Robert Thurman

I loved this course! It was my first psych class and the class that inspired me to major in psychology. She is an extremely kind teacher who makes the material interesting. Her slides are very clear and easy to understand. The class is super low stress.

This looks like the first review in quite a while... some things are the same, some different. I first wanna say that Indo-Tibetan Buddhism has so far been the greatest class I've taken at Columbia. Thurman totally pulls the rug out from under traditional Western thought while simultaneously showing how entrenched we are in it... this comes up in his book "Inner Revolution" which you read all throughout the semester. It's a unique course for a number of reasons, beginning with how Thurman doesn't treat the subject matter as some bs theoretical thought experiment, but truly believes what he says. That goes further than might be obvious. His personal connection to the material gives it real depth, and if you're engaged in it you may find that it can... dare I say... make your life more meaningful. No class I've taken so far has been more influential to my everyday thinking, and taking it during the election of 2016 was especially profound... i know i wasn't the only one who found those two days a week the most inspiring. Thurman's a badass, super funny and self-deprecating, very quotable, very famous, definitely prone to tangents (which almost always DO relate and come back to the material), very political, and seriously knowledgeable. Sometimes doesn't give thorough explanations of the Sanskrit terms, but very thorough explanations of esoteric buddhist concepts, many of which h…

Warning: to all students who sign up for a Thurman class thinking, "despite all the bad reviews of this guy, he's friends with the Dalai Lama so there must be something good about him," you will be disappointed. I practically gauranteed it. In fact, this class made me lose respect for H.H. because I couldn't understand why he'd be buddy buddy with such an arrogant, infuriating man. I'm trying to get that respect back so I don't end up in a hell-realm, but its difficult because Thurman is such a poor teacher. In fact, fantasizing about writing this review is pretty much the only thing thats kept me motivated during class. Robert Thurman is obviously extremely brilliant. You can tell this from his excellent translations of seminal Buddhist texts as well as his own extremely influential commentary, both of which constitute a majority of the reading for the class (not necessarily bad). But Thurman is horrible at giving any coherent version of his knowledge to students. There is absolutely no structure or organization to his long diatribes that dominate the class. A couple things about this Thurmanism (that should be the title of any Thurman class). First, this was supposed to be a seminar, which is laughable. Thurman is pretty much incapable of not hearing himself talk for more than about five minutes. He'd open class with a long rant, often having nothing to do with Buddhist phil…

Dr. Thurman is a very talented speaker and an intelligent man. He certainly has a wealth of knowledge about Buddhism. He also has a very big ego, and he doesnt seem to try very hard to restrain it. He does most of the talking in class. Even when he invites others to speak, he seems far more interested in what he has to say. He quickly jumps to conclusions and has a habit of projecting extreme opinions onto students that they never claimed to have. He can be defensive when students say something that could contradict one of his own ideas. His lectures are entertaining, but I feel we missed a lot of the details of what we are studying. I rarely took notes because he rarely wrote on the board, and much of what he says are opinions, anecdotes, and stories. I enjoyed the class; however, it would have been much better if there had been more concrete information given to the students. We had, in theory, a total of six three to four page papers and weekly postings to Courseworks

3 words: Overrated, Overrated, Overrated. If you're taking this class because you think you'll catch a glimpse of his movie star daughter Uma you're out of luck. You will hear alot about his beautiful swedish wife and how good friends Thurman is with the Dalai Lama. He looks like the man from Titanic - you know the scary valet guy.

I disagree completely with all the negative reviews posted on here about Thurman. Thurman is indeed an incredibly smart thinker and highly intelligent--the only thing the prior reviewers have gotten right about him, in my opinion. Thurman definitely is not your typical stuffy Ivy League lecturer filled with mundane academia crap. If you're expecting to be given a boring textbook lecture, then of course you're going to be disappointed. I, for one, absolutely LOVED going to his classes; it was the highlight of my week. Thurman challenged one to think outside the box, reject unquestionably accepting the mores of established society, and really lay off the pretentiousness and act realistic. Don't expect to get anything out of his class if you're planning on approaching it with the same systematic mentality you approach the majority of other CU classes. Thurman's class is truly the only challenging course I've taken here at Columbia (I'm a 3rd year). ... Buddhism is learning what the nature of reality really is and consider yourself fortunate if you have him for a professor. He's one of the very few Westerners appropriately trained in Tibetan Buddhism--was taught by the same teachers who taught the Dalai Lama.

so i was kind of apprehensive about taking this class, after reading some of the below reviews. but i have to disagree with many of the negative remarks. i think he's gotten a bit more organized in his lectures, and there is indeed a structure to the class. yes, he goes on tangents, and yes, sometimes he's a little boring. but i think the positives outweigh the negatives. i learned a LOT about buddhism, which i knew literally almost nothing about before. additionally, i also learned much about thinking about religion, which i appreciated, not being religious myself. i enjoyed taking a class with such an academic celebrity (it's quite something when your professor talks about his personal conversations with the dalai lama; which he's quite pleased with, but irregardless...). thurman can be incredibly funny in class (intentionally or not) and has some funny stories to tell (but because he is self-proclaimed "senile" he often repeats them). i enjoyed his lectures, learned a lot, and would recommend taking this course with him. my only real complaint was that he didn't write some sanskrit terms on the board, and often talked fast about some things without pausing to let us catch up. and he didn't miss all that many classes, only four i think. it's understandable that he has obligations, and because there were four TAs for the class, it seemed like it was also an opportunity for th…

I can only speak from the experience of my own section (I've heard from people who took the class in previous semesters that it was much better), but this is among the worst classes I've taken, ever. This course is full of shortcomings that could be easily corrected if the profs just took the time to do so. The material covered oscillates wildly between the phenomenally dense and the absurdly simplistic, with virtually no middle ground. The syllabus and outline of the course are so vague and the readings are presented so totally out of context that it took me the better part of the semester to get even the most rudimentary sense of what exactly we were studying (for future reference, it is the history of Madhyamaka as seen through the eyes of the Tibetan philosopher Tsong Khapa, with Vedanta thrown in every other week just to make things extra confusing). This seems to be a general characteristic of nonduality scholarship; at first I though the class readings were impenetrable because the subject matter was so difficult, but in time it became clear that, while this is true, it doesn't help that virtually no one among the assigned authors can write their way out of a paper bag. Tubb is extremely nice and knows his Vedanta, but somehow his lectures manage to be simultaneously very well-organized and totally impossible to follow. Thurman is fascinating when he gets going in "Budd…

Significant amount of reading. six three to four page papers. Weekly postings to Courseworks.

Thurman gives tenure a bad name. If he did bother to show up he had the class laughing at other students (those ballsy enough to disagree with him). If he decided he would rather travel than teach, the class was led by TAs with similarly "enlightened" personalities to that of Professor Windbag. Do the smart thing, sit in on a class and decide whether leftist diatribes and shameless self promoting is worth the money your parents will throw down.