Turrell V. Wylie

Who was Turrell V. Wylie?

Turrell Verl Wylie was an American Tibetologist, born in Durango, Colorado. He was for many years professor of Tibetan at the University of Washington and its first chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. Wylie founded the Tibetan Studies Program at the University of Washington, the first such program in the United States.

In 1960, following the People's Liberation Army takeover of Tibet, Wylie invited Sakya Dagchen Rinpoche, one of the main hierarchs of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, along with his family and his tutor Dezhung Rinpoche, to Seattle where they settled.

Amongst students of Tibetan, Wylie is best known for the system of Tibetan transliteration described in his article A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription. This has subsequently become the almost universally adopted scheme for accurately representing the orthography of Tibetan in the Latin script, and is commonly known as Wylie transliteration.

Wylie died of cancer on August 25, 1984. Upon his death, the Dalai Lama remarked, "Dr. Wylie's strong and genuine feelings for the Tibetan people and their just cause will long remain deeply appreciated. In the death of Dr. Wylie we have lost a true friend and a distinguished scholar of Tibetan studies."