Our beloved Bill Magee passed away peacefully on February 20, 2023. >Please visit his TRIBUTE PAGE here.
William Magee, PhD, is not only a warm, generous, humorous, and encouraging teacher, he is also a supremely knowledgeable scholar of Tibetan language and philosophy. He has designed and honed a method for teaching students classical Tibetan – from beginners to competent translators – empowering them to derive both precision and meaning in their reading of Tibetan texts, be it for personal practice, linguistic and philosophic studies, or Buddhological research.
Dr. Magee completed his PhD from the University of Virginia, and has sustained decades-long collaboration with his former mentor, Jeffrey Hopkins, with whom he runs the UMA Institute for Tibetan Studies. In 2020, Bill founded The Dharma Farm, creating ongoing opportunities for advanced Tibetan Buddhist Studies and Translation with leading scholars. Bill has taught at the University of Virginia, Dharma Drum (Taiwan), and multiple monasteries before coming to Maitripa College. Students consistently finish Bill’s summer course amazed at having learned far more than they imagined possible, enriched for a lifetime of friendship and newfound access to Tibetan and Buddhist thought, practice, and textual heritage.
Co-author with Elizabeth Napper of Fluent Tibetan: A Proficiency-Oriented Learning System for Novice and Intermediate Tibetan, he has published several books about Indian and Tibetan philosophical thought as well as a novel about a fictitious Tibet of the future. Recently, Bill has published three books in a series on Jam-yang-shay-pa’s Great Exposition of the Interpretable and the Definitive. These translations as well as more information about Bill are available here.
Tibetan Class
Classical Tibetan Intensive: Summer 2017
Classical Tibetan Intensive: Summer 2018
