Geshe Sopa

Deer Park’s Guiding Spirit

Geshe Sopa is recognized worldwide as one of the great living spiritual masters of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He is particularly renowned for maintaining the high standards of scholarly learning while personally embodying the qualities of humility, tolerance and compassion.

Though trained in his youth in one of the most rigorous Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, Geshe Sopa’s life work has been centered in the heartland of America. Here, Geshe Sopa has spent forty years inspiring all those he meets—as a Buddhist monk, a university professor, a committed peacemaker, a consummate teacher and as an extraordinary human being.

Geshe Sopa’s abilities were apparent from a very early age in Tibet, leading him to be selected as one of the scholars to personally test His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his final examinations – even before Geshe Sopa had completed his own examinations.
Just two years after many Tibetans were forced into exile by the communist Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, His Holiness the Dalai Lama asked Geshe Sopa to travel to the United States, giving him his lifelong mission of bridging cultures and sharing the Dalai Lama’s vision of global human values and ethics.
Geshe Sopa was the first Tibetan to be tenured in an American university, and went on to teach Buddhist philosophy, language and culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 30 years. During that time, Geshe Sopa trained many of this country’s first generation of respected Buddhist scholars and translators, including Jeffrey Hopkins, José Cabezón and John Makransky.
Geshe Sopa founded Deer Park Buddhist Center in 1975, after students began requesting instruction outside the formal academic setting. Deer Park today remains a full-scale monastic and teaching center upholding the Dalai Lama’s tradition in the Midwest, attracting students from around the world to its annual programs.
Geshe Sopa has facilitated an ongoing relationship between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which His Holiness has visited five times, and from which he has received an honorary doctoral degree.
As a trustee on the international committee for the Peace Council, Geshe Sopa has traveled to Belfast, Jerusalem and Chiapas in Mexico as part of Peace Council projects to work toward ending the violence in those troubled areas, reflecting Geshe Sopa’s heartfelt commitment both to public service and to non-violence.

For generations of students, Geshe Sopa has been a shining example of the human capacity for developing kindness and wisdom. With his international support, a solid tradition behind him and his own personal qualities, Geshe Sopa has been the guiding force behind the Deer Park Buddhist Center and Monastery, and has been instrumental in planting the roots of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.