We begin this week’s New Center NY newsletter by honoring the life of Robert Thurman, Tibetan scholar and teacher exrraordinaire, who died last week. Bob was a good friend of the Open Center, which preceded the New Center and offered many Tibetan programs in its early years, before Tibet House came into existence as a repository of Tibetan culture. Bob was president of Tibet House New York and an old friend of the Dalai Lama. He was also the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Notably, he held the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West. Bob was also a warm, brilliant, upbeat and fun person who was highly articulate and could keep an audience hanging on every word.

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From the New Center’s perspective, his most important contribution was the co-creation with the Open Center of the Art of Dying conferences starting in 1995. These were major events with 700 to 900 attendees engaged with spiritual, scientific and practical approaches to death and dying and in many ways were the original major conferences providing a more holistic view and understanding of death and dying. These seminal events were followed by the long-term certificate program in Integrative Thanatology which is now among the New Center NY’s most significant programs. These programs would not have come about had Bob Thurman not just published a new translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time. This coincided with my thought that it was time for the Open Center, after 10 years of operation, to offer major conferences. Thus began in 1995 both the Art of Dying and the Esoteric Quests on the Western Esoteric Tradition that still flourish today.

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So, a thousand thanks and feelings of appreciation and gratitude go out from us to Bob Thurman and the great contribution he made to Tibet, the Open Center, and the whole rise of a healthy and conscious approach to dying. Bon Voyage, Bob, you are deeply missed.

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