About the Author

Erik Pema Kunsang, also known as Erik Hein Schmidt, is known as one of the world's most gifted interpreters of Tibetan into English--although Danish was his first language. Traveling to Nepal from his native Denmark at twenty years old, he has studied with or translated for more than sixty Tibetan masters. He is the compiler of a voluminous 3,000-page Tibetan dictionary for spiritual terms (The "Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dictionary of Buddhist Culture"), used by other Tibetan translators as an authoritative reference and now available online at www.dharmadictionary.net. Erik Pema Kunsang was the main interpreter of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche for seventeen years, living in Tulku Urgyen's monasteries--one in Kathmandu's "Little Tibet," near the great Boudhanath Stupa, the other his mountainside hermitage overlooking the Kathmandu Valley--and translated forty-six books of scripture and sacred writings.