“I must have been hallucinating,” she said, “but it turns out I had a father complex, which I got completely cured of.”
She and Dr. Thurman met in the kitchen at Millbrook, the New York estate given to
Dr. Leary, Richard Alpert and their followers by scions of the Mellon family.
Taya Thurman, Dr. Thurman’s eldest daughter, said, “You can see that my dad’s house was drawn and made by hand, which is a beautiful feeling.”
Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, a hero of Dr. Thurman’s, he topped the cabin with a geodesic dome built from shingles and plexiglass.
Dr. Thurman, the professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and the president of Tibet House US, a cultural institution
that is three decades old this year, has a book to promote, a biography in graphic-novel form of the Dalai Lama called “Man of Peace.”
Dense with East Asian history, it’s not quite “Persepolis” or “Fun Home,”
but it is a thrill to come upon cartoon versions of hometown political figures like Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barack Obama (you’ll even find Whoopi Goldberg near the end, in a hilarious panel where the Dalai Lama praises her dreadlocks and she praises his bald pate).