Kurt Kankan Spellmeyer

Kurt Spellmeyer is an award-winning teacher and scholar in the English department at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a Rinzai Zen Master. He is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century and several other books. Robert Thurman holds the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. As President of the American Institute for Buddhist Studies, he convened the First Inner Science Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Amherst College in 1984. He is also a founding trustee of Tibet House New York.