Georges Dreyfus

Georges Dreyfus was the first Westerner to obtain the title of Geshe Lharampa, the highest degree confered within the traditional Tibetan monastic system. He is presently Professor of Religion at Williams College. His most important works are: Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti's Philosophy and its Tibetan interpreters, and The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. His main areas of interest are: Buddhist philosophy, scholasticism and monasticism, protector deity cults, nationalism and identity.

After fifteen years of Tibetan scholastic training during the 1970s and early 1980s, Sangye Samdrup became the first Westerner to achieve the Ge-luk degree of Geshe (dge shes). In 2000, when I arrived at the Institute of Buddhist Dialecticsin Dharamsala, where Sangye Samdrup had studied, his reputation as an excellentdebater was still intact. He is known to readers of this journal by his Europeanname, Georges Dreyfus, and for his outstanding scholarship on Indian and Tibetan philosophy. In The Sound of Two Hands Clapping he brings his considerable un-derstanding of Western religious studies, philosophy, and cultural theory togetherwith his experience as a monk and his vast knowledge of Tibetan traditions to de-scribe and analyze the elite, scholastic education of the great Tibetan monasteries.

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