No Regrets

I’ve had my share of failed interviews. The first was a planned Q&A with the Burmese meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita (1921–2016), who seemed more interested in asking me about my own practice than answering any questions I had for him. “Where do you feel the breath?” he’d ask, interrupting a question I had about working with difficult meditation experiences. And “When do you sit? Mornings or evenings?” It went on this way for a while, until I finally gave up, switched off the recording device, and settled into the role of student.

Another failed interview is one I attempted to conduct with Robert A. F. Thurman (1941–2026), the late Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Bob had an outsize personality, and all that goes with that: his booming voice, his lumbering gait, the way all eyes locked on him when he entered a room. And then, of course, there was the glass eye that somehow didn’t hide what was missing but added a waggish charm. He was a person hungry for ideas and conversation and meeting new people. He challenged the stereotypes about Buddhist spirituality. He was unabashedly social, and he broadened our vision of what bodhisattva activity could look like.

Plenty has been written about Bob since his death at his home in Woodstock, New York, in June (see the obituary by contributing editor Joan Duncan Oliver), and much has rightly been made of his significant contribution to the American dharma scene. That became apparent early in my career at Tricycle, in the 1990s, whenever I interviewed young job applicants. “How did you develop an interest in Buddhism?” I’d ask. Almost invariably, the applicant would answer, “I learned about Buddhism from Professor Thurman.” Sometimes they called him “Buddha Bob,” or “Tenzin Bob,” as he was also affectionately known, and Bob had sent them our way.

In the early 2000s, I arrived at Bob’s home not far from Columbia University to interview him about his book The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti: A Mahāyāna Scripture. I was taken with the notion of an enlightened layman and thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s accessible style and his helpful glossaries that brought the sutra to life in English. But Bob barely mentioned the sutra. He talked about politics, our endless wars, and the Bush dynasty, occasionally taking detours into Tibetan teachings on compassion and the practice of loving our enemies. I did my best to bring him back to the sutra but had no success, and as with Sayadaw, I eventually gave up. But I was not for a moment bored. I’d been taken for a conversational joy ride that ended only when his wife, Nena, interrupted us to remind Bob that he had another commitment and we’d have to wrap up. I left without an interview and without regrets. The irony is that the interview is all the more memorable for its failure.

The contrast between Sayadaw and Bob couldn’t have been starker: Sayadaw brought me back to myself, while Bob’s talks were magnificent voyages that dropped me off at wonderful and unexpected places. A few years ago, I hosted Bob on Zoom, and more than what he said, I recall the broad smile, the mischievous laugh, the delight he took in the dharma, and the enviable full head of hair. I mentioned the failed interview of a few decades before, and he said that we’d have to revisit Vimalakīrti sometime. We never did.

–James Shaheen
Editor-in-Chief