Tulku Thondup Rinpoche was born in Golok, Eastern Tibet, and recognized as a reincarnate lama at age five. He left Tibet as a political refugee in 1958 and taught at Lucknow University and Visva Bharati University in India before coming to the United States as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1980. Since then, he has lived and worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, engaged in translation and writing projects on Tibetan Buddhism, focused particularly on the teachings of the Nyingma school. He is the author of numerous books on history, literature, mind, and meditation.