Thubten Jigme Norbu
lama, writer, civil rights worker, university and college faculty member
The 6th Taktser Rinpoche Thubten Jigme Norbu (Tibetan: ཐུབ་བསྟན་འཇིགས་མེད་ནོར་བུ་, Wylie: Thub-stan 'Jigs-med Nor-bu) (August 16, 1922 – September 5, 2008), was a Tibetan lama, writer, civil rights activist and professor of Tibetan studies and was the eldest brother of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. He was one of the first high-profile Tibetans to go into exile and was the first to settle in the United States.
Early life
Thubten Jigme Norbu was born in 1922 in the small, mountain village of Taktser in the Amdo County of Eastern Tibet.
Independence walks
In 1995, Norbu cofounded the International Tibet Independence Movement (ITIM). He led three walks for Tibet's independence, starting in 1995 with a week-long walk 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Bloomington, Indiana to Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1996 he led a 300-mile (480-kilometer), 45-day walk from the PRC embassy in Washington, DC to the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. The following year, joined by Dadon with her three-year-old son, he led a 600-mile (970-kilometer) walk from Toronto to New York City, beginning on March 10 (Tibetan Uprising Day) and ending June 14 (Flag Day).
Life in the US
Norbu lived at the Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center with his wife Kunyang. They have three sons, Lhundrup, Kunga and Jigme Norbu, all born in New York. Norbu moved to Bloomington in 1965 to teach college students as a professor of Tibetan Studies at Indiana University Bloomington where he taught until retirement from IUB in 1987.
The public source identifies “Thubten Jigme Norbu” as lama, writer, civil rights worker, university and college faculty member. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Thubten, Jigme and Norbu.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1385565. VIAF identifies the subject as 108831318. The Library of Congress control number is n50011885. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 2008, 1995 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thubten Jigme Norbu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.