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Born in Pasadena,
California in 1950, Alan Wallace was raised and educated
in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968,
he enrolled in the University of California at San Diego,
where for two years he prepared for a career in ecology,
with a secondary interest in philosophy and religion. However,
during his third year of undergraduate studies at the University
of Göttingen in West Germany, his interests shifted
more towards philosophy and religion; and he began to study
Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language.
In
1971, he discontinued his formal Western education to go
to Dharamsala, India, where he studied Tibetan Buddhism,
medicine, and language for four years. During his first
year in Dharamsala, he lived in the home of the Dr. Yeshi
Dhonden, personal physician of H. H. the Dalai Lama. Throughout
his stay in Dharamsala, he frequently served as interpreter
for Dr. Dhonden, and under his guidance he completed a translation
of a classic Tibetan medical text. In 1973, he began training
in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, in which all instruction,
study, and debate were conducted in Tibetan.
In
1975, at the request of the Dalai Lama, he joined the eminent
Tibetan Buddhist scholar Geshe Rabten, in Switzerland, first
at the Tibet Institute in Rikon, and later at the Center
for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. Pèlerin. Over the
next four years, he continued his own studies and monastic
training, translated Tibetan texts, interpreted for Geshe
Rabten and many other Tibetan Lamas, including the Dalai
Lama, and taught Buddhist philosophy and meditation in Switzerland,
Italy, Germany, France, and England.
At the end of
1979, he left Switzerland to begin a four-year series of
contemplative retreats, first in India, under the guidance
of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United
States.
In 1984, after
a thirteen-year absence from Western academia, he enrolled
at Amherst College to complete his undergraduate education.
There he studied physics, Sanskrit, and the philosophical
foundations of modern physics, and in 1987 he graduated
summa cum laude and phi beta kappa. His honors
thesis was subsequently published in two volumes: Choosing
Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Snow
Lion: 1996) and Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on
the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva
Way of Life (Snow Lion, 1988).
Following his
sojourn at Amherst, he spent nine months in contemplative
retreat in the high desert of California. Then in 1988,
he joined the Tibetan contemplative Gen Lamrimpa to assist
in leading a one-year group contemplative retreat near Castle
Rock, Washington, during which ways were explored for refining
and stabilizing the attention.
In the autumn
of 1989, he entered the graduate program in religious studies
at Stanford University, where he pursued research in the
interface between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy.
These studies are closely related to his role as an interpreter
and organizer for the "Mind and Life" conferences
with the Dalai Lama and Western scientists beginning in
1987 and continuing to the present. In 1992, sponsored by
the Mind and Life Institute, which he helped to found, he
traveled widely in Tibet, conducting a preliminary survey
of living Buddhist contemplatives. In 1995, he completed
his doctoral dissertation on attentional training in Tibetan
Buddhism and its relation to modern psychological and philosophical
theories of attention and consciousness. A modified version
of his dissertation has been published under the title The
Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation
(Open Court Press, 1998).
During the period
1992-1997, he served as the principal interpreter for the
Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche, a senior Lama of the Nyingma
Order of Tibetan Buddhism. During this time, he translated
five classic Tibetan treatises on contemplative methods
for exploring the nature of consciousness. From 1995-1997,
he was a Visiting Scholar in the departments of religious
studies and psychology at Stanford University. During this
time, he and his wife, Dr. Vesna A. Wallace, produced a
new translation from the Sanskrit and Tibetan of the classic
text A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Snow
Lion, 1997), and he also conducted research for his primary
academic work thus far, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward
a New Science of Consciousness.
From 1997-2001,
Alan Wallace taught in the Department of Religious Studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he
held classes on Tibetan Buddhist studies and the interface
between science and religion. His most recent academic books
are The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of
Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Buddhism
and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia University
Press, 2003), and his latest popular book is Buddhism
with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training
(Snow Lion 2001). After leaving UCSB in June 2001, he spent
six months in a solitary contemplative retreat in the high
desert of California. He now lives in Santa Barbara, where
he is the president and founder of the Santa Barbara Institute for
Consciousness Studies, and he teaches Buddhist philosophy and
meditation throughout Europe and North America.
