Acting

Losang Samten

Losang Samten (Tibetan: བློ་བཟང་བསམ་གཏན།, Wylie: blo-bzang bsam-gtan) is a Tibetan-American scholar, sand mandala artist, former Buddhist monk, and Spiritual Director of the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia. He is one of only an estimated 30 people worldwide who are qualified to teach the traditional art of Tibetan sandpainting.He has written two books and helped to create the first Tibetan sand mandala ever shown publicly in the West in 1988. In 2002, he was made a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2004, he was granted a Pew Fellowship in Folk and Traditional Arts. Born into a Buddhist family in Chung Ribuce (Ü-Tsang, Tibet) in 1953,Samten spent two months crossing the Himalayas with his family to Nepal in 1959.After arriving in Dharamsala, India in 1964 or 1965,Samten entered Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, taking the vows of a novice monk there in 1967. He probably took full ordination at Namgyal in 1969. While enrolled at Namgyal, Samten also studied the arts of ritual dance and sand mandala construction at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. (Both institutions are closely associated with the 14th Dalai Lama.) In 1985 he earned a Master's Degree in Buddhist Philosophy, Sutra, and Tantra from Namgyal Monastery.