Rob Nairn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rob Nairn is a South African Buddhist teacher, author and populariser. He is a follower of Tibetan Buddhism.

1 Academic Education
2 Law and Academic Career
3 Buddhist Path
4 Bibliography
5 DVDs

[edit] Academic Education

Graduating from the University of Rhodesia with an LL.B (Hons) (London), he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for postgraduate studies in UK and went on to study criminology, psychology and law at King's College in London and to receive a postgraduate diploma in criminology from Edinburgh University. He then returned to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to become an advocate of its High Court.

[edit] Law and Academic Career

Nairn was appointed as a magistrate at 21, which was the youngest ever appointment of this type in the then Rhodesia. He went on to become the private secretary to Minister of Justice, Law and Order of that country as well as a senior lecturer in law and criminology at the then University of Rhodesia.

Moving to South Africa, Nairn became a senior lecturer in law at the University of Cape Town and later a professor of law and criminology and the Director of the Institute of Criminology at the same institution.

[edit] Buddhist Path

A student of Buddhism since the 1960s, Nairn resigned as professor of criminology at the University of Cape Town in 1980 in order to devote himself to Buddhism.

From 1989 to 1993 he took part in a four-year isolation retreat at the Kagyu Samyé Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre in Scotland.

Currently Nairn is the African representative for the Venerable Dr Akong Rinpoche and is responsible for eleven Buddhist centres in South Africa and three other African countries.

As he was instructed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to teach meditation and Buddhism in 1964 and also instructed by His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa to teach insight meditation in 1979, Nairn spends a lot of his time teaching and running retreats in Southern Africa as well as the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Italy, The Netherlands and Germany.

[edit] Bibliography

Living Dreaming Dying, ISBN 0-9584348-9-1
Diamond Mind, ISBN 0-9584166-3-X
Tranquil Mind, ISBN 0-9585057-1-3 (translated into Afrikaans as 'n Stil Gemoed, ISBN 0-9584166-2-1). This book has also been translated into German, Italian, Shona, Spanish, Czech, Dutch and Portuguese.
What Is Meditation?, ISBN 1-57062-715-0