Robert Thurman

He enrolled in boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. He was expelled in 1958 — weeks from graduation, having already been accepted at Harvard — after leaving without permission to join Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army in Cuba. He was stopped in Florida and worked for a brief time in Mexico.

In 1959, he married Christophe de Menil, an oil heiress. In 1961, while changing a flat tire, the tire iron slipped and destroyed his left eye, a freak accident that left him questioning his own mortality.

He dropped out of Harvard to travel across Asia. His wife, uninterested in his wanderings, left him. He arrived in Turkey close to broke.

…

He returned home when his father died in 1962, but continued his pursuit of Buddhist knowledge with Geshe Wangyal, a Buddhist lama in New Jersey. Adept at languages, he learned Tibetan in a matter of months and eventually spoke it without an accent.


He decided to become a monk and persuaded his teacher to accompany him to Dharamshala, India, the home in exile of the Dalai Lama.

Dr. Thurman and the Dalai Lama became fast friends: He studied under the Tibetan spiritual leader and, in turn, gave him lessons in Freudian psychology, nuclear physics and other Western ideas.

“He would say, ‘Forget about the teaching, you can go and talk to some old lama,’” Dr. Thurman told The San Francisco Examiner in 1997. “‘But now what I want to know is how does the bicameral American constitutional system work? What is a gene, how does it work?’”

Incredible obituary of Robert Thurman. A remarkable comment from one of his kids:

From Christophe DeMenil’s obituary:

In the spring of 1959, she married Robert Thurman, who was eight years her junior and who would enter Harvard that fall. He dropped out two years later with wanderlust and headed toward India by way of Turkey and Iran in search of enlightenment through Buddha. He left behind his infant daughter, Taya, as well as his wife, who, he was quoted as saying, was “nervous, scared of the whole thing.”

Ms. de Menil maintained for years that it was not India where he had been headed but the mountains of Mexico, where he proposed to camp and explore mind-altering drugs, neither of which she felt was appropriate for an infant. The marriage ended in divorce, and Mr. Thurman, who became a distinguished scholar of Buddhism and a monk, later married a German-Swiss model who had divorced Timothy Leary, the proponent of LSD. One of their children, born in 1970 in Mexico, is the actress Uma Thurman.

How did the de Menils get so rich?

Each child was endowed with a formidable financial legacy, thanks to their grandfather Conrad Schlumberger, a physicist, and the great-uncle, Marcel. Together the two men pioneered well-logging, which, using the electrical resistance of the earth, determines with considerable accuracy the location of oil deposits.

I know the name from the art collection in Houston, founded by Christophe’s mother.