Contemplatives, academics, and innovators

Spiritual Guide

Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche

Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche is a world-renowned teacher and meditation master in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and the inspiration from whom this university draws its deepest vision. Born in Tibet in 1951 as the eldest son of the revered Dzogchen master Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, he was recognized in early childhood as the seventh incarnation of the meditation master Gar Drubchen, and studied under some of the most illustrious teachers of the age, including the 16th Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Since 1976 he has been abbot of Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling, one of Nepal’s largest monasteries, near the Great Stupa of Boudhanath in Kathmandu.

Rinpoche’s life has been devoted to a single aspiration that this university now carries forward: that contemplative wisdom be made genuinely available to the modern world, with rigor and without dilution. In 1997 he founded the Rangjung Yeshe Institute, which combined traditional shedra training with contemporary academic scholarship and, in partnership with Kathmandu University, became an accredited center granting degrees in Buddhist studies. He has established a global network of Gomde meditation centers — including in Austria — and Dharma House city centers across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and through the Shenpen charitable foundation has supported education, health, and disaster relief in Nepal for decades. He is the author of many books, among them Present Fresh Wakefulness and Sadness, Love, Openness, and is known the world over for the warmth, humor, and directness of his teaching.

Kremsegg University is founded in his lineage and his vision. He serves as its Spiritual Guide, while the university maintains full academic freedom under the governance of its Rector and faculty.

Founding Rector

Professor John Dunne

John Dunne (PhD, Harvard University) currently holds the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is also a distinguished professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures and recently served as department chair. He is the Director of the Kremsegg University Project and will serve as the Founding Rector.

For more than two decades, Professor Dunne’s scholarship has done precisely what this university is built to do: hold Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice in rigorous dialogue with cognitive science. His more than fifty publications range across both the humanities and the sciences — from technical studies of Buddhist epistemology to widely read work on the nature of mindfulness and contemplative practice — and include Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and his contributions to Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics: The Mind, a volume produced in collaborative effort guided by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Professor Dunne has decades of experience in higher education, including leadership positions, and he has likewise engaged in broader efforts to bring contemplative insights to other domains, especially through the Mind and Life Institute, where he has served on the board of directors, and Mind and Life Europe. He likewise has served for two decades as an academic advisor to the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu — the institution founded by Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche that first joined traditional monastic study to accredited modern scholarship. He has long taught within this lineage, including at the Gomde centers of Austria and Denmark. His appointment as Founding Rector is therefore the deepening of a relationship, not the beginning of one.

Under Professor Dunne’s leadership, Kremsegg University maintains complete academic freedom and professional academic governance.

Advisor to the Project Director

Dr. Andreas Doctor

Andreas was a founding member of the Rangjung Yeshe Institute, where he spent fifteen years teaching, and for most of this period he served as director of studies at Kathmandu University’s Centre for Buddhist Studies. He is currently the editorial co-director at 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.