Advisory Board Chair: Tenzin Dechen Rochard

Tenzin Dechen Rochard has a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy (University of London) and a PhD in Buddhist philosophy (University of Cambridge). She also completed a traditional 10-year study programme in Buddhist Philosophy at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (Dharamsala, India). Dechen translated and edited Geshe Sopa Rinpoche’s oral commentary on the Insight section of Tsongkhapa’s Lamrim Chenmo (Steps on the Path to Enlightenment, Vol. 5, forthcoming, Wisdom Publications). She has been teaching Buddhism, Philosophy, and meditation in the UK and abroad for several years, and is involved with inter-faith dialogue. She is currently working for The Dalai Lama Trust, translating a recently composed compendium of teachings by ancient Indian Buddhist masters of the Nalanda tradition, historically the source of all Tibetan Buddhist traditions.

Advisory Board Member: Fr Martin Ganeri OP

Fr Martin Ganeri OP is Vice-Regent of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. He studied Classics and Oriental Studies for his MA at the University of Cambridge where he also took an MPhil in Indian Archaeology. He subsequently took his DPhil—The Vedantic Cosmology of Ramanuja & its Western Parallels—at the University of Oxford.

Fr Martin lectures in World Religions at Blackfriars Hall, focusing on Catholic approaches to other religions, and also lectures in Theology at Heythrop College, University of London. In addition, he is Director of the Centre for Christianity and Interreligious Dialogue at Heythrop College.

Advisory Board Member: Thupten Jinpa Langri

Thupten Jinpa is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences at Stanford University.president and editor-in-chief of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, Cambridge.

He is also a member of the advisory board of the Mind and Life Institute, which is dedicated to fostering creative dialogue between the Buddhist tradition and Western science.

Thupten Jinpa has written many books and articles, his latest being Tibetan Songs of Spiritual Experience (co-edited with Jas Elsner) and Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Thought: Tsongkhapa’s Quest for the Middle View.

Advisory Board Member: Jesse Norman MP

Jesse Norman is the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. He is a member of the Treasury Select Committee, the House of Commons Governance Committee and one of the few Conservative MPs who has consistently refused to back the government’s military intervention in Syria.

Jesse is the author of several works in philosophy and politics. These include After Euclid: visual reasoning and the epistemology of diagrams, The Big Society: the anatomy of the new politics, Compassionate Conservatism: what it is and why we need it and Compassionate Economics: the social foundations of economic prosperity. The latter was described as “the most intelligent political tract of 2009, and the best analysis of the credit crunch” in the Daily Telegraph. He is also editor of Achievement of Michael Oakeshott.

His work in the community includes the Roundhouse arts centre and urban regeneration project.