50 years of marriage and mindfulness
The long and successful family business that is the Robert and Nena Thurman partnership
WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — The lawn goldfish, to use Ganden Thurman’s name for his parents’ three temple dogs, were trailing Nena Thurman in a wheezing cortege.
Nena Thurman’s husband, Robert, the Buddhist scholar and activist, made his way down the twisting stairs of their idiosyncratic handmade house, and the two settled into a well-worn sofa, the dogs strewn on the floor.
Robert Thurman, professor of IndoTibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and president of Tibet House US, a cultural institution that is three decades old this year, has a book to promote, a biography in graphic-novel form of the Dalai Lama called “Man of Peace.”
Dense with East Asian history, it’s not quite “Persepolis” or “Fun Home,” but it is a thrill to come upon cartoon versions of political figures like Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barack Obama (you’ll even find Whoopi Goldberg near the end, in a hilarious panel where the Dalai Lama praises her dreadlocks and she praises his bald pâté). Nonetheless, its contemporary exposition is one Robert Thurman hopes will newly popularize the exiled Tibetan leader’s life story among millennials.
As one of the Dalai Lama’s most famous — and oldest — Western pals, Thurman is still his best and most passionate apologist. And the two have made a curious bet to live until the year 2048 to see the Tibetan cause through. To speed up the process, Thurman wants to send Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, the works of Jonathan Schell, the antiwar advocate and academic who died in 2014.
In the meantime, the publication of the graphic novel, which Thurman wrote with William Meyers and Michael G. Burbank, and is either his 20th or 21st book — he isn’t quite sure, given his prodigious output of scholarly works and translations — is the latest example of the long and successful family business that is the Robert and Nena partnership. They will celebrate their halfcentury anniversary in July, although this former model, now 76, and this former monk, now 75, were once voted by their friends as the couple least likely to succeed.
In 1961, Robert Thurman was a senior at Harvard, “a New York City-bred WASP,” as he put it, who had run away from Exeter, his boarding school, to join Fidel Castro’s army, although he didn’t get much farther than Mexico. He was married to Christophe de Menil, a daughter of the art world patron Dominique de Menil, and they had a baby girl, Taya, when he lost the sight in his right eye changing a flat tire.
He then set off for Mexico and India, in search of verities he hoped would be more durable and more eternal than those presented by his upbringing. His wife was understandably not eager to bring a new baby on her husband’s vision quest, and the couple parted ways.
Thurman was just 23 when he was introduced to the Dalai Lama, then 29. A crackerjack linguist, Thurman had learned Tibetan in 10 weeks, and the two became “talking partners,” as the Dalai Lama liked to say. The Tibetan leader was interested in interrogating Thurman on Freud and other thinkers in the contemporary Western canon, while Thurman was eager for the Dalai Lama’s insights into the dharma. The older man ordained the younger as a Tibetan monk, the first known Westerner to take the necessary 253 vows.
Nena von Schlebrugge’s quest for larger truths began when she was a schoolgirl of 14 in Stockholm. “No one there was even asking the right questions,” she said. Scouted by Norman Parkinson, the British fashion photographer, and then recruited by Eileen Ford, a founder of Ford Models, von Schlebrugge became a successful, if ambivalent, model, arriving in New York City after a rough passage on the Queen Mary. (Photos of her at the time show just how much the actress Uma Thurman resembles her mother.)
Unimpressed with uptown mores, she found a salubrious crowd in Greenwich Village, which included the poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. One night, she, Corso and others rented a car and drove up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary was testing the effects of small doses of mescaline. She remembered Leary, 20 years her senior, as being boring and overweight. Yet a few years later, she married him.
“I must have been hallucinating,” she said, “but it turns out I had a father complex, which I got completely cured of.”
She and Robert Thurman met in the kitchen at Millbrook, the New York estate given to Leary, Richard Alpert and their followers by scions of the Mellon family. She was there to persuade Leary to sign their divorce papers. Robert Thurman was there to persuade Leary to stop taking so many drugs — although he too had indulged in a bit of hallucination. Thurman was not looking his best: He had thrown kerosene on a brush fire and his face was covered in soot. He had given up being a monk, and the hair on his shaved head had just begun to grow in.
Yet Robert Thurman “had all kinds of answers and interesting questions and new ideas,” Nena Thurman said, and learning about Buddhism felt like “déjà vu.” “Life is full of serendipitous happenings. It’s like a skateboard is hovering just outside your door. You can close the door, or you can jump on and take the ride.”
Nena Thurman had a small inheritance, and the couple bought 9 acres on a hill here in Woodstock for $7,000, cleared the land and put up a few tents and a teepee. When the VW Microbus in which they had travelled through India died, it became a planter. Then Robert Thurman had a commission to translate a Tibetan sutra. He saved $3,000 to build a house, Nena Thurman said, “which was enough to either hire people and dig a cellar, or buy lumber — we decided to buy the lumber.”
They named the place Punya House — “punya” means “merit” in Sanskrit — although Nena Thurman’s brother, recruited on weekends to work, called the cellar he was digging the Gulag. Taya Thurman, Robert Thurman’s eldest daughter, said, “You can see that my dad’s house was drawn and made by hand, which is a beautiful feeling.”
Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, a hero of Robert Thurman’s, he topped the cabin with a geodesic dome built from shingles and Plexiglas. (You can see this iteration of the place in “Woodstock Handmade Houses,” the indie classic from 1974.) But it leaked badly. And the couple needed more rooms for their four children, Ganden, Dechen, Uma and Mipam. So Robert Thurman took it down and built a second floor.
Theirs was a lively, and somewhat Darwinian, dinner table, filled with graduate students, Tibetan refugees and a rotating cast of monks and lamas. “One night my brother Dechen kept asking my father to please, please pass the salt,” Ganden Thurman said. “My father was debating heatedly, talking shop, and finally the telephone rang. It was Dechen phoning my father to ask him to please, please pass the salt.”
Clodagh, the Irish designer who collaborated with Nena Thurman on Menla, the Tibet House outpost and retreat space in Phoenicia, New York, said Thurman events were “always very Irish, with everyone laughing and telling stories. They understand the elements and they understand the senses.” Her husband describes the couple as “Enlightenment Within Reach.’”
Downstairs at the Thurmans’ house, a rope swing was looped over a beam; a climbing plant seemed to be growing up the wood stove, and deity-tchochtkes, as Robert Thurman called the house army of Buddhas and other Indo-Tibetan figurines, were marshaled along most of the horizontal surfaces.
On the second floor, beams were painted with lotus flowers and other so-called lucky signs. In an anteroom, there is a wall of 500 or 600 Tibetan sutras, each wrapped in a bright orange cloth, that Robert Thurman has promised the Dalai Lama he will translate. Finally, up another twisting staircase, a 16-sided bedroom is overseen by a fearsome, gilded figure with 16 feet. “I call it the terminator exterminator,” he said, “because it’s a fierce symbol of overcoming death.”
He explained how the theory of relativity is expressed in the 16 emptinesses that are the core of Buddhist teachings. “The relative universe means there is no absolute container,” he said. “And so we are empty of any isolated, separated identity, if you follow me. We are a complete nexus of interrelatedness, which means there is nothing to do but improve.”
Nena Thurman, meanwhile, had some tips for successful marriage. “If you share a spiritual outlook,” she said, “it’s an area you can return to when you are having your petty struggles, which are nonsense compared to what you really care about. On a practical note, you have to take turns, so that no one partner becomes dominant in the relationship.”
Ganden Thurman had another theory about his parents, gleaned from reading about some early work at the MIT Media lab having to do with interactivity, and the essential elements of human conversation.
“Turns out it’s a high degree of mutual interruptibility,” he said. “You had to have a high tolerance for that in my family. There were always a lot of ideas — and grudges, too — pouring forth. Being somewhat social oddballs who were often left to our own devices, we became, as people who are marooned together often do, a little funky.”
You can close the door, or you can jump on and take the ride. NENA THURMAN