Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. Born Jeffrey Miller, he was raised in Valley Stream on New York's Long Island, where he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah and earned letters in basketball, baseball, and soccer at Valley Stream Central High School (class of 1968). While a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he attended antiwar protests, marched on Washington, and attended Woodstock. After graduating with honors from college, he traveled throughout Europe and the East.
Surya has spent thirty five years studying Zen, vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great masters of Asia, including the Dalai Lama's own teachers, and has twice completed the traditional three year meditation cloistered retreat at his teacher’s Tibetan monastery. He is an authorized lama (priest and spiritual master teacher) in the Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the founder of the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its branch centers in New York City, New Jersey, California, Portland, and Texas. Founder of the Western Buddhist Teachers Network with the Dalai Lama, he is also active in interfaith dialogue and social activism and regularly organizes its international Buddhist Teachers Conferences.
Surya Das is a sought after speaker, and teaches, lectures, and conducts retreats around the world. Lama Surya Das is a published poet, translator, and chantmaster. In addition to Words of Wisdom, he is the author of many other books, including Awakening the Buddha Within, Natural Radiance, The Big Questions, Buddha is as Buddha Does, and Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be.
Based on his relationship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Surya Das founded the Western Buddhist Teachers Network and has organized three weeklong conferences of Western Buddhist Meditation Teachers with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. He also teaches regularly at Esalen, the New York Open Center, Omega Institute, Interface, at universities in the United States and abroad, and at spiritual centers of all denominations.
Surya Das is a contributing editor to Body and Soul, writes regularly for Tricycle and other magazines, and is a founder and board member of a number of Buddhist monasteries, centers, and charitable projects in refugee camps in Asia. He writes a regular “Ask The Lama” column at Beliefnet.com.
He lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
