| Geshe Michael Roach | |
|---|---|
| School | Gelugpa |
| Personal | |
| Nationality | American |
| Born | 1952 Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Senior posting | |
| Based in | Diamond Mountain |
| Title | Geshe |
| Religious career | |
| Website | aciphx.org |
Michael Roach (born 1952) is an American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelugpa school, and was the first Westerner to qualify for the Geshe degree at Sera Monastery in India. He received the degree after twenty-two years of (part time) training in both India and abroad. He is a scholar in Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Russian.[1][2][3][4]
He currently teaches Buddhism at ACI Phoenix, a branch of Asian Classics Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, which he founded in 2010[5]. He also tours the world, teaching Buddhism and ethical business practices. He has founded several other endeavors, including Andin International, the Asian Classics Input Project, the Diamond Abbey in New York, and the Enlightened Business Institute.
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Michael Roach was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952 to Episcopalian parents and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He was a choirboy at his local church. He received the Presidential Scholars Medallion following high school graduation from U.S. President Richard Nixon, then graduated from Princeton University in 1974. Shortly before his graduation, he lost both of his parents to cancer and then his brother to suicide. Following graduation, he moved in to a Buddhist monastery in New Jersey with his lama Sermey Khensur Lobsang Tharchin.[2]
Roach returned to the United States in 1981 and gave Dharma teachings on WBAI radio in New York City. In 1983 he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and received the Geshe degree in 1995.[6]
Roach went on to found Andin International, a jewelry retailer based in New York. At Andin, he built a lucrative international business in the diamond industry, turning an initial $50,000 investment into hundreds of millions of dollars. He later left the company and relinquished his holdings, setting up financial endowments to fund various projects.[7][8] He used these experiences as the basis for his classic book, The Diamond Cutter, in which he explains the practice of the Diamond Cutter Sutra in the context of business.[9]
From 1993-1999, Roach taught a series of academic courses on Tibetan Buddhism in New York City.[10][11] These courses together constituted a seven-year program of study and cover the Six Great Books of Buddhism.
Roach also founded the Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP)[12] which compiles important Buddhist texts on CD-ROM.[3][13] ACIP has input over 8,500 texts—nearly half a million pages—which it has made available for free.[12] ACIP also provides a means of earning income for many Tibetan refugees.[14]
During the 1990s he hosted a television program on public-access television in Manhattan, as well as a weekly broadcast for Mongolia that garnered approximately 500,000 viewers.[7] He founded Diamond Abbey in New York (a Tibetan training center for monks and nuns) and also the Enlightened Business Institute (an institute that helps train people to make money by implementing Buddhist ethics). Roach also founded Godstow Retreat Center in Redding, Connecticut which is now Do Ngak Kunphen Ling Tibetan Buddhist Center for Universal Peace.[2][3]
From 2000-2003, Roach engaged in a traditional three-year silent retreat in the Arizona desert with five other retreatants.[8][13]
In the Fall of 2004, Roach and his partner Christie McNally established Diamond Mountain, a Buddhist retreat center and seminary in Arizona.[15] They taught an eighteen-course curriculum on the Vajrayana path. This eighteen-course advanced series was completed in 2010. A new three-year retreat, with students from Diamond Mountain's first graduating class, began in 2010 in the retreat valley at Diamond Mountain.[16]
Though normally celibate, Gelugpa monks in some cases undertake the practice of karmamudrā (a yogic practice involving sexual intercourse with a partner) without breaking their monastic vows.[17] Roach and McNally, his disciple at the time, began such a partnership in 1998 and, in keeping with tradition, initially kept it secret. The couple took personal vows together, one of which was that they would never be more than 15 feet apart.[15]
In 2003, citing the impossibility of keeping it secret any longer, Roach and McNally made their partnership public. This gave rise to controversy in the Buddhist community, both in the United States and in India.[15] To avoid the appearance of impropriety, Roach and McNally were requested not to attend a teaching of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 2006.[18] The partnership ended in 2009 when McNally began a relationship with one of their students;[19] Roach and McNally continued to teach together.[20]