Bob Thurman, In His Own Living Room.
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
A Glass of Water and the Wheel of Life
Robert A.F. Thurman — Bob, to everyone who knew him — died on June 16, 2026, in Woodstock, New York. He was 84. The first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University for decades, co-founder of Tibet House US, and the closest Western friend the Dalai Lama ever had. Uma Thurman’s father. A man who managed to be, simultaneously, one of the most serious scholars of his generation and one of the funniest people in any room.
I visited him in the summer of 2022 with my son William, at his home in Woodstock — a house that felt entirely like him, lived-in and full of things that mattered, his daughter Uma’s two dogs keeping him company, his life companion Nena von Schlebrügge nearby. He was gracious from the first moment, the kind of gracious that has nothing to do with manners and everything to do with genuine attention. He looked at you when you spoke. Two moments from that afternoon have stayed with me.
The first: he said, with complete composure, that Donald Trump must have been an extraordinarily generous and virtuous person in a previous life — which would explain why he had been reincarnated into such extraordinary privilege. The comment detonated on YouTube. Critics missed the point entirely. From a Buddhist perspective, it was not a defense of Trump. It was something far more subversive — a reminder that the wheel turns, that today’s fortune is yesterday’s merit, and that the whole system is more complicated and more just than anything our political categories can contain. Brilliant, and perfectly delivered.
The second: he offered William and me a glass of water, and in the same breath pointed down the hall toward the bathroom, in case we needed to use it afterward. No ceremony. No performance. Just a man who had spent his entire life trying to dissolve the distance between the sacred and the ordinary, and had clearly succeeded.
If his cosmology holds — and he spent eighty-four years making the case that it does — Bob is mid-transition right now, heading somewhere luminous. The Dalai Lama will know where to look for him.
Go well, Bob. It was an honor to sit in your living room.
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