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Kazuo Enoki was born in Kobe city in 1913 and was an educator and historian. In 1955 he became a Professor of Tokyo University. He studied mainly Central Asia under guidance of Shiratori Kurakichi. Besides this, he wrote several historical books about China and Japan. In 1974, he was Director General of Toyo Bunko. Also, he was in England (1952-53) as guest professor of London University. He was related to [the] amassing of distinctive materials of Toyo Bunko after WW2, such as documents unearthed from Dunhuang and Turfan, Middle Eastern Documents, the Jesuitas na Asia from the Biblioteca de Ajuda in Lisbon, etc. In 1990. his bereaved donated his 30,000 books to Toyo Bunko. ([http://www.toyo-bunko.or.jp/toyobunko-e/library3/shozou/enoki-e.html; http://www.toyo-bunko.or.jp/toyobunko-e/library3/shozou/enoki-e.html Adapted from Sources Mar 23, 2021]) +
Dr. Kano is an associate professor at Komazawa University in Japan and a specialist of Sanskrit and Tibetan tathāgatagarbha literature. His particular research interests focus on philosophical interpretations of the ''Ratnagotravibhāga''. ([https://conference.tsadra.org/past-event/2019-vienna-symposium/ Source Accessed July 22, 2020]) +
Keutsang Rinpoche is a Gelugpa lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He was born in Lhoka, Tibet in 1944. He was recognized at the age of 2 as the fifth Keutsang Rinpoche. His previous incarnation, the fourth Keutsang Rinpoche, was a high Tibetan lama who was responsible for finding the reincanation of the 13th Dalai Lama, now the 14th Dalai Lama. The present Keutsang Rinpoche, was imprisoned for 20 years starting at the age of 16; he was imprisoned as a class enemy under the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He was released from prison in 1980, and in 1985, he left Tibet for India. He currently resides at H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama's residence in Dharmsala, India.
Source[http://www.deerparkcenter.org/NewFiles/keutsang.html] +
Keiko Takioto Miller is Assistant Professor of Japanese and French and Director of Asian Studies Program at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. +
Keith Dowman is a translator and teacher of Dzogchen. A student of the great Dzogchen lamas Dudjom Rinpoche and Kanjur Rinpoche, he has lived in Banares, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, for 50 years. His translations include SkyDancer, and Longchenpa’s Natural Perfection and Spaciousness.
A cultural refugee from his native England, Keith Dowman arrived in Banares, India in 1966, after travelling overland from Europe. Apart from an occasional foray back to the West he has spent a lifetime in the sub-continent, engaged in existential buddha dharma. In India and Nepal, not always in Tibetan refugee society, he has lived as a yogin, monk, pilgrim, and then as a householder, and as a scholar and poet gloriously free from western academia and cultural institutions of all shapes and sizes.
In India in the ‘sixties he was fortunate enough to encounter the grandfather-lama refugees just after their arrival in India in the wake of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. In those heady years when the old lamas were totally receptive to the solicitation of western disciples seeking confirmation of the validity of their existential trajectories, he received initiation, empowerment, pith instruction and personal guidance from Dudjom Rinpoche Jigdral Yeshe Dorje and Kanjur Rinpoche Longchen Yeshe Dorje, who became his root gurus, among many other Nyingma lamas and lamas of other schools, notably Khamtrul Rimpoche and the 16th Karmapa Rikpai Dorje. As Chogyal Namkhai Norbu remarked "In communion with many great masters [Keith Dowman] has fortuitously absorbed the realization of Dzogchen."
Settled in Kathmandu, in the ‘eighties he translated the Rabalaisian hagiography of The Divine Madman (Drukpa Kunley) and also that of the Guru’s Consort, Yeshe Tsogyel, in Skydancer, both of which remain in print. Entering Tibet immediately after it opened to foreign travelers, his three years of seasonal trekking in central Tibet resulted in The Pilgrim’s Guide to Central Tibet. The Power Places of Kathmandu was also written in the ‘eighties, description of pilgrimage in the Kathmandu Valley. Masters of Mahamudra: the Legends of the Eighty-Four Mahasiddhas was the fruit of his connection with the Kagyu school. More recently, spending less time in the polluted Kathmandu Valley, leaving Vajrayana behind, he has concentrated exclusively on the translation of Dzogchen texts: The Flight of the Garuda, Natural Perfection, Maya Yoga, The Great Secret of Mind, and Spaciousness: Longchenpa’s Treasury of the Dharmadhatu. Guru Pema Here and Now, The Mythology of the Lotus-Born, his most recent book, reverts to the imagery of the myth of Padmasambhava to illustrate the reality of Dzogchen.
Teaching the Dharma since 1992, his original concern was to assist in bridge building from East to West, a conduit for the lamas’ buddha-dharma. Now that aim has been achieved, leaving even the Dzogchen that is embedded in Vajrayana behind, the essence of Dzogchen which he calls radical Dzogchen is his primary concern and the main content of his teaching.
Still based in Kathmandu, he leads a nomadic lifestyle, teaching Dzogchen nonmeditation worldwide. This Dzogchen, derived from the early Nyingma tantras, free of the tendency toward the spiritual materialism so evident in western Buddhism, nonculturally specific, easily assimilable into Western culture, can, he believes provide a key to a renaissance, or at least a reformation, of Western mysticism in the existential mold. ([http://keithdowman.net/footer-pages/about-keith-dowman.html Source Accessed Feb 3, 2021])
Following Dogen Zenji, the Dharma lamp was transmitted to Ejo Zenji, then to Gikai Zenji, and then to Keizan Zenji, who was the fourth ancestor in the Japanese Soto Zen lineage.
Keizan Zenji was born in 1264 in Echizen Province, which is present-day Fukui Prefecture. His mother, Ekan Daishi, was a devoted believer in Kannon Bosatsu (Avalokiteshvara), the bodhisattva of compassion. It is said that she was on her way to worship at a building dedicated to Kannon when she gave birth. For that reason, the name that Keizan Zenji was given at birth was Gyosho.
At the age of eight, he shaved his head and entered Eiheiji where he began his practice under the third abbot, Gikai Zenji. At the age of thirteen, he again went to live at Eiheiji and was officially ordained as a monk under Ejo Zenji. Following the death of Ejo Zenji, he practiced under Jakuen Zenji at Hokyoji, located in present-day Fukui. Spotting Keizan Zenji’s potential ability to lead the monks, Jakuen Zenji selected him to be ino, the monk in charge of the other monks’ practice.
In contrast to Dogen Zenji, who deeply explored the internal self, Keizan Zenji stood out with his ability to look outwards and boldly spread the teaching. For the Soto Zen School, the teachings of these two founders are closely connected with each other. In spreading the Way of Buddha widely, one of them was internal in his approach while the other was external.
After more years of practice in Kyoto and Yura, Keizan Zenji became resident priest of Jomanji in Awa, which is present-day Tokushima Prefecture. He was twenty-seven years old. During the next four years, he gave the Buddhist precepts to more than seventy lay people. From this we can understand Keizan Zenji’s vow to free all sentient beings through teaching and transmitting the Way.
He also came forth emphasizing the equality of men and women. He actively promoted his women disciples to become resident priests. At a time when women were unjustly marginalized, this was truly groundbreaking. This is thought to be the origin of the organization of Soto Zen School nuns and it was for this reason many women took refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Keizan Zenji finally moved back to Daijoji, in present-day Kanazawa City, where he became the second abbot, following Gikai Zenji. It was here that he gave teisho on Transmission of Light (Denkoroku). This book explains the circumstances by which the Dharma was transmitted from Shakyamuni Buddha through the twenty eight ancestors in India, the twenty three patriarchs in China, through Dogen Zenji and Keizan Zenji in Japan until Keizan’s teacher, Tettsu Gikai.
In 1321 at the age of fifty-eight, a temple called Morookaji in Noto, which is present-day Ishikawa Prefecture, was donated to Keizan Zenji and he renamed it Sojiji. This was the origin of Sojiji in Yokohama, which is, along with Eiheiji, the other Head Temple (Daihonzan) of the Soto Zen School.
Keizan Zenji did not, by any means, make light of the worldly interests of ordinary people and along with the practice of zazen used prayer, ritual, and memorial services to teach. This was attractive to many people and gave them a sense of peace. For this reason, the Soto Zen School quickly expanded.
Even in the Soto Zen School today, while all temples have zazen groups to serve the earnest requests of believers, they also do their best to fulfill the requests that many people have for benefiting in the everyday world, which include memorial services and funerals.
Keizan Zenji died in 1325 at the age of sixty-five. In succeeding years, his disciples did a good job in taking over for him at Sojiji on the Noto Peninsula. However, that temple was lost to fire in 1898. This provided the opportunity in 1907 to move Sojiji to its present location. The former temple was rebuilt as Sojiji Soin and continues today with many supporters and believers. (Source: [https://www.sotozen.com/eng/what/Buddha_founders/dogen_zenji.html Sotozen.com])
K. Dhondup was a prominent literary and cultural figure of the Tibetan exile world in the eighties and nineties. Working at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala, he was Managing Editor of the Tibet Journal as well as on the editorial board of Pema Thang, which was possibly the first Tibetan literary journal in English. He wrote three histories of Tibet, of which two were published and the third remained incomplete. An editor, journalist and historian, K. Dhondup also wrote poetry and published a translation of the Sixth Dalai Lama's poetry. +
Ken is currently Director of Studies at Kagyu Samye Ling. His life is spent teaching in Samye Dzongs in various countries, writing and translating dharma works, and he also occasionally interprets for visiting Tibetan lamas. He has also lectured in elementology and astro-science for the Tara-Rokpa College of Tibetan Medicine. He was a founder member of the Scottish Inter-Faith Council and has worked with the British Cabinet Office and the European Community on training programmes. He represented Buddhism at the seminal 2002 meetings in Brussels to discuss religious representation in the new European constitution. ([https://www.samyeling.org/buddhism-and-meditation/teaching-archive-2/dharmacharya-ken-holmes/ Source Accessed Jul 22, 2020]) +
Ken McLeod is a senior Western translator, author, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He received traditional training mainly in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage through a long association with his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, whom he met in 1970. McLeod resides in Los Angeles, where he founded [https://unfetteredmind.org/ Unfettered Mind]. +
Kendra Smith holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has worked widely as a psychiatric social worker. She has received training in organizational development from N.T.L.-U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Business and in family therapy from Boston Family Institute. She is a graduate of the 1974 Human Development Training Program. (Source: 1975 publication: [[Reflections of Mind: Western Psychology Meets Tibetan Buddhism]]) +
Kengo Harimoto has been a faculty member in the Buddhist Studies department at Mahidol University in Thailand since 2015. He is a Sanskritist focusing on Indian Philosophy, an expert reader of manuscripts, and has a wide academic background ranging from Vedānta, to Āyurveda, to the edition of Buddhist philosophical commentaries. ([https://www.facebook.com/BuddhistPhDMahidol/photos/a.10152914725503032/10153873367343032/?type=1&theater Source Accessed April 27, 2020]) +
Kenjo Shirasaki is a Japanese scholar specializing in Buddhist philosophy, particularly the epistemological and doctrinal aspects of Indian Buddhism. His research has focused on analyzing the philosophical positions of prominent figures like Mokṣākaragupta (ca. 1050–1292 CE) and Jitāri (ca. 940–980 CE), both of whom played significant roles in the final stage of Indian Buddhism. Shirasaki's studies examine their contrasting positions within the Yogācāra school, specifically the Sākāravāda (the doctrine of representation) and Nirākāravāda (the doctrine of non-representation) sub-schools, using textual evidence from works like ''Tarkabhāṣā'' and ''Sugatamatavibhaṅgabhāṣya''.
Shirasaki has contributed to clarifying these doctrinal distinctions by analyzing references to earlier scholars such as Dharmakīrti, Prajñākaragupta, Śāntarakṣita, and Ratnākaraśānti. His work highlights the complexities in classifying these sub-schools, a topic also debated by other scholars like Toru Funayama. (Generated by Perplexity Mar 21, 2025) +
Kenneth Hutton is Academic Collaborations Manager/Philosophy Subject Specialist at University of Glasgow. +
Kenneth Ken'ichi Tanaka (born 1947), also known as Kenshin Tanaka or Ken'ichi Tanaka is a scholar, author, translator and ordained Jōdo Shinshū priest. He is author and editor of many articles and books on modern Buddhism.
Tanaka was born in 1947 in Japan but grew up in Mountain View, California. He received his B.A in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1970. He then received his masters in Philosophy and Indian Studies and his Ph.D. through the Graduate School of Humanities Doctoral Program in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1991 Tanaka was appointed the Rev. Yoshitaka Tamai Professor at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California. He was president of the Buddhist Council of Northern California and served as editor of ''Pacific World: The Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies''. In 1995 he became the pastor of the Southern Alameda County Buddhist Church.
Tanaka is the author of numerous articles and books on the subject of Buddhism. He was interviewed as part of the PBS report Tensions in American Buddhism in 2001and Talk of the Nation program of National Public Radio. In 1998 he became professor of Buddhist Studies at Musashino University in Tokyo, Japan. He produced and appeared in a television series sponsored by the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai foundation that aired in 2005, with DVDs later distributed. He gave the keynote address at the 750th memorial observance of Shinran in February 2010. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_K._Tanaka Source Accessed July 21, 2021]) +
Kenneth Lewis Kraft (July 16, 1949-October 1, 2018) was a professor of Buddhist studies and Japanese religions (emeritus) at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
====Education====
Kraft received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1971. He holds an M.A. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan (1978) and a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University (1984).
====Career====
In 1984, Kraft became a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. He joined the Lehigh University faculty in 1990 and was appointed a full professor in 2001. At Lehigh he has served as chair of the Religion Studies department and director of the College Seminar Program.
He was a visiting professor at the Stanford University Japan Center and a visiting scholar at the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism, both in Kyoto. He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College.
Kraft has served on the advisory boards of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, California; the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University; the ''Journal of Buddhist Ethics''; the Rochester Zen Center; and the World Faiths Development Dialogue in Washington DC.
In 1992, he was featured in "The Creative Spirit," a PBS television series. In 2008, he participated in "Secrets of the Samurai Sword," a NOVA documentary, and, in 2009, "Inquiry into the Great Matter: A History of Zen Buddhism," an independent film.
In his early research, Kraft explored the transmission of Zen from China to Japan in the 13th and 14th centuries. Zen master Daitō, a seminal figure in this process, is best known as an exemplar of post-enlightenment training. Kraft documented Daitō's life, his teaching, and his role in the development of capping phrases (''jakugo''), a form of spiritual/literary commentary.
The transmission of Zen from Asia to the West accelerated after World War II. In 1988, Kraft edited ''Zen: Tradition and Transition'', a collaboration by present-day Zen teachers and scholars. It addressed some of the same issues that had arisen in Daitō's era: What is real Zen? What are the criteria of authenticity?
Buddhism's encounter with the West in the 20th century inspired an international movement known as engaged Buddhism. Its leaders include the 14th Dalai Lama and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Kraft began writing about engaged Buddhism in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Cold War. Some of the underlying concerns can be framed as questions: What do Buddhist ethical principles signify today? What is the relation between work on oneself and work in the world? Does Buddhist nonviolence call for unwavering opposition to war, or are there exceptions?
Some observers challenge the apparent newness of engaged Buddhism. Columbia University scholar Thomas Yarnall has criticized the work of Kraft and other "modernists" who "appropriate, own, and reinvent Buddhism from the ground up." In Yarnall's view, engaged Buddhism should be seen as a revival of original Buddhism, which was more engaged than is usually assumed.
Buddhism may have resources that are freshly relevant in a time of ecological crisis. Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, an anthology coedited in 2000 by Kraft and Stephanie Kaza, was an early contribution to an emerging field. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Kraft Source Accessed Sep 17, 2021])
Professor Liberman received his Phd from the University of California, San Diego in 1981. He joined the University of Oregon in 1983. His specialties are ethnomethodology, intercultural communication, race relations, and social phenomenology.
Liberman has completed ethnomethodological studies of mundane interaction among traditional Australian Aboriginal people (''Understanding Interaction in Central Australia'', Routledge), the practices of reasoning of Tibetan scholar-monks (''Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture'', Rowman & Littlefield), and the uses of objectivity in coffee tasting by professional coffee tasters in 14 countries (''Tasting Coffee'', SUNY Press). He provided a detailed ethnomethodological account and assessment of sophistry based on a video-recorded Tibetan debate in his ''Husserl’s Criticism of Reason'' (Lexington Books). His ''More Studies in Ethnomethodology'' (SUNY Press) won the Best Book Award from the EMCA Section of the American Sociological Association.
He is presently undertaking a long-term comparative study of negative dialectics in Tibetan Buddhist and postmodern epistemological practice. ([https://cas.uoregon.edu/directory/sociology/all/liberman Source Accessed Jan 17, 2025]) +
Kenneth Roy Norman FBA (21 July 1925 – 5 November 2020) was a British philologist at the University of Cambridge and a leading authority on Pali and other Middle Indo-Aryan languages.
Norman was born on 21 July 1925, and was educated at Taunton School in Somerset and Downing College, Cambridge, receiving his M.A. in 1954.
He was trained as a classicist and studied classical philology, in the form which was current in his student days, i.e. the investigation of the relationship between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in particular, and between other Indo-European languages in general. He went on to study Sanskrit and the dialects associated with Sanskrit—the Prakrits—and was appointed to teach the Prakrits, or Middle Indo-Aryan, as they are sometimes called, lying as they do between Old Indo-Aryan, i.e. Sanskrit, and New Indo-Aryan, i.e. the modern Indo-Aryan languages spoken mainly in North India.
The whole of his academic career was spent at Cambridge. He was appointed Lecturer in Indian Studies in 1955, Reader in 1978, and Professor of Indian Studies in 1990. He retired in 1992.
From 1981 to 1994 he was President of the Pali Text Society, and from January to March 1994 he was the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai Visiting Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
He was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1983 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._R._Norman Adapted from Source July 16, 2023]) +
Dr. Kenneth R. White is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He completed his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught courses in Buddhism and East Asian history at several universities, including the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Dr. White has lived in Japan and traveled extensively throughout Asia. ([https://mellenpress.com/book/Role-of-Bodhicitta-in-Buddhist-Enlightenment-Including-a-Translation-Into-English-of-Bodhicitta-Sastrabenkemmitsu-Nikyoron-and-Sammaya-Kaijo/6385/ Source Accessed Jan 14, 2025]) +
Kensur Ngawang Lekden was a distinguished Tibetan Buddhist scholar and abbot who played a pivotal role in transmitting the Geluk tradition's philosophical teachings to the West during the early 1970s.
Born in 1900, Lekden began his life as a singer and player of a Dranyen before entering the Gomang College of Drepung Monastic University. He initially trained to develop the multitonal voice required to become a chant master but was encouraged to pursue the scholarly path instead, eventually earning the prestigious Geshe degree.
Lekden served as the former abbot of the prestigious Tantric College of Lower Lhasa, a position that placed him at the very top of the traditional Geluk hierarchy in Tibet, just a few rungs below the Dalai Lama himself. He spent the first 60 years of his life in traditional Tibet, escaping just before His Holiness the Dalai Lama following the Chinese occupation.
After leaving Tibet, Kensur Lekden lived in France until Geshe Wangyal invited him to the United States . In 1970, at age 70, he accepted an invitation from Prof. Richard Robinson and Jeffrey Hopkins to teach in the Buddhist Studies program at the University of Wisconsin, becoming one of the first high-ranking Tibetan lamas to teach Madhyamaka philosophy at an American university.
Kensur Lekden taught a seminar on Madhyamaka in the fall of 1970, which Jeffrey Hopkins translated. His teachings profoundly influenced the first generation of Western Tibetan Buddhist scholars, introducing them to rigorous philosophical texts and meditation practices that had previously been inaccessible to Western students.
His teachings were later compiled in the book ''Meditations of a Tibetan Tantric Abbot'', translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins and published by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala. The work presents core practices of the Mahāyāna Buddhist path and reflects his deep knowledge of both sūtra and tantra.
Kensur Ngawang Lekden passed away in 1973, leaving a lasting legacy as a bridge between traditional Tibetan Buddhism and Western scholarship. His influence continues through his students, including scholar Anne Klein, and through the foundational role he played in establishing Tibetan Buddhist studies in American universities.
Kensur Yeshey Tupden (Ye-shes-thub-bstan, 1916-1988) was one of the most respected among the last generation of Gelukba scholars to complete their training in Tibet prior to the Chinese takeover in 1959. Kensur came into exile in India in the early 1960s, and during his ten years as abbot he oversaw the reestablishment of Loseling College, Drebung Monastery in Mundgod, India. ([https://www.namsebangdzo.com/Path-to-the-Middle-p/12807.htm Source Accessed Aug 9, 2023]) +
