the lead in turning America away from a self-defeating war economy to a green sustainable economy, and so the conversion of the Woodstock plant of Rotron from war component making to purely peace-product manufacturing is of vital concern to all Woodstock taxpaying citizens, including myself.” 

From Woodstock Peace Economy introducing the Woodstock Forum: Building a Peaceful, Just and Sustainable Economy, August 15-19, 2009.

Related: Two Opportunities to Learn Peacemaking

Josh Glenn, noted Boston Globe Columnist and editor of the Hermenaut, writes in HiloBrow “ROBERT THURMAN, who was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1964 by Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama (an avatar of Lowbrow, in the most praiseworthy sense of that term), is one of the world’s most respected scholars and translators of Tibetan and Sanskrit for a Western audience — i.e., he is a Highbrow. Even more confusing: during the Nineties Thurman was best known as a mentor of middlebrow “celebrity Buddhists,” and as the father of a middlebrow celebrity. So what to make of him? I interviewed Thurman for the magazine Utne Reader in 1996.” [Read more]