Robert Thurman

And no one has provided greater fertilizer, in my humble opinion.

I mean, the Tibetan book of the dead and the dying, you know, we had Dr. Robert Thurman on the podcast, incredibly rich read as well.

Um, Diwise, Stephen Jenkinson, and here in this moment with Stephen's diagnosis and what he's going through, he opens himself up, turns himself inside out, and we get to discuss what it's been like for someone that sat with people's bedsides and had helped support them go across the other side what of that content that material that experience and everything he's learned and now finally when the rubber hits the road in his own life what still holds true what doesn't what he's learning what is you know and we get the opportunity to really go into that um What comes up for me at this moment is actually to thank you, the audience.

I'm only really gifted with the opportunity and the responsibility to have conversations like this, thanks to your presence here.

... that I've met are funny, and that's one of the biggest things that drew me to them.

And Robert Thurman, I don't know if you know the Tibetan Buddha scholar.

I-- Yeah, he just passed.

He ...

[laughs]

And then, and then I, uh, then I encountered Bob Thurman at Amherst College and everything w- went much better after that.

That where he, we spent most of class arguing about whether I really existed, so that-

[laughs]

Um, I love it, just makes your teaching sink in, and I absorb it because of your humor to a large extent.

And also, when I experience you, I experience Bob Thurman.

[laughs]

Because I don't know if people have told you-

but I [laughs] you sound so much like him.

It's just uncanny to me.

I was very close to Bob Thurman-

Yeah

You know, as Kodo mentioned, um, uh, very much based on my f- great and long friendship with Francisco Varela, the neuroscientist, um, and philosopher and Buddhist practitioner, [clears throat] where, um, he and I were part of a group called the Lindisfarne Fellowship that was magnetized by an amazing, uh, kind of visionary historian, William Irwin Thompson.

And Bill brought together, uh, people like Francisco and Schumacher and Gregory Bateson, Ro- the late Robert Thurman, um, myself, artists like Mayumi Oda, um, poets like Wendell Berry.

We would come together once or twice a year, and the last meetings actually were here before Bill became very ill.

And it was, you know, just kind of a mind meld.

And I started setting up and then instantly I didn't have that yucky feeling anymore.

Well, there's a Jewel Tree of Tibet meditation that Robert Thurman teaches, and it's in one of his books, and it's about that.

The people that are most the stones in your path, you send their higher selves love, and you'll be surprised.

It changes you, of course.

I was, wanted to, I was gonna read you an, a passage from it, much like the Vimalakirti Sutra, the beginning one I read, which is, like, this endless, um, recitation of the, the powers of the bodhisattvas, you know? And the, or the names of the bodhisattva, and it goes on page after page after page of that.

And that's when I realized, like, nobody reads the Avatamsaka Sutra, so I got Robert Thurman to read it to me, and I just wanna pass this along.

There is a series of, you know, uh, 72 lectures of Robert Thurman.

It's about 120 hours of Robert Thurman reading, reading the Avatamsaka Sutra from start to finish.

I think it's, like, $150, so it's not cheap.

But you know, and it's taken me a year.

I'm still working my way through it, but it's delightful, 'cause it's Robert Thurman, right? So he's both, you know, reading, like, he's reading the whole thing, but he's also lecturing on it, and then he's just delighted.

Sometimes he's like... 'Cause the translation, it's Thomas Cleary, who he knew very well, and sometimes he'll ar- sort of argue with Thomas in his head about whether this was the right word, but it's delightful.