1. Nicholas Vreeland, known as Rato Khensur Thupten Lhundup, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the former abbot of Rato Dratsang, a 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery reestablished in India.
12 Facts About Nicholas Vreeland
1. 2.
Nicholas Vreeland is the first Westerner His Holiness the Dalai Lama appointed Abbot of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, one of the important Tibetan government monasteries under his authority.
3.
Monk With A Camera, a documentary film about Nicholas Vreeland, was released in 2014.
4.
Nicholas Vreeland lived in Germany and Morocco before coming to live in the United States at the age of 13 when his father was assigned to the United States Mission to the United Nations.
5.
Nicholas Vreeland attended Groton School in Massachusetts, where he became interested in photography.
6.
Nicholas Vreeland apprenticed to photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
7.
In 1977, Nicholas Vreeland began his studies of Buddhism with Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama sent to the West in the early 1960s by the 14th Dalai Lama to introduce Tibetan culture, Buddhist religion, and philosophy.
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Nicholas Vreeland became the director of The Tibet Center in 1999.
9.
Nicholas Vreeland helped raise the funds, in part through offering his photographs for sale, to enable Rato Dratsang to build a new monastic campus in Karnataka, India to accommodate an ever increasing monastic population.
10.
Nicholas Vreeland has edited two books by the Dalai Lama, An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life, 2005, a New York Times bestseller, and A Profound Mind: Cultivating Wisdom in Everyday Life, 2011.
11.
Nicholas Vreeland is the first Westerner to be appointed the Abbot of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery.
12.
In May 2014, Nicholas Vreeland was awarded Honorary Doctorate degrees from The American University of Paris and John Cabot University in Rome.