Geshe Dorji Damdul

Geshe Dorji Damdul has directed Tibet House, the Dalai Lama's cultural centre in New Delhi, since 2011. Behind that role lie fifteen years of philosophical study at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamshala and at Drepung Loseling Monastic University in Mundgod, and the Geshe Lharampa degree — the highest doctorate of the Gelug tradition — which he took with distinction in 2002.

In 2003 the Office of the Dalai Lama sent him to Cambridge to perfect his English, where he was a Visiting Fellow at Girton College. He returned to serve as the Dalai Lama's interpreter and translator, in India and abroad, and became one of the chief editors on books written with Western scientists and philosophers — among them Emotional Awareness, the Dalai Lama's dialogue with Paul Ekman.

The teaching is where the scale shows. The Nalanda Buddhist Philosophy Studies courses he launched in 2016, inaugurated by the Dalai Lama, have drawn more than ten thousand students from over a hundred countries, and the transcripts of his teaching run to twenty-eight volumes.

What he is known for is the combination: a philosopher's grip on emptiness, taught in unusual depth, alongside a genuine love of physics and neuroscience and a willingness to put the whole thing in secular language when the room asks for it.