Gareth Sparham received a BA in English (Hons) from McGill University and PhD in Asian studies from the University of British Columbia. He studied formally at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala from 1974 until 1986 and remained closely associated with the institute until 1998. He then taught Tibetan and Sanskrit at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, for twelve years, leaving to focus on translating Indian and Tibetan Perfection of Wisdom literature from Tibetan and Sanskrit into English. He has published numerous multi-volume translations of Perfection of Wisdom literature and translations of several key works of Tsongkhapa.
Jeffrey Hopkins was Professor Emeritus of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, where he taught Tibetan studies and Tibetan language for more than thirty years. He received a BA magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1963, trained for five years at the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America (now the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center) in New Jersey, and received a PhD in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973. From 1979 to 1989 he served as His Holiness the Dalai Lama's chief interpreter into English on lecture tours in the U. S. , Canada, Southeast Asia, Great Britain, and Switzerland. He published more than fifty books, including Meditation on Emptiness, a seminal work of English language scholarship on Tibetan Madhyamaka thought, as well as translations of works by Tsongkhapa, Dolpopa, and His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At the University of Virginia he founded programs in Buddhist Studies and Tibetan Studies and served as Director of the Center for South Asian Studies for twelve years. Jeffrey passed away on July 3, 2024.
