Property:Bio
From Bodhicitta
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Lewis Lancaster (born 27 October 1932) is Emeritus Professor of the Department of East Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and has served as President, Adjunct Professor, and Chair of the dissertation committee at University of the West since 1992. He graduated from Roanoke College (B.A.) in 1954 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Roanoke in 2007. He is also a 1958 graduate of USC-ST (M.Th.) and a 1968 graduate of the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.). He received an Honorary Doctorate of Buddhist Studies from Vietnam Buddhist University in 2011.
Professor Lancaster has published over 55 articles and reviews and has edited or authored numerous books including ''Prajñāpāramitā and Related Systems'', ''The Korean Buddhist Canon'', ''Buddhist Scriptures'', ''Early Ch’an in China and Tibet'', and ''Assimilation of Buddhism in Korea''. He also founded the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to use the computer-based technology to map the spread of Buddhism from the remote past to the present. In 2008 he gave the Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society. Professor Lancaster is the research advisor for the Buddha's Birthday Education Project. He was the Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC, Berkeley, USA and Editor of the Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series. . . .
Professor Lancaster was a key figure in the creation of descriptive catalogue and digitization of the Korean Buddhist Canon. He was awarded the 2014 Grand Award from the Korean Buddhist Order for his contribution to Buddhism. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Lancaster Source Accessed March 23, 2020]) +
Jonathan Landaw spent six years living in northern India studying Tibetan Buddhism and is the editor and author of a number of Buddhist books. He has led meditation courses at Buddhist centers for over twenty-five years and is a popular teacher at dharma centers around the world.
Jonathan Landaw, author of ''Buddhism for Dummies'', was born in New Jersey in 1944. From 1972 to 1977 Jon worked as an English editor for the Translation Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives producing numerous texts under the guidance of Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. As a student of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche since 1973, Jon has edited numerous works for Wisdom Publications, including ''Wisdom Energy'' and ''Introduction to Tantra''. He is also the author of ''Prince Siddhartha'', a biography of Buddha for children, and ''Images of Enlightenment'', published by Snow Lion in 1993. As an instructor of Buddhist meditation, he has taught in numerous Dharma centers throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Capitola, California, with his wife and three children. +
Paloma Lopez Landry (translator) studied the Tibetan language for three years in Nepal before meeting Khentrul Rinpoche upon his arrival in the US in 2002. She has been translating for him since then as well as for other teachers of the Katog lineage within the Nyingma tradition. ([https://katogvajraling.org/teacher/ Source Accessed Jan 31, 2025]) +
Karen C. Lang is Professor of Buddhist Studies and Indian Religions and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies. As a member of UVA's Religious Studies Department since 1982, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Buddhist history and philosophy, including seminars on Buddhist and Hindu Ethics, Jainism, Mahayana Budddhism, and Buddhism and Gender, as well as reading courses in Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan. She has received Fulbright, NEH, and AIIS fellowships. Her publications include ''Four Illusions: Candrakirti's Advice on the Bodhisattva Path'', ''Aryadeva on the Bodhisattva's Cultivation of Merit and Knoweldge'' (translated into German in 2007), and numerous articles on Buddhist philosophy and literature. Professor Lang was a member of the translation team that produced the first English translation of Tsongkhapa's ''The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment''. Her current research and translation interests focus on the work of 7th-century Buddhist philosopher Candrakirti. ([https://religiousstudies.as.virginia.edu/node/75 Source Accessed Mar 31, 2021]) +
Hillary A. Langberg is a scholar of Buddhism and Asian art history, currently a visiting assistant professor of religion at Bard College. She earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, following an AIIS Junior Research Fellowship (2017–2018). Her research centers on the rise of goddesses and female deity reverence in Mahāyāna Indian Buddhism, combining visual analysis of ca. 6th–7th century western Deccan sculptural programs with philological analysis of Sanskrit texts (ca. 2nd–7th centuries CE), including work on mantra-based ritual practice and bodhisattva emanation doctrine. She was named a 2022 Robert H. N. Ho Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar, spending her fellowship (2022–2024) at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, where she curated the online exhibition "Wisdom of the Goddess." She has published articles in ''The Eastern Buddhist'' and ''Pacific World'', including work on goddess figures in the ''Sūtra of Golden Light'', and is currently completing a book titled ''Goddesses of the Great Vehicle: The Centering of Female Deities in Classical Indian Buddhism''. +
Fr. Nilo Asuncion Lardizabal, O.P., is a priest of the Philippine Dominican Province. He teaches philosophy at the Ecclesiastical Faculties of UST, specializing in Oriental and Modern philosophies. +
P'arang Geri Larkin, born Geraldine Kapp Willis, is founder and former head teacher of Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple, a Korean Chogye center in Detroit, Michigan. The name Geri Larkin is a pen name. She graduated from Barnard College in 1973. Larkin, daughter of a wealthy IBM executive, left her successful business life as a management consultant to enter a Buddhist seminary for three years, where she was ordained. When she left she sold her material possessions and bought a brick duplex in downtown Detroit which, with the help of local residents, she cleaned up and turned into Still Point. Larkin's articulation of the concept of "right livelihood" was highly influential on Ann Perrault and Jackie Victor, two of her students who founded Avalon International Breads in Detroit in 1997. She has been a longtime columnist for Spirituality & Health magazine. She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geri_Larkin Source Accessed Apr 8, 2021]) +
Zach Larson is a practitioner in the Longchen Nyingthig lineage of the Nyingma School, who works as a translator, editor and author. He was born in 1978 in Wisconsin and received a BA in "Buddhism and Politics" at UW-Madison in 2001 after a year-long study-abroad program in Kathmandu, Nepal in which he met his first teacher, Changling Tulku Rinpoche of Shechen Monastery, with whom he studied the Longchen Nyinthig preliminaries for six months. While working on the research project "Nonviolence in Tibetan Culture: A glimpse at how Tibetans view and practice nonviolence in politics and daily life," he met and received profound blessings from Chatral Sangye Dorje Rinpoche and offered to compile and translate teachings by him in the coming years. Chatral Rinpoche approved of the idea, and Larson returned to Wisconsin to study Tibetan language and Buddhism for three years at the UW-Madison Graduate School. He returned to Nepal in 2004 and compiled, edited, and translated Chatral Rinpoche's biography and teachings into the book ''Compassionate Action: The Teachings of Chatral Rinpoche'', which was published by Shechen Publications in New Delhi in 2005.
Larson attended the full Nyingma Kama Wang with Trulshik Rinpoche in the winter of 2004 in Boudha and received the Kunsang Lama'i Shelung empowerment from Tsetrul Rinpoche in January 2005.
Snow Lion Publications released an expanded and updated version of ''Compassionate Action'' in 2007. The book has since been translated into Spanish (2009), Indonesian (2009), and Russian (2010). ([https://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/Zachary_Larson Source Accessed Nov 21, 2023]) +
Horst Lasic is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Horst Lasic studied Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna and received his PhD in 1999. He has been a research fellow at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna since 1995. His main areas of research are religion and philosophy in South Asia and Tibet, with a special focus on the Buddhist philosophers Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, Jinendrabuddhi, Jñānaśrīmitra, and Ratnakīrti. He has been teaching at the University of Vienna since 1999. ([https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at/en/person/lasic-horst/502 Source Accessed Oct 9, 2025]) +
Kyabje Lati Rinpoche (1922 – 12 April 2010) Born in the Kham region of Eastern Tibet in 1922, Lati Rinpoche was identified as the reincarnation of a great practitioner by Gongkar Rinpoche and entered monastic life at the age of 10.
At the age of fifteen, he enrolled in Gaden Shartse Norling College, one of the 'great three' Gelukpa university monasteries of Tibet.
In 1959, Lati Rinpoche sat for the Geshe Lharmapa examination and he was conferred as "Geshe Lharampa". In 1960, Lati Rinpoche joined the tantric college in Lhasa, and started intensive study in Tantra. In 1964, Lati Rinpoche left Tibet to join the 14th Dalai Lama in exile. On arrival in Dharamsala, he was appointed as the Spiritual Advisor to the 14th Dalai Lama.
From 1976, Lati Rinpoche taught at the Namgyal Gomba (the 14th Dalai Lama's personal monastery). In the same year, he was appointed as the Abbot of the Shartse Norling College of Gaden Monastery, a replacement university in the like of Gaden Shartse Norling College, for the monkhood in exile. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lati_Rinpoche Source Accessed July 24, 2023]) +
Howard Lazzarini is the English translator of ''The Sound That Perceives the World: Calling Out to the Bodhisattva'' by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi (Wisdom Publications), a work of autobiographically-informed commentary on the ''Kannon-gyō'' (Chapter 25 of the ''Lotus Sūtra'') centered on the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara (Kannon/Kanzeon).
Lazzarini holds a degree in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and lived in Japan for twelve years. During the early 1970s he practiced Sōtō Zen at Antaiji, a small temple in the Takagamine district of Kyoto, where he first studied under Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi—the author whose work he would later translate—training in the shikantaza ("just sitting") style associated with Uchiyama and Dōgen. After returning to the United States, he continued his practice with Shōhaku Okumura Rōshi at the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana, where he took lay ordination. He translated ''The Sound That Perceives the World'' in close collaboration with Okumura Rōshi and his wife, Shōko Hayashi Lazzarini. Lazzarini currently lives in Everett, Washington, where he practices with the Everett Zazen Group. ([https://wisdomexperience.org/content-author/howard-lazzarini/ Source Accessed July 26, 2026]) +
Lotsāwa Che Tashi was a translator who was born during the latter part of the eleventh century CE. He collaborated with Municandra on a translation of Sthiramati's ''Sūtrālaṃkāravṛttibhāṣya'', a commentary on the ''Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkārakārikā'' of Maitreya. +
Denma Geshe Lobzang Choying (19th cent.) attended Drepung Loseling Monastic College. He wrote refutations on the views of Jamgon Ju Mipam Gyatso (1846-1912) on topics such as Madhyamaka philosophy and emptiness. ([https://library.bdrc.io/show/bdr:WA00EGS1016271 Source Accessed Feb 10, 2023]) +
Phillip Lecso has been an important translator for the International Kalachakra Network. For many years, Lecso was Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Ohio and published articles on Buddhist attitudes toward biomedical issues. Recently he has had to discontinue these activities due to an aggressive neuromuscular disorder. (Source: ''As Long as Space Endures'', 477) +
Shao Chang Lee was Professor of Chinese History and Language at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He was the first Director of the Oriental Institute when it was established in 1935. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1917 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1918. He is the author of several China-related publications. ([http://manoa.hawaii.edu/chinesestudies/lee-shao-chang/ Source Accessed Aug 17, 2021]) +
Michael Lees received his PhD in Global and Comparative Education, MA in Contemplative Religions with a focus on Buddhist Studies, and a BA in Environmental/Ecological Studies and Indigenous Wisdom Traditions. His research interests include examining the intersections of eastern and western spiritual, contemplative, and ecoliterate pedagogical approaches to learning for emerging adults in the higher education classroom. He currently teaches courses including but not limited to: Buddhism, Taoism, Asian Religions, Religion and Culture: An Ecological Perspective, Native American Religions, Death, Dying, and the Afterlife, Creative Thinking, Introduction to Eastern Philosophy, Western Philosophy, and Religions of the World. ([https://montclair.academia.edu/MikeLees Adapted from Source Jan 20, 2021]) +
Salomon Lefmann (born in Telgte, Westphalia, 25 December 1831; died in Heidelberg, 14 January 1912) was a German Jewish philologist.
He was educated at the Jewish school of his native town, at the seminary and academy at Münster, and at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Paris (Ph.D., Berlin, 1864). In 1866 he became privat-docent of Sanskrit at Heidelberg, where he later became an associate professor (1870) and honorary professor (1901).[1]
Lefmann's principal philological works were:
*"''De Aristotelis in Hominum Educatione Principiis''", Berlin, 1864.
*"''August Schleicher : Skizze''", Leipzig, 1870 (biography of linguist August Schleicher).
*"''Lalita Vistara''" (edited and translated; Lalita-vistara), Halle, 1883, 1902.
*"''Geschichte des Alten Indiens''", Berlin, 1879–90; 2nd edition, 1898 ("History of ancient India").
*"''Franz Bopp : sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft''" 2 volumes., Berlin, 1891–97 ("Franz Bopp; his life and science").
Through his "''Ueber Deutsche Rechtschreibung''" (in "Virchow und Holzendorff's Wissenschaftliche Vorträge", 1871) and "Zur Deutschen Rechtschreibung" (in "Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung", 1871, nos. 136, 209, 274) Lefmann took part in the movement for the establishment of a uniform system of spelling in German.
Lefmann took part in Jewish communal affairs. While preparing himself for the university and during his employment as a public teacher he held also the positions of tutor and school-master in several small communities of Westphalia; and at Heidelberg in 1887 he was president of the Zedaka Verein, a society for the aid of the poor. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Lefmann Source Accessed July 28, 2021]) +
Legs pa'i blo gros (Tib. Ban de legs pa'i blo gros; BDRC P4267) was a Tibetan monk-translator of the imperial period, active between the eighth and ninth centuries. His only known work is the Tibetan translation of Nāgārjuna's ''Āryaśālistambakamahāyānasūtraṭīkā'' (Tib. ''<i>'</i>Phags pa sā lu ljang pa zhes bya ba theg pa chen po'i mdo'i rgya cher bshad pa''; Derge Tengyur 3986), an extensive commentary on the ''Śālistambasūtra'' (''Rice Seedling Sūtra''), which he translated together with Jñānakumāra and Dharmaśrīprabha. The translation is preserved in the Derge, Peking, Narthang, and Golden Manuscript Tengyurs. Nothing further is known of his life. +
Taigen Dan Leighton (b. 1950, Pittsburgh, PA) is an American Sōtō Zen priest, scholar, and author, and a Dharma successor in the lineage of Shunryū Suzuki. He began formal Zen practice in 1975 at the New York Zen Center under Kandō Nakajima Rōshi, and after earning a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, moved to the Bay Area in 1978 to practice and work full-time at San Francisco Zen Center, residing for years at City Center, Tassajara, and Green Gulch Farm. He received priest ordination in 1986 from Tenshin Reb Anderson Rōshi and Dharma Transmission from him in 2000. From 1990 to 1992, Leighton practiced and translated Dōgen in Kyoto, Japan, working closely with Rev. Shōhaku Okumura.
Leighton holds an M.A. from the California Institute of Integral Studies and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where he has taught since 1994, alongside teaching appointments at Loyola University Chicago and other institutions. In 2007 he relocated to Chicago to become founding Guiding Dharma Teacher of Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, a role he held through mid-2024. He is an authorized teacher (kyōshi) in the Japanese Sōtō school and has long been active in peace and environmental activism.
Leighton has authored roughly ten books of commentary and translation on Zen texts, including ''Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression'', ''Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra'', ''Zen Questions: Zazen, Dōgen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry'', and ''Realizing Genjōkōan: The Key to Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō'', as well as co-translations of major Dōgen works such as ''Dōgen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku'' and ''Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi''. +
Ven. Gyalten Lekden was born and raised outside of Boston. He first started studying and practicing Buddhism during his undergraduate studies, and after completing BAs in Theatre and Religious Studies he continued on to complete his Masters of Divinity in Buddhist Ministry at Harvard Divinity School. Ven. Lekden started leading Buddhist communities while an undergrad, and has studied, served, and taught at various Dharma centers since then. In 2012 he joined Sera Je Monastery in southern India, where he continues to study and practice. Ven. Lekden is a registered teacher in the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, and has given Dharma talks and meditation instruction in India and the USA. ([https://tnlsf.org/faculty/ Source Accessed Mar 27, 2026]). +
