“Unhappy Endings Suck”

Brian Balogh: As a kid growing up in New York City in the 1950s, Robert Thurman was searching for an answer to one of life’s harsh realities.

Robert Thurman: Unhappy endings suck. I wasn’t really into tragedy. I didn’t like it. I felt there must be a way of really understanding.

Brian Balogh: Since then, Robert Thurman has devoted his life to studying, teaching, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. He’s regarded as one of the leading scholars on the topic, and recently retired from a long career as professor at Columbia University. Along the way, he’s had five kids, including actress Uma Thurman, opened a cultural center called Tibet House with Richard Gere, and served as an advisor and friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In 1965 the Dalai Lama ordained Robert as the first American Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition, even though Robert says the Dalai Lama avoids converting people to Buddhism.

Robert Thurman: He’s not trying to spread Buddhism, as a religious thing where he would convert somebody away from Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or whatever other religion. He just wants them to learn about their minds. Buddhism isn’t a religion where you adopt a creed and then you change your cultural setting and you drop out from what the Dalai Lama calls your grandmother’s religion. He’s not in favor of that. He wants to help people where they are, instead of change them and make them into some kind of Tibetans or into Buddhists. Finally I said, “Okay, don’t worry, Your Holiness. You didn’t [inaudible 00:50:40] did not convert me from Christianity to Buddhism.”

Brian Balogh: I talked more with Robert about his introduction to Buddhism and how he initially crossed paths with the Dalai Lama decades ago. He says losing an eye in a garage accident in the early 1960s sparked his Buddhist awakening.

Robert Thurman: My first guru [inaudible 00:51:00] I call my root teacher, he told me I should always say when I mention it that I lost the one eye and gained a thousand. That’s what he said I should always say, so I’m just following his saying. That gave me, I would call it a midlife crisis at 20.

Robert Thurman: That was lucky, although it was agonizing of course and annoying and whatever. It was really lucky because I then decided that my sense of looking for something else, which was what Buddhism was representing to me already by then, and I was reading it, but then I would just go and have fun, but looking for something else, that I should really look for something else, that life and death was a big thing, and that somebody in India did know, and I was going to find out on the trail of the Buddha. That was my luck actually. Otherwise I might’ve stuck with what I was with a [inaudible 00:51:50] view of it. I started in the ’60s because of that accident, which turned out to be great fortune in my view.

Robert Thurman: Then bam, I met the Tibetans, who had just come out starting in ’59 with His Holiness. Two and a half years earlier they were getting their bearings there in India. Then I realized they really knew what it was. Somehow I went nuts over the Tibetans, probably a previous life thing. Then luckily, I had to return to America for a family thing. Then I met in New Jersey a Mongolian lama who had been in Tibet. I’ll tell you, every time I see the Karate Kid, that Mongolian lama was just like that teacher in the Karate Kid. I’m not kidding, he was just like him.

Brian Balogh: Is this a second life thing for the Karate Kid?

Robert Thurman: I guess so.

Brian Balogh: You mentioned the Holiness the Dalai Lama. Tell me about the first time you met him. What was that like?

Robert Thurman: What happened was after about a year and three quarters with my Mongolian teacher, I kept badgering him about ordaining me as a monk. I wanted robes, shaved head. I wanted the whole trip. He said, “No, you just live like it as a student, that’s fine, but it’s not in your future. It’s not going to happen for you.”

Robert Thurman: Finally he had to go to India, and he had to go and report to the Dalai Lama. He had to help some Mongolian monks who were more in poverty than the Tibetans in India. He said, “I have to go to India. I’ll take you with me and I’ll leave you with the Dalai Lama and maybe he’ll make you a monk,” he said, “Since you’re bugging me all the time.” He said, “This kid is a little crazy, American, very smart. He speaks Tibetan already. He wants to be a monk, which he shouldn’t do, because he’s not going to be a monk in the future I’m sure, but I’m just an old Mongolian, you’re the Dalai Lama, you decide.” He did warn the Dalai Lama that even though I really was sincere, the I wouldn’t stay. Then the Dalai Lama looked me over and then he took me under his wing for about a year and a half.

Robert Thurman: Then finally toward the end of that time he did make me a monk at my continuing insistence. We became really good buddies. He and I had this great dialog because I was only the second person I think in his life who was already fluent in Tibetan that he could discuss Freud and the American Constitution and democracy and nuclear physics, although I wasn’t that good at nuclear physics, but psychology and things. He could discuss all those kind of things with me. Then I was really interested in what he was also studying. That was really nice.

Brian Balogh: When you came back to the United States, you did run into countercultural types like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who embraced elements of Buddhism. How did that go?

Robert Thurman: We got along really well actually. They had been doing Japan stuff. They didn’t know much about Buddhism. Actually, they met Tibetan stuff through me at that time, and they began to see something interesting about connecting to zen, but something different and deeper than zen, in a certain way the learning element of Buddhism, which people took decades for people to begin to realize that it’s not just meditating, there’s something to learn. There are Buddhist sciences, especially sciences of the mind, which has been my job all these years. That time that was news to them. They were beginning to get into it. At the same time, all my peers were out with the Civil Rights Movement, the anti Vietnam War movement. Now we’re talking ’65, ’66, ’66 really. I would go out and meet them and I was trying to help them. Then I went to see some old friends of mine from Cambridge who were in the psychedelic movement, trying to get them to meditate without acid.

Robert Thurman: Then the old Mongolian lama said, “If you want to go out and be activists with your friends, you can’t do that as a monk living all over the place and this and that place. You have to stay in the monastery. If you stay in the monastery, you can’t go out and do that. Which are you having to do?” Eventually I realized I had this karmic thing of trying to change the world in a certain way, and that being locked up in a monastery was not possible.

Brian Balogh: Where does academia fit into all of this, Bob, because you’re a very successful professor. Why academia?

Robert Thurman: Academia is really great. After I quit being a monk, I resigned, so what can I do with my life, be a waiter, whatever? I did make a choice then, with the help of a wonderful lady that I fell in love with, after having quit. She takes no responsibility for my quitting being a monk, which means celibate. Only after I had resigned did I meet her. With her help I decided to be a professor in a Western monastery let’s call it, which is academia, rather than try to start a dharma center or something, like some other ex-monks have done in American Buddhism, because then I would have a day job in a way. I wouldn’t depend on having disciples and having to create a dharma center empire type of thing.

Robert Thurman: I was a little very resistant to it actually. I thought, “Oh academia, I left there long ago. Who needs it? They just do this and that.” Then I got to really see that there’s something great about our liberal arts education system. It still has that element in it, a sewn-in element of follow your bliss, find your values. That aspect is good, and it fits actually with the Buddhist exploration of the meaning of life and the meaning of what it’s all about very well.

Brian Balogh: I just want to hear what your thoughts are on the popularity of what we might call secular mindfulness meditation center, so mindfulness without-

Robert Thurman: I love it.

Brian Balogh: You love it. I didn’t see that coming. Tell me about that.

Robert Thurman: I love it. I love it. They can secularize it as much as they want. It’s like secularized yoga, people who go to do yoga instead of jogging. It’s not of course the whole thing of mindfulness, because it doesn’t address the ethical element. It’s not a matter of [inaudible 00:58:22] some sort of credo, religious credo. That’s not necessary even in Buddhist mindfulness. It’s Buddhist mindfulness just because you are aware of how your mind works. In fact, if they don’t do the full thing of mindfulness of actually beginning to edit your inner mental habits and things, they just want you to become more aware of it and able to dissociate from the negative ones, which is what some people, and I like that they are criticizing that by saying it’s too superficial.

Robert Thurman: I have a good friend who just wrote a nice book called [inaudible 00:58:52] Mindfulness where he criticizes them. I like him. He’s a good friend. I’m glad he’s criticizing them. On the other hand maybe he’s asking too much in the sense that any development in our population of people who decide they’re not going to just depend on outside substances or experts, they’re not just going to ask for a Prozac or something, but they’re going to learn to calm themselves down by becoming aware of what’s going on in their mind. In other words I love it that people are becoming more self-reliant in these ways, without any involvement of Buddhism. This is one thing I want to say about Buddhism, because in our culture whenever we think we’re talking about religion, it just gets too serious. We think it’s really serious.

Brian Balogh: Correct.

Robert Thurman: Then Buddhism gets distorted into that very much because first noble truth is the truth of suffering. If you insist on being an idiot, you’re going to be unhappy. That’s not really a genius insight. That’s obvious. The key thing about Buddha is discovery is that you can be happy, that you have a right to it, you have access to it. Happiness is the nature of life. The world likes us. Plants are producing oxygen for us to breathe, if we don’t smother them all. If you behave sensibly, the world loves you. Buddha wants people to be happy. That’s the key thing. That was his discovery, and that’s why he’s popular. Asian people are not people who don’t like to be happy and only Americans like to be happy. Asian people are very good at being happy. They had the Kama Sutra 2,000 years ago, way before Shades of Gray.

Robert Thurman: This is a key thing. I think that hasn’t been brought out enough. In my retirement, I’m going to … It’s dangerous to promote happiness I think. They think you’re asking them all to get stoned or something or you’re competing with the Prozac manufacturers. I would like to compete with them, because real self-reliance, self-developed yogic happiness doesn’t have bad side effects.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackstoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 10: Brian Balogh is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is a Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.