LONDON, England – David Seyfort Ruegg, a world-renowned authority on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, died on Feb. 2, in London, of complications from Covid-19.

His interest in Buddhism originated with his mother, painter Aimee Seyfort, and her fascination with Eastern spirituality, as imbibed from Russian mentors during her fine arts training in Paris and later fostered in such New York venues as the Roerich Museum during the 20s and 30s. He also possessed a keen gift for modern and ancient languages, including the Sanskrit and Tibetan so essential to his research. He primarily studied in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, where his most influential teachers were Jean Filliozat and Louis Renou for Indology, and Marcelle Lalou and Rolf Stein for Tibetology. Ruegg developed a special talent for synthesizing new ideas based on those of his mentors and his own encyclopedic knowledge of this highly technical, often arcane field. These he shared in a lucid, accessible style, making him a uniquely engaging teacher, known for his incisive seminar exchanges with students as well as colleagues. Throughout his long, cosmopolitan academic career in Europe, England, India and the United States, he and his mother continued to inspire each other: she by her luminous paintings that visually interpreted what Ruegg verbally translated and analyzed—often in pioneering fashion–from primary Buddhist philosophical writings. His twelve books and over eighty articles and other writings explore many aspects of Tibetan and Indian religions, history, philosophy and linguistics, yet he kept returning to and expanding upon two favorite philosophical topics: Buddha nature (Tathagatagarbha) or conceptions of mind and enlightenment, and the Buddhist philosophy of the middle (Madhyamaka), which from its beginnings in around 100 CE, emerged as the dominant type of Buddhist thought in Tibet, spreading into East Asia.

Ruegg was born in Binghamton, NY on Aug. 1, 1931 to his artist mother and textile magnate Erhart Ruegg. After his high school and early college years spent in Binghamton then Santa Fe (where he and his mother befriended Georgia O’Keefe and her circle) then London and Zurich, he and his mother traveled to and lived in India for years, where he did research with Indian, Tibetan, and Mongolian scholars, while also studying in Paris, at the Sorbonne and Ecole des Hautes Etudes, receiving his doctorate (Doctorat d’Etat) from the University of Paris in 1968. His academic career had already begun at the Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient in Paris, then as Professor of Indian philosophy at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands in 1966. Not long after, he was appointed Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, leaving a decade later for Hamburg, Germany to assume the chair of Tibetan Studies which he held until his retirement in 1993. Interspersed with these posts were visiting professorships at Toronto, SUNY Stony Brook, the College de France, Vienna, and Harvard, as well as London. From then on until his death, he resided at Cadogan Square, London with his immense library, where he received many notable scholars from around the world and continued to publish, maintaining his research affiliation with the School of Oriental and African Studies.

He was predeceased by his parents, half-brother Erhart Ruegg, Jr., and a niece, Valerie Margolis, and survived by his sister, Diane S. R. Kensler, of North Hampton, N.H. and nieces Nadia and Aimee Margolis, of Gorham, Maine and North Hampton, respectively.

Due to Covid, memorial events will be announced at a later date.