Wisdom Dharma Chat | Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche & Professor Robert Thurman
In this special Wisdom Dharma Chats episode, presented in collaboration with Tergar International and Tibet House US, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Professor Robert Thurman come together for a rich and wide-ranging conversation on the practical application of Buddhist teachings in everyday life. With clarity, warmth, and humor, they explore tantric practice, the nature of Buddha’s potential, and the central role of meditation in transforming the mind.
Rinpoche, a renowned meditation master trained in the highest Vajrayana practices and known for his extended retreats and wandering pilgrimage through the Himalayas, brings firsthand insight into the lived experience of the Dharma. Thurman, a preeminent scholar of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and a tireless advocate for its preservation, shares his deep textual knowledge and contemporary reflections on the relevance of the Buddhist worldview today.
Together, they discuss overcoming distraction, the role of compassion in both personal and societal contexts, and even reflect on the meeting point between artificial intelligence and consciousness. The session concludes with a short guided meditation from Rinpoche, offering participants a direct experience of present-moment awareness. With host Daniel Aitken guiding the conversation, this Wisdom Dharma Chat offers a rare and inspiring encounter with two remarkable teachers who bridge ancient wisdom and the modern world.
Meet Our Guests
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Mingyur Rinpoche is a world-renowned meditation teacher with personal experience of anxiety and panic attacks, which he suffered from throughout his childhood and into his teenage years, when he learned to transform his panic through meditation.
Born in Nepal in 1975, Mingyur Rinpoche began to study meditation as a young boy with his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, himself a well-respected Buddhist teacher.
As a child he became interested in contemporary science through conversations with scientists who were visiting his father, and as he grew older he began to collaborate with neuroscientists and psychologists, including Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz at the University of Wisconsin, on research projects that study the effects of meditation on the brain and the mind.
Mingyur Rinpoche’s first book, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into over twenty languages. His second book, Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, explores how difficult emotions and challenging life situations can be used as stepping stones to discover joy and freedom. In his most recent book, In Love with the World, Mingyur Rinpoche shares how his meditation practice sustained him when he left his monastery to wander through India and the powerfully transformative insights he gained from the near-death experience he had at the beginning of his journey. Mingyur Rinpoche recently appeared in the Netflix series The Mind, Explained, in an episode about the benefits of mindfulness.
As the head of the Tergar Meditation Community, Mingyur Rinpoche supports groups of students in more than thirty countries, leading workshops around the world for new and returning students every year.
Robert Thurman
Bob Thurman, known in the academic circles as Professor Robert A.F. Thurman, is a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
A charismatic speaker and author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, Bob was named by The New York Times the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, and was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri Award in 2020, for his help in recovering India’s ancient Buddhist heritage. Time Magazine chose him as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.”
Bob served as the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University for 30 years, until 2020. A very popular professor, students always felt his classes were “life-changing”. Bob is the founder and active president of Tibet House US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan culture, and of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific Tibetan treatises.
His own search for enlightenment began while he was a university student at Harvard. After an accident in which he lost the use of an eye, Bob left school on a spiritual quest throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He found his way to India, where he first saw His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1962. After learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism, Bob became a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. Some years later, however, he offered up his robes when he realized he could be more effective in the American equivalent of a monastery: the university, returning to Harvard to finish his PhD.
As part of his long-term commitment to the Tibetan cause, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama, Bob co-founded Tibet House US in 1987 with Tenzin Tethong, Richard Gere, and Philip Glass, a non profit organization based in New York City and dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of Tibetan culture.
Inspired by his longtime good friend the Dalai Lama, Bob takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world through the prisma of Tibetan Buddhism. He shares with us the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens a door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful, kind, and wise future.
