Lopön Sonam Jamtsho

Sonam is a Bhutanese Research Associate at the University of Hamburg and has a wealth of knowledge on Buddhist philosophy and epistemology. As one of our Expert Traditional Scholars, he provides guidance on our source texts, difficult translation points, and Buddhist philosophy. Sonam is also one of our in-house translators.

After completing higher secondary school in Bhutan, Sonam began to study the Tibetan language, both classical and colloquial, along with the fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhism, in Nepal. In 2009, he enrolled at Dzongsar Shedra, where he spent the next nine years completing the traditional shedra curriculum.

Between 2018 and 2024, Sonam studied at the University of Hamburg, in the Indology and Tibetology department, and completed his MA thesis in early 2020 on the fifteenth-century Sakya scholar, Gorampa. Sonam recently also completed his doctoral dissertation in Tibetan Buddhist epistemology, which includes a translation of the famous tshad ma rigs gter.

Throughout the past seven years, Sonam has served as oral interpreter, from English to Tibetan and from Tibetan to English, for a variety of lamas, khenpos, scholars, consultants, and teaching experts. He also teaches some of the shedra core curricula in various Dharma centers in Germany and for the Milinda program.

Sonam currently lives in Hamburg, and in his spare time he enjoys reading and going on pilgrimages.