(CONVERSATION WITH DR. ROBERT THURMAN)
Dr. Robert Thurman, who passed away in Jun 2026, was named one of Time magazine’s 25 Most Influential Americans in 1997; an internationally recognized scholar, translator and author; and the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. In describing Thurman, Time magazine calls him “the Billy Graham of American Buddhism. Or perhaps the St. Paul, a later-day, larger-than-life scholar-activist destined to convey the dharma, the precious teachings of Siddhartha, from Asia to America. The following interview by Louis Bourgeois* is perhaps the last with Dr Thurman that has not been released to the reading public.
In all the lectures I’ve seen of yours you never discuss Zen Buddhism. What’s you’re stance on Zen?
I love Zen!
My view of Zen is that the core of its tradition is the DIALECTICTICIST CENTRISM (Prāsaṇgikamādhyamika) – Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, the Mahamudra, or the Dzogchen of China and Japan! I wrote to this effect in my Buddhist Hermeneutics article decades ago, and repeated that in the introduction to the Central Philosophy of Tibet.
Chinese culture was so nervous about women and their power, that the advanced Tantras never got very settled there until 20th century, and so the Ch’an lineage brought the radical “effect vehicle” teachings without the sexual imagery and subtle body yogas, though they knew them and used them themselves at the highest levels. Even Japan, where the Shingon line did bring much of the Tantric perspective, shied away from the Unexcelled Yogas, and so Zen served the super-advanced there.
Of course, the Hvashang Mohoyen in Tibet and many others associated with the tradition over-simplified things with the naive Subitist, rather nihilistic extremist theory, so I don’t mean all Zen teachers and writers reached the level of their core tradition. I love especially Cleary’s Blue Cliff Record and some other translations, as really conveying the subtleties well.
What is the difference between Nothingness and Nirvana?
Nothingness doesn’t exist except as a negative notion. Nothing is just nothing, technically a non-referring term, and the “-ness” doesn’t make it something.
Nirvana is the experienced freedom from all physical or mental suffering, otherwise known as inconceivable bliss.
In the Mystic Fire videos, you describe Buddhism as a great super pattern of moral reality. But from what I’ve read of Zen there doesn’t appear to be anything but enlightenment itself, i.e., enlightenment strikes all at once and has nothing to do with moral actions done in this life. In Zen, there doesn’t seem to be any references to any kind of re-birth pattern, etc.
By the way, your lectures on tape have pulled me through some of the darkest moments of my life.
And thanks for that!
I’m so glad and touched.
The thing about Ch’an and Zen is that it aims at people who have grown up with Avalokliteshvara and Manjushri all around them, Amitabha in the West, the Buddhist ethic maintained by monastics and together to be flouted by the many. So the tradition that attracts our notice takes the moral patterns, rebirth as a given, etc., for granted, as already second nature in the common sense of the people. So it seems absent, unless we’ve studied the culture extensively – and not just as many western academics who unconsciously are bent on seeing things in a way that reinforces their sense of their own culture’s superiority.
I’ve been rigorously pursuing my studies in Zen…but my mind is thoroughly en-trenched in Existialism, as it has for 20 years. I can only seem to get so far with Buddhism, then the door shuts. It would be helpful to me if you could give a Buddhist response to the six Existential principles.
I present these statements with total respect for you and Zen. I’m simply trying to reverse some very nasty intellectual habits.
Existence precedes essence. In other words, “you are not a thing” and there is no structure (Metaphysically or otherwise) that binds you. What is the Buddhist understanding of this assertion?
Existence and essence are a binary conceptual pair, when both are understood as conventional terms. VOIDNESS of essence doesn’t mean there are no essences, only that the habitually imagined, reified and absolutized essence in persons and things does not exist, all being sheer relativity. Existence as opposite of essence is meaningless without relative essence. In terms of your simple statement, “You are both a person and a thing, but not an intrinsically real person nor an intrinsically real thing.” Relatively, relativistically, there are structure and binding and freedom from binding. Absolutely, ultimately, intrinsically, there is neither bondage nor freedom. Etc. This can go on and on.
Anxiety is the universal condition. Those who claim not to experience anxiety are either lying to themselves or completely deluded.
Dualistic life is so stressful lived driven by the truth-grasping mind, freedom is imagined to be some transcendent state detached from life. However, beyond that type of escapist fantasy, non-dualistic life is, apparently, blissful beyond conceivability, as relational existence is experienced as magical illusion, indivisible from its matrix of freedom, death and life in balanced communion. Anxiety is caused by the delusion of intrinsically real self-habituation, and is dispelled by wisdom. If you attain the ultimate tolerance of cognitive dissonance that is enlightenment, and can live joyfully as if already dead-free, anxiety about yourself no longer arises; and anxiety about others who are not so aware and not so tolerant emerges as compassion, made tolerable by the infinite well of bliss, the clear light or transparency of the free void.
Absurdity: to exist is inexplicable. Although my existence is free and un-bounded, I exist for no particular reason.
Inconceivable is how it is traditionally put, also inexpressible and inexplicable. Whenever existence is experienced with full relationality, it is evenly free, and certainly a remembered kind of alienated existence as self vs. other is known as pointless not imposed by anyone or anything for any reason. However, one is then free to choose to make its reason the love of compassion for others not so free and so experiencing themselves as suffering.
Nothingness: there is nothing that structures my world. The self is nothing and there’s no way to “transcend” it.
There is no such thing as nothing or nothingness, the ultimately non-referring, or not even conceptually referring, concept! So therefore no thing is nothing, or perhaps, only nothing is nothing. “Is” has no referent as concerns “nothing.” There is no absolute self, has not been found by millions of seekers, so far. However, there is a relative self, always changing, a continuum, a work in progress, ignorant and alienated, always anxious and suffering, wise and connected, enlightened, blissful and confidently in communion with all beings and things. There definitely are transcendent experiences, the supreme perhaps being the transcendence of transcendence, experienced still as being something apart or beyond something else, un-located or nonlocal nirvana, Buddha-hood, bliss-void-indivisible, etc.
Death: the final nothingness: death is total non-existence.
Death does not exist, except conceptually, just as a line has no width, a point no size, an instant no duration. Therefore there are no dead persons, no one can “be” dead, and it is an arbitrary seeming boundary of a perceived form of life. The subjectivity of a person passing from one life form into another experiences only threshold states of obliteration of habitual states of awareness, replaced seamlessly by other states. Just as the person falling asleep and letting go of coarse consciousness in the softness of the pillow is not aware of any state of nonawareness before rising in subtler dream awareness, and also passing again from dream through non-aware deep sleep and arising in wakefulness. We can say “final nothingness “and “total non-existence” and “death,” longing for a final anesthesia, but we are reifying non-referring terms into a picture of a dark oblivion space which no relative being can ever inhabit, there being only continua in relational existences. We are never going to be dead. And those, like the wonderful Miguel de Unamuno, who thought themselves into being afraid of la nada, were simply focusing their alienated anxiety on the notion of nothing in their heads. “There is nothing to be afraid of!” “I am afraid of nothing!” These are more sensible locutions, more sensible use of the term “nothing.” What is fearful actually is continued states of existence becoming negative, painful, horrible, etc. What is frightening is endless continuity without understanding or control. “To die. To sleep. Perchance to dream, Aye there’s the rub….” etc.
Alienation: I cannot truly connect with others, nature, culture, etc.
“Alienation” means feeling one is really a self apart and different from other beings and things. Prthagjana (Tib. so sor skye bo) means literally “separate person,” the opposite of ārya, a “noble” person, who has had some visceral experience of selflessness and so feels the life of others as equal to her or his own life, and so feels a noblesse oblige about those others. Shakyamuni, apparently, brilliantly took terms that were race- or class-based in Vedic India, “noble” as twice-born upper class, and “separate person” as someone excluded from the Vedic rite, low caste outsider, and transvalued them into meaning, respectively, individuals who felt a relational unity with others and so had the nobility of empathetic wisdom, and persons who were enclosed in self-centeredness, obsessed only with their self-concerns, and so felt alienated and disconnected from others, unaware of and unconcerned about their condition.
I enjoyed engaging with these questions and topics. I hope the answers are helpful.
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* Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated, The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.