What Bob Thurman Knew About Letting Sacred Places Change
May he rest in peace.
This piece is a reflection on a one-on-one conversation I recorded with Bob Thurman in November 2025, backstage at the Eudēmonia Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida. I did not know it then, but it would be one of the last conversations he gave.
Robert "Bob" Thurman, the Buddhist scholar, author, and one of the West's most important interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism, died on June 16, 2026, at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 84.
Thurman's path to that life began after a 1961 accident left him without the use of one eye and sent him traveling through Turkey, Iran, and India. He went on to become, in 1965, the first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained personally by the Dalai Lama, with whom he remained close for the rest of his life. He later returned to lay life, earned a PhD from Harvard, and spent three decades as the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the West. In 1987, at the Dalai Lama's request, he co-founded Tibet House US alongside Richard Gere and Philip Glass, and in 2002 he and his wife, Nena von Schlebrügge, opened Menla Retreat in the Catskills as a center for Tibetan-inspired healing and contemplative practice. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Inner Revolution, Why the Dalai Lama Matters, and Infinite Life, and was the father of actress Uma Thurman and grandfather of Maya Hawke.
For nearly two decades, Thurman also led travelers into the Himalayas himself. By the time we sat down together, he had stepped back from the trips, but not from the questions they raised. In our conversation, he reflected on what regenerative travel actually asks of us — not just to visit sacred places, but to reckon with how they change, and how we change them.
The Places That Used to Be
Thurman had spent more time than almost anyone reckoning with how Buddhist Asia shifted under the weight of tourism, politics, and money. Sri Lanka was still finding its footing after years of hardship, he told me. India and Nepal remained steady presences on the map of seekers, even for those who never quite got there themselves.
But it was Bhutan that drew out his sharpest observation. Once the kind of place pilgrims simply went, it had become something else — a destination shaped by steep daily tourist fees and a wave of luxury hotel construction. Not commercial in the obvious sense, he noted, but expensive in a way that quietly changes who gets to come, and why.
It is a familiar story to anyone working in regenerative travel. The places that most need protecting are often the ones that get priced into a different kind of relationship with the people who love them.
The Technology Already Inside Us
Midway through our conversation, the talk turned to Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher who founded Anthroposophy after rebelling against a more conventional academic path. Steiner's famous warning — that humanity will keep inventing technologies outside itself until it either destroys the world or recognizes that those technologies already exist within — landed as more than a thought experiment for Thurman.
He traced a direct line from Steiner's spiritual philosophy to his own pioneering work in regenerative agriculture, a tradition he studied under Al Gore's multi-day trainings after retiring from academia. He described farmers in North Dakota who shifted to alfalfa rotation instead of leaving fields fallow, and how that soil weathered drought and flood better than land kept on a steady diet of machines and chemicals.
The thread connecting Steiner to alfalfa to Bhutan's luxury hotels was not subtle, in Thurman's telling. Regeneration, in other words, is not a separate project from inner work. It is what inner work looks like once it reaches the ground.
The Mind, the Land, and What We Owe Each Other
Thurman had long argued that the mind is the determinant of experience — not because the external world doesn't matter, but because how we meet it does. Master the mind, diminish its negative habits, reinforce what is generous in it, he said, and the result is not just a happier person but someone who treats the world, and other people, and the land, better.
It was, notably, not an argument for escape. Thurman was openly critical of spiritual traditions that offer transcendence as a way out of responsibility. He spoke of his own theology, applied loosely across Western religions and some forms of Hinduism, that the divine figures in these traditions were never as all-powerful as people imagine. If they were, he reasoned, ethical instruction would be pointless, since an all-powerful being could simply make everyone behave. The fact that these traditions offer guidance, and warn of consequence, suggests something more reciprocal — a shared stake in how things turn out here.
Nirvana, Eventually
Asked whether nirvana is achievable, Thurman didn't hedge. Not only achievable, he said, but unavoidable — though not necessarily within this lifetime. He pointed to his book Infinite Life, named for Amitayus, the Pure Land Buddha of boundless life, and a cosmology in which consciousness has no real beginning or end. Even the eventual death of the sun, billions of years out, doesn't end the story. Beings move on, and eventually return.
What stayed with him most, he said, was the idea of mahamudra, the great embrace — an experience of love so total it extends not just to people but to the palm tree, the bush, the floor. You embrace the universe, he said, and the universe embraces you back. It is, in his telling, simply what becomes available once someone gets a real glimmer of how happy they could be, all the time, and decides that's how they want to live.
What the Trips Were For
For years, Thurman ran travel through Buddhist countries built around something closer to pilgrimage than tourism. Participants might give a thousand dollars to a monastery ahead of a trip, then travel together, then receive chanting and an honorarium for the meditation hall in return. Money moved, but so did something less transactional — people who became monks and nuns, donors who showed up and meant it.
He had stepped back from leading those trips himself. Age, and a dwindling appetite for airports, had done what they do. But he was matter-of-fact, not wistful, about handing the work to younger organizers who don't need to make huge money, just some, and who might reach travelers he no longer could.
Two Decades at 47 Percent Oxygen
Our conversation closed where Thurman's own history ran deepest, in Tibet, where he made something like twenty trips between 1987 and 2007. He never warmed to the cities, overrun as they became with vendors selling trinkets and religious objects to tourists who didn't always know the difference. The mountains were the draw, always.
He lingered on the physical strangeness of the place — roughly 47 percent of sea-level oxygen, enough that chronic mountain sickness affects even people who've lived there a long time, and enough that Chinese officials stationed there would send pregnant wives elsewhere to give birth. Bolivians, he noted, have a different chemistry entirely, one that lets them chew coca leaf in ways that don't translate to Tibetan altitude.
Visa rules tightened hard after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Thurman stopped trying to go back. He missed it, he said. The trekking, mostly.
Carrying It Forward
Sitting with Bob, what stayed with me most was how little distance he kept between the spiritual and the practical. Regeneration, for him, was never a separate category from how a soul moves through the world, how a government prices a visa, how a hotel gets built, how a farmer rotates a field. The places we visit and the way we visit them are part of the same story, and he had spent a lifetime watching both unfold across the same stretch of mountains.
That conversation feels like an invitation now — not just to remember him, but to go see for ourselves what he loved. The Himalayan region he gave so much of his life to is still very much open to thoughtful travelers, and regenerative options across it continue to grow. Ladakh, often called Little Tibet, offers high-altitude monasteries, Buddhist communities, and a culture closely tied to the one Thurman spent decades studying, with a growing number of community-based and low-impact stays. Nepal remains rich with regenerative lodges and locally rooted experiences around Kathmandu, Pokhara, and the trekking routes into the Annapurna and Everest regions. And India more broadly, from Dharamshala to the Buddhist circuit in Bihar, holds some of the same living traditions Thurman returned to again and again.
If his conversation with me left you wanting to understand this part of the world a little better, we'd encourage you to go see it. Thoughtfully, slowly, and with the kind of respect for these places that he spent his whole life trying to teach.
Learn more about Bob Thurman's ongoing work at thus.org .
This piece reflects on a one-on-one conversation recorded with Bob Thurman in November 2025 at the Eudēmonia Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, covering regenerative travel, Buddhist philosophy, and three decades of work in the Himalayas. Robert A.F. Thurman died June 16, 2026, in Woodstock, New York, at age 84.
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