Anne Carolyn Klein

Anne Carolyn Klein is a professor and former chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University, where she developed a contemplative studies concentration for graduate students, teaches courses on Buddhism, and reads with students in Tibetan. She is also a lama in the Nyingma tradition and a founding teacher at Dawn Mountain, a center for Tibetan Buddhism, where she teaches a variety of practices and texts, especially recently revealed (gter) practices from Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, whom she met adventitiously in Tibet in 1996 and who named her a Dorje Lopön in 2009.

She has studied and translated in three of Tibet’s five traditions. Her scholarly work encompasses both Tibetan texts and the learned oral commentary on them. Her books include Knowledge and Liberation, on Buddhist distinctions between intellectual knowing and direct experience; Path to the Middle: The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden, on preparing to meet the ultimate; Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, contrasting Buddhist and feminist understandings of self; Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche’s Strand of Jewels, on essential Dzogchen teachings; with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Unbounded Wholeness, a translation and presentation of a Bön Dzogchen text; and Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse, on the foundational practices and lineage of Jigme Lingpa, with chantable English translations.

In all these endeavors her central theme is the embodied interaction between head and heart on the paths to wholeness, and delight in finding these throughout Buddhist literary and contemplative traditions.