Robert Thurman, the noted scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and father of actor Uma Thurman, has died at 84.
Thurman was widely recognized as a pioneering figure in American Buddhism. According to his official website, he became the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama.
He also had a long academic career, serving as Columbia University’s Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies for roughly 30 years before retiring in 2019.
His spiritual life helped shape Uma Thurman’s early years. Part of her childhood was spent in Almora, a town in northern India near the Tibetan border that was once known as a hub for Western Buddhists.
News of his death was announced Tuesday by Tibet House US, the nonprofit he co-founded at the Dalai Lama’s encouragement alongside supporters including Richard Gere.
In a statement posted on Instagram, the organization said it was “deeply saddened” to share that Thurman — described as a leading American Buddhist scholar, Tibet House US co-founder, author and translator whose teachings influenced countless people — died Tuesday morning, June 16, in Woodstock, New York.
Uma Thurman’s father Robert Thurman, a monk and renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, has died at the age of 84; the father and daughter are pictured in May 2006
Robert raised Uma a Buddhist, with two years of her childhood spent in Almora, an Indian town famed as a hub for western Buddhists; the pair are raised in 1993
Invoking the Sanskrit mantra: ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ the statement noted that the ‘Thurman family requests privacy at this time.’
Born in New York in 1941 to a stage actress and a news editor, Robert Thurman had a grisly accident while changing a tire that left him with a glass eye at the age of 20.
Jolted into life-changing action, he divorced his heiress wife, dropped out of Harvard and traveled rough through Turkey and Iran before reaching India.
There, he converted to Buddhism and trained under the 14th and current Dalai Lama, who was by then already in exile in India after Mao Zedong’s crackdown on Tibet.
‘Uma said recently, after seeing a photograph of me in my monk phase: “Oh, look at Daddy – he looks like Henry Miller in drag,”‘ Robert told the New York Times in 1996.
After three years of ascetism as a monk, Robert resumed the enjoyment of worldly pleasures and married the Swedish-German model Nena von Schlebrügge, with whom he welcomed four children including Uma.
However his attachment to his religion remained intact, and thus part of Uma’s childhood was passed in Almora, an Indian town whose landmarks include a ridge known as Hippie Hill for its popularity among bohemian western Buddhists.
‘There’s been a lot written about my upbringing, making it sound as if it were some hippie-dippy childhood, but that’s totally absurd,’ Uma insisted to the Irish Examiner.
Uma, pictured with Robert in 2014, has noted he ‘didn’t impose his religion on us as children to the point that maybe it would have been nice to have a little more – something to rebel against’
‘There’s been a lot written about my upbringing, making it sound as if it were some hippie-dippy childhood, but that’s totally absurd,’ insisted Uma, pictured with Robert in 2005
‘There’s an assumption that because someone is a Buddhist, they are a leftie loose cannon, unusually weird, and that’s complete baloney! I was brought up in academic housing, I went to school, my father was a professor. It was all extremely normal.’
In another interview, she noted that in spite of his own convictions, Robert ‘didn’t impose his religion on us as children to the point that maybe it would have been nice to have a little more – something to rebel against.’
Robert worked not only as a professor but also as a writer and translator, producing an English version of a classic Mayahana Buddhist text called the Vimalakirti Sutra.
He became a charming and vigorous promoter of Tibetan Buddhism in America, and in 1987 he joined forces with a number of his coreligionists including Richard Gere and composer Philip Glass to found Tibet House US.
As his daughter became a movie star, Robert’s own work advertising Tibetan Buddhism to the west achieved greater public attention.
In 1997, the year Uma’s movies Gattaca and Batman & Robin were released, Robert was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans.
He was hailed in that issue as a ‘larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.’
Among the other accolades he was heaped with over the course of his career was the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honors, which he was awarded in 2020 for his contribution to the fields of literature and education.
