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Professor Paul Badham has been Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at University of Wales Lampeter since 1991. He was born in 1942 and educated at Jesus College Oxford (traditional Christian Theology); at Jesus College Cambridge (Modern Religious Thought); and at Westcott House (Anglican Ministry). He then went to Birmingham and for five years worked as a Curate while simultaneously writing a PhD under John Hick. Since 1973 he has been at Lampeter where he has gradually moved from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer to Reader and finally to Professor and Dean.
On his arrival at Lampeter he joined five other Anglican clergymen in a very traditional Department of Theology. One of his main concerns has been to transform the Department into a vibrant centre for the study of all world religions, with a particular emphasis on religion in the contemporary world and with an emphasis on the possibility of studying each religion from within. The Department now consists of 18 full-time and 12 part-time staff across the whole area of Religious Life and Thought, with specialists in each of the major faiths and with all disciplines of Religious Studies included.
Exploration of the arguments for and against belief in a life after death has been one of Paul Badham’s main academic concerns. This led to his books ''Christian Beliefs about Life after Death and Immortality or Extinction? as well as to his edited collections Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World''; ''Perspectives on Death and Dying''; ''Ethics on the Frontiers of Human Existence and Facing Death''. He has for many years directed a unique MA programme on Death and Immortality, taught jointly with the Philosophy Department at Lampeter, and he has always had a succession of research students working in this area from all over the world. He has contributed to seven television documentaries on the Near-death experience and is currently preparing for a major international conference on this in Washington.
Paul Badham is also deeply interested in issues of Modern Theology and Inter-faith Dialogue, and has contributed to a series of books in this area arising from Conferences in Claremont as well as his edited ''John Hick Reader''. He has also written a series of bilingual (England and Japanese) publications with Professor Daigan Lee Matsunaga on ''Near-Death Experiences, Interfaith Dialogue and Christian Beliefs About God and Christ in Relation to True Pure Land Buddhism'' (published in Japanese as Christianity for Buddhists). He is currently working on a Centenary volume for the Modern Church People’s Union on ''The Contemporary Challenge of Modernist Theology''.
Paul Badham’s other concern is the relationship between Religion and Politics. This has led to his edited work ''Religion, State and Society in Modern Britain'' and to an ongoing project with Vladislav Arzenukhin on ''Religion and Change in Eastern Europe''. This concern also helped to establish an MA degree on ''Religion Politics and International Relations'', jointly taught by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Lampeter and by the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth. ([https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/96773532.pdf Source Accessed Feb 14, 2023])
An early supporter of Buddhism in America and the proponent of the "religion of science": a faith that claimed to be purified of all superstition and irrationality and that, in harmony with science, would bring about solutions to the world's problems. Carus was born in Ilsenberg in Harz, Germany. He immigrated to America in 1884, settling in LaSalle, Illinois, where he assumed the editorship of the Open Court Publishing Company. He attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and became friends with several of the Buddhist delegates, including Dharmapāla and Shaku Sōen, who were among the first to promote his writing.Later, Shaku Sōen's student, Daisetz Teitaro Susuki, woudld spend eleven years working with and for Carus in LaSalle. In 1894, Carus published ''The Gospel of Buddha according to Old Records'', an anthology of passages from Buddhist texts drawn from contemporary translations in English, French, and German, making particular use of translations from the Pāli by Thomas W. Rhys Davids, as well as translations of the life of the Buddha from Chinese and Tibetan sources. Second only to Edwin Arnold's ''Light of Asia'' in intellectual influence at the time, ''The Gospel'' was arranged like the Bible, with numbered chapters and verses and a table at the end that listed parallel passages from the New Testament. ''The Gospel'' was intended to highlight the many agreements between Buddhism and Christianity, thereby bringing out "that nobler Christianity which aspires to the cosmic religion of universal truth." Carus was free in his manipulation of his sources, writing in the preface that he had rearranged, retranslated, and added emendations and elaborations in order to make them more accessible to a Western audience; for this reason, the translated sources are not always easy to trace back to the original literature. He also makes it clear in the preface that his ultimate goal is to lead his readers to the Religion of Science. He believed that both Buddhism and Christianity, when understood correctly, would point the way to the Religion of Science. Although remembered today for his ''Gospel'', Carus wrote some seventy books and more than a thousand articles. His books include studies of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and Chinese thought. (Source: The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 2014, 168)
Paul Condon is an associate professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University. He has also served as a visiting lecturer for the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute, and is a fellow of the Mind & Life Institute. His research examines the relational basis for empathy, compassion, wellbeing, and prosocial action, and the influence of compassion and mindfulness training on those capacities. His writing and teaching also explore the use of diverse scientific theories in dialogue with contemplative traditions to inform meditation practices of compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom. Paul teaches meditation practices adapted from the Tibetan Nyingma and Kagyu traditions for multi-faith and secular application. ([https://paulcondon.org/ Source Accessed April 25, 2024]) +
Paul Demiéville (13 September 1894 – 23 March 1979) was a Swiss-French sinologist and Orientalist known for his studies of the Dunhuang manuscripts and Buddhism and his translations of Chinese poetry, as well as for his 30-year tenure as co-editor of ''T'oung Pao''.
Demiéville was one of the foremost sinologists of the first half of the 20th century, and was known for his wide-ranging contributions to Chinese and Buddhist scholarship. His influence on Chinese scholarship in France was particularly profound, as he was the only major French sinologist to survive World War II.
Demiéville was one of the first sinologists to learn Japanese to augment their study of China: prior to the early 20th century, most scholars of China learned Manchu as their second scholarly language, but Demiéville's study of Japanese instead was soon followed by nearly every major sinologist since his day. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Demi%C3%A9ville Source Accessed Jul 21, 2020]) +
Paul Eugène Pelliot (28 May 1878 – 26 October 1945) was a French Sinologist and Orientalist best known for his explorations of Central Asia and his discovery of many important Chinese texts such as the Dunhuang manuscripts. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pelliot Source Accessed Jan 25, 2024]) +
Paul Hackett specializes in canonical Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan culture, as well as their influence on contemporary alternative religion in America. He is also active in the field of applied computational linguistics and serves as the chair of the Tibetan Information Technology Panel for the International Association for Tibetan Studies. He previously taught Classical Tibetan language at Columbia and Yale universities. ([https://www.shambhala.com/authors/g-n/paul-g-hackett.html Source Accessed Nov 21, 2023])
Paul's doctoral dissertation, "Barbarian Lands: Theos Bernard, Tibet, and the American Religious Life" (2008), presented the first and only comprehensive narrative of the life of Theos Bernard (1908-1947). In the context of this narrative, the dissertation examined such issues as Bernard’s place in the early history of the American subculture and counter-culture informed by Indian concepts of religiosity and the narrative of the genesis and spread of Indian and Buddhist religious traditions in America over the last 150 years. In addition, Bernard’s life and writings are examined as a paradigm of an ethnically American counter-culture religious experience and his academic activities are discussed in terms of their broader implications for the study of religion.
His masters thesis, "Approaches to Tibetan Information Retrieval: Segmentation vs. n-grams" (2000), reported the results of research evaluating automatic word-segmented indexing for Tibetan documents against a system using n-gram indexing in a search and retrieval system. For the thesis an algorithm for automatic sentence- and word-segmentation for Tibetan was designed and implemented in conjunction with a shallow parser performing automatic Part-of-Speech tagging. +
Paul Groner received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Yale and spent most of his career at the University of Virginia. His research mostly focused on the Japanese Tendai School during the Heian period. He has also done research on the precepts and ordinations, which led to research on Eison, founder of the Shingon Ritsu sect, and the status of nuns in medieval Japan. In recent years, his interests have extended to the Tendai educational system during the Muromachi Period and to the establishment of Japan’s first public library at the Tendai temple, Kan’eiji. Among his major works are ''Saichō: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School'' and ''Ryōgen and Mount Hiei: Japanese Tendai in the Tenth Century''. He is also the translator of HIRAKAWA Akira’s ''The History of Indian Buddhism'', vol. 1 (all published by University of Hawai’i Press). ([https://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/paul-groner Source Accessed Dec 3, 2019]) +
Paul Gustafson is an editor and scholar of Buddhism who co-edited the book ''The Power of Mind: A Tibetan Monk's Guide to Finding Freedom in Every Challenge'' by Khentrul Lodrö Thayé Rinpoche. He worked alongside other editors Paloma Lopez Landry and Ibby Caputo on this publication, which presents teachings on Tibetan Buddhist mind training practices. (Generated by Perplexity Mar 25, 2025) +
Griffiths was born in London, England, on 12 November 1955. Griffiths has held appointments at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. A scholar of Augustine of Hippo, Griffiths's main interests and pursuits are philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion – particularly Christianity and Buddhism. He received a doctorate in Buddhist studies in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his early works established him as one of the most incisive interpreters of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. His works on Buddhism include ''On Being Mindless'' (Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1991) and ''On Being Buddha'' (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). After converting from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism and accepting the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at UIC, he has largely given up his work in Buddhist studies. His recent books include: ''Problems of Religious Diversity'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); ''Philosophy of Religion: A Reader'' (co-edited with Charles Taliaferro) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); and ''Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity'' (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). His latest book deals with curiositas and the nature of intellectual appetite; its title is: ''Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar''. According to the faculty pages at Duke Divinity School, from which he resigned in 2017, Griffiths has published ten books as sole author and seven more as co-author or editor. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_J._Griffiths Source Accessed Jul 21, 2020]) +
Paul Harrison completed his B.A. and M.A. in Chinese at Auckland University in his native New Zealand and took his Ph.D. in South Asian & Buddhist Studies from Australian National University in 1979. After a short stint at Auckland (1981-1983), he taught Religious Studies at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, for 22 years, being responsible for courses on Buddhism. Paul joined the permanent faculty of Stanford's Religious Studies Department in 2007. His research focuses on Buddhist history and literature, on the study of Buddhist manuscripts, and the edition and translation of Buddhist sacred texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. Paul is co-director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford. ([https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/instructor/paulh1 Source Accessed Dec 4, 2019]) +
Paul Masson-Oursel was a French orientalist and philosopher, a pioneer of 'comparative philosophy'. Masson-Oursel was a student of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Pierre Janet, André Lalande, Marcel Mauss. With Sylvain Lévy, Alfred Foucher, Chavannes, Clément Huart, he learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Arab[ic?]. ''La Philosophie Comparée'', his Sorbonne doctoral dissertation, attempted to apply Comtean positivism and a comparative method which identified 'analogies' between the philosophies of Europe, India and China. Masson-Oursel argued that "philosophy cannot achieve positivity so long as its investigations are restricted to the thought of our own civilization", since "no one philosophy has the right to put itself forward as co-extensive with the human mind." ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Masson-Oursel Source Accessed May 13, 2020]) +
Paul Oltramare was a Sanskritist and historian of religious ideas of Ancient India. Born in Geneva in 1854 to a protestant family of university scholars, he was a lecturer who held the chair for Latin literature and language and the chair for religions at the University of Geneva. He had studied under Louis Havet and Michel Bréal during the 1870s in Paris where he had published his thesis on ''L'histoire des idées théosophiques en Inde'' (''The history of theosophical ideas in India'') in a ''Musée Guimet'' collection. Source: Roland Lardinois, ''Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France in the 19th-20th Centuries'' (London: Routledge, 2018), 16. +
Paul is a Ph.D. candidate in Buddhist studies, with interests in Indian Buddhism (5th c. BCE – 14th c. CE), Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism (particularly medieval Chan), as well as Indology, specifically Sanskrit literature, Śaivism, and other philosophies and religions of pre-modern India. He is currently researching the parallels between tantric Buddhism and tantric Śaivism in medieval India. ([https://sseas.berkeley.edu/people/paul-thomas/ Source Accessed Jan 14, 2021]) +
Paul Francis Waldau (born January 16, 1950) is an American ethicist and former professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he headed the graduate program on anthrozoology, which he founded. He has several times served as Barker Lecturer in animal law at Harvard Law School, and is the author of a number of books on animal rights and speciesism. Waldau has also served as the legal director of the Great Ape Project, which campaigns for rights for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. He has served as President of the Religion and Animals Institute since 2003. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Waldau Source Accessed June 16, 2023]) +
Paul Williams (b. 1950) is Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at the University of Bristol, England. Until his retirement in 2011 he was also director for the University's Centre for Buddhist Studies, and is a former President of the UK Association for Buddhist Studies.<br> Williams studied at the University of Sussex's School of African & Asian Studies where he graduated with a first class BA in 1972. He then went on to study Buddhist Philosophy at Wadham College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded his DPhil in 1978. His main research interests are Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism, and Medieval philosophical and mystical thought.<br> Williams was a Buddhist himself for many years but has since converted to Roman Catholicism, an experience he wrote about in his book ''The Unexpected Way'' and in an article, "On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism – One Convert's Story." He is now a professed lay member of the Dominican Order. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Williams_(Buddhist_studies_scholar) Source Accessed April 16, 2020]) +
Pavel L. Grokhovsky was the head of the Department of Mongolian Studies and Tibetology of the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.
In 1994, he graduated with honors from the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University with a degree in Orientalist-Philologist (Mongol-Tibetan Philology). In 1994–1998, P.L. Grokhovsky was a full-time postgraduate student of the Oriental Faculty, and in 2000 he successfully defended his thesis "Samadhiraja Sutra" as a monument of Buddhist canonical literature" for the degree of candidate of philological sciences.
From 1998 to 2001 P.L. Grokhovsky worked at the Department of Mongolian Philology as an assistant, from 2001 until his untimely death - as an assistant professor. In 2000–2004 P.L. Grokhovsky was the Deputy Dean of the Oriental Faculty for Academic Affairs. In 2003-2008 he was the head of the Department of Mongolian Philology, and in 2008-2009 he was the head of the Department of Mongolian Studies and Tibetology. Since 2012, P.L. Grokhovsky was the chairman of the Educational and Methodological Commission of the Oriental Faculty. By the decision of the Academic Council of St. Petersburg State University, since November 2016, P.L. Grokhovsky was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies and Tibetology at St. Petersburg State University. ([http://www.orientalstudies.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9593&Itemid=48&fbclid=IwAR1Fsoxq_ejxgaPPV0vzATjwUEqb47sOJcI5fSkr_MfHRNipZRCMIrUmTbI Source Accessed Apr 12, 2022]) +
Though the names Vīraprakāśa or Vīraprabhāsvara are unattested in Sanskrit sources, this author is known to Tibetans as Pawo Ösel and is associated with a cycle of spiritual songs related to the famed Eighty-four Mahāsiddhas of India. +
Khenchen Ngawang Chodak (mkhan chen ngag dbang chos gragss) was born to his
father Trungtso Phuntsok (drung 'tsho phun tshogs) and his mother Phenthok Kyi (phan
thogs skyid) in Semcher valley of Tsang in 1572.
He was intellectually more mature than his peers, so learned reading and writing effortlessly. At the age of eleven, he abided in a holy mountain under the care of Kunkhen Ngawang Chakpa ([[kun mkhyen ngag dbang grags pa]]) for one year. Then he went to the great monastic school of Thupten Yangpajan (thub
bstan yangs pa can), and Geshe Kunchok Gyatso ([[dkon mchog rgya mtsho]]) bestowed
him the ordination name of Ngawang Chodak.
From then, Khenchen Ngawang Chodak studied with numerous great masters: Kenchen
Wangchok Pelsang ([[mkhyen chen dbang phyug dpal bzang]]), Mangthu Logrub Gyatso
([[mang thos klu sgrub rgya mtsho]]), Grubchok Suonam Chophel ([[grub mchog bsod nams
chos 'phel]]), Jonang Daranatha ([[jo nang ta ra na tha]]), Khenchen Jampa Sangpo ([[mkhan
chen byams pa bzang po]]), Muchen Sangye Gyaltsen ([[mus chen sangs rgyas rgyal
mtshan]]), etc., and became expert in the treatises of the Six Volumes and knowledge of
sutras and mantras with his brilliant intellect. He pilgrimaged to Sagya and Ngamring,
and gained reputation for his erudite debate skills.
Khenchen Ngawang Chodak took gelong vows when he could meditate with the actual
meaning of what he had been taught and he could attain the realization of various deities.
At the thirty-five, he took the throne of the Thupten Yangpajan monastic school and
devoted the rest of his life there to study, teach, and write. At age of seventy, he peacefully passed
into Nirvana. +
Ellen Pearlman has been a Buddhist practitioner for over 30 years under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and has studied with Buddhist teachers in India, Sikhim, Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Europe, Latin America, and North America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Source: ([https://www.scribd.com/author/229965933/Ellen-Pearlman# SCRIBD]) +
Pegyal Lingpa was born 1924, the wood-rat year of the 15th Rabjung Tibetan cycle, in Golok Serta, of Eastern Tibet, among the clan of Chok tsang of Mukpo clan. His father was Pema Jigme and his mother Sherab Tshomo. Pegyal Lingpa was later recognized as an incarnation of Nupchen Sangye Yeshe. Oral stories recount that from childhood Pegyal Lingpa was extraordinary and that he could perform all of the different tantric rituals even while he was playing. (Source: [https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Pegyal_Lingpa Rigpa Wiki]) +
