Distinguished Visiting Teachers | Past Resident Teachers | Tibetan Medical Doctors

American born nun Ven. Thubten Chodron received her novice ordination in 1977 and her full bhikshuni ordination in Taiwan in 1986. She has studied Buddhism in India and Nepal for many years and has taught worldwide, serving for two years as spiritual director of Lama Tzong Khapa Institut in Italy and as resident teacher of Amitabha Buddhist Center in Singapore. She currently lives in Seattle and has visited us twice to give teachings.

Ven. George Churinoff is an American monk who took ordination in 1975, and who also holds a physics degree from MIT and a Master’s degree in Buddhist Studies from Delhi University. He has taught extensively across the world and played an important role in furthering the activities of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT).

Prof. Georges Dreyfus was the first Westerner to obtain the title of Geshe Lharampa, the highest degree conferred within the traditional Tibetan monastic system. He received his traditional Buddhist education at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics and at Sera Je monastic university. He is presently Professor of Religion at Williams College. His most important works are: “Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti's Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpreters,” and “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk.”

Prof. Dunne teaches and supervises graduate student research on Buddhist philosophy at Emory University and is the author of “Foundations of Dharmakirti’s Thought,” a seminal work on the important Buddhist logician Dharmakirti. Before joining Emory in 2005, Prof. Dunne was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he collaborated in research with Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Antoine Lutz on neuroscientific studies of Tibetan monks in meditation.

Wendy Farley is Professor of Religion and Ethics at Emory University. Prof. Farley received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988. Her teaching interests include religious dialogue, classical texts, and contemporary ethical issues. She has written three books: “Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy,” “Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World,” and “The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth.”

Glenn Mullin is an internationally renowned Tibetologist, author, translator, and expert on Buddhist meditation, who lived in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama, for many years where he studied Tibetan language, literature, yoga, and meditation under twenty-five of the greatest masters of Tibet. He is author of over 15 books on Buddhist topics, and has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and the Far East.

Dr. Ozawa-de Silva received her D. Phil. in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford University in 2001. Following that, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard's Department of Social Medicine, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2003 she joined Emory University as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her interests lie in cross-cultural understandings of health and illness and in bringing Western and Asian perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, therapy, and health and illness into fruitful dialogue. She is author of the book “Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan.”

Bobbi Patterson is a Senior Lecturer at Emory University and Director of the Emory Scholars Program. Her research focuses on spiritual practices, particularly in relation to wilderness and social change. With training in feminist theory and theology, her interests generally focus at the intersections of symbolisms of the body, psychodynamics, and cultural construction/reconstruction. Her comparative fields are Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. Committed to the scholarship of teaching, she has published numerous articles on these topics. She received her B.A. in Religion from Smith College, M.Div. from Harvard, and Ph.D. from Emory.

Dr. Charles Raison is an assistant professor in the Mind-Body Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, where he also serves as Director of the Behavioral Immunology Clinic. His research ranges from immune system effects on central nervous system functioning to the application of compassion meditation as a strategy to prevent depressive symptoms in college students via reduction in stress-related inflammatory activity.

Prof. Thurman is the Je Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and co-founder and president of Tibet House New York. At age 24, he became the first Western monk of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He is considered one of the foremost scholars of Tibetan Buddhism in America and is the author of over a dozen books and translator of several important Buddhist texts into English.

Distinguished Visiting Teachers | Past Resident Teachers | Tibetan Medical Doctors