Tricycle Magazine recently published a biographical piece on Canadian born scholar Richard Robinson, who was teacher to some of our most prominent Buddhist thinkers and created the foundations for higher learning of Buddhist doctrine and history in the United States. An excerpt reads:
Robinson lived and worked in an era when revealing one’s personal faith was enough to discredit one’s academic work, no matter how profound or revolutionary the scholar’s contribution to the field. Even 50 years later, Robinson’s closest students and mentees could only guess whether or not he had been a practitioner. But Hannah Robinson said that both she and her husband were Buddhists, that they had kept a shrine in their house, meditated, and practiced in the Tibetan and Indian traditions. And according to Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, one of the first Westerners to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun and the founder of India’s Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery, Robinson was “one of the first Western Buddhist scholars courageous enough in the world of academia to declare themselves as practicing Buddhists.”
Read the entire article: https://tricycle.org/magazine/richard-robinson-buddhism/.
