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From Durango to the Dalai Lama: the remarkable life of Turrell Verl ‘Terry’ Wylie

Turrell Wylie’s tombstone in Durango, with Tibetan script. (Courtesy of Douglas Ober)

The entrance to Greenmount Cemetery, just west of Durango’s Overend Park, offers no indication that one of America’s most influential scholars rests here. But walk a little deeper through the rows of weathered stones, and you'll find a brown marble marker bearing not just an English name, but a string of elegant loops and dots – a second name, etched in Tibetan script.

Prof. Turrell Wylie. (Photo courtesy of the University of Washington Department of Asian Languages and Literature)

The tombstone reads:

Turrell Verl Wylie (1927–1984)

Loved Husband, Scholar and Friend

Beneath it, the Tibetan characters spell Tashi Samphel, a name bestowed on Wylie by none other than His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

How did a ranch boy from Durango become one of the world’s leading experts on Tibet – and the father of American Tibetology?

Born into a family with deep roots in La Plata County, Wylie grew up amid the rough contours of Depression-era Durango. His family had homesteaded along Salt Creek near Oxford in the early 20th century. Tragedy visited early and often: he lost his father to stomach cancer when he was a teen, and one of his brothers to Bright’s disease. His mother, Myrtle, supported the family by cleaning rooms at the Strater Hotel before remarrying a blacksmith and widower – Terry’s uncle, in fact – who worked for the Colorado Highway Department. The blended family moved to 768 East 7th Street in Durango during World War II.

Even as a boy, Terry stood out: tall and lean, witty, athletic and artistic. The Fort Lewis Collegian yearbook named him senior class president in 1945, noting he was “well-liked by all the students,” had a “vivid sense of humor,” and “the ambition of wishing to be the first person to the moon.” He worked on construction crews for the Million Dollar Highway before joining the Army, then the Merchant Marine, serving in Cuba and penning a never-finished novel titled Rum and Raw Sugar.

After the war, Wylie used the GI Bill to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, becoming the first in his family to pursue higher education. Initially an English major, he was required to study a foreign language. He chose classical Chinese – drawn to the artistry of its script, which reminded him of painting. That decision changed everything.

Turrell Wylie’s 1963 abstract painting of the Buddha in the mast of a ship. 16 x 34 inches. (Courtesy of Sharrie (Wylie) Shade)

He soon shifted from English literature to Chinese, enrolling in UW’s PhD program in Chinese language and literature. But it was Tibet – its ancient language, culture and religion – that ultimately captured his imagination and would become his life’s work. At a time when Tibet was becoming geopolitically significant, Wylie secured a Ford Foundation fellowship to study for two years under famed Italian orientalist Giuseppe Tucci in Rome and then with Tibetan monks in India.

He returned to the University of Washington just as Tibetan history took a pivotal turn: in 1959, Mao Zedong’s armies occupied Tibet, and the Dalai Lama fled to India with nearly 100,000 refugees.

Wylie’s deep knowledge of Tibetan history and politics suddenly became critical. Backed by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he helped build what many would consider, for decades, the finest Tibetan Studies program in the United States, and took a role as the first Chair of UW’s Department of Asian Languages and Literature, still one of the top ranked programs in the country.

The support was part of a broader American Cold War interest in the region. Some whisper that his activities were linked to wider CIA efforts at the time, but Wylie never confirmed it. What is certain is that he played a central role in preserving Tibetan culture abroad, at a time when that culture was under existential threat – by training new generations of scholars, hosting visiting monks and teachers, and resettling numerous Tibetan refugees in Washington.

His home in Seattle became an unlikely sanctuary and laboratory – a place where Tibetan monks, lamas and scholars debated the past, present and future of Tibet with Christian missionaries, lawyers, British diplomats, Sinologists, anthropologists and wide-eyed undergraduates, many of them 1960s and 70s-era seekers drawn to Buddhism. Today, some of the most eminent western scholars of Tibet – anthropologist Melvyn Goldstein, art historian David Jackson, and many others – trace their academic lineage to Wylie’s Tibetan Studies program.

Cover image of the 1990 Festschrift commemorating the first 25 years of Tibetan Studies at the University of Washington and honoring its founder, Turrell Wylie. Includes essays on Tibetan geography, history, language, philosophy, and monasticism.

He was part of the first generation of Americans to combine deep linguistic training in Tibetan with social-scientific analysis. His academic output was remarkably diverse – covering everything from Tibetan geography, philology, and religious biography to an early study of ro-lang, or so-called Tibetan zombies.

But his most lasting contribution is something every student of Tibetan language encounters from day one: the Wylie transliteration system. Developed in 1959, it remains the global standard for rendering Tibetan script into Roman letters without diacritics – used in everything from scholarly publications to digital archives. Unlike earlier systems that relied on guesswork or idiosyncratic spelling, Wylie’s approach is exact and reproducible: each character in the Tibetan syllabary corresponds to a consistent Roman-letter form. Want to type a Tibetan mantra or catalog a Buddhist text? You’ll use the Wylie system – and you’ll see his name, again and again, whether you know his story or not.

But Wylie wasn’t only a scholar. He was a gifted artist with a taste for the eccentric. Friends and colleagues recall his sharp wit and flair for storytelling. At departmental parties, he would show off his military tattoos and roast colleagues with made-up biographies and cartoon sketches. He painted traditional Tibetan thangkas, or scroll paintings, but added his own modernist twist. One painting depicted the Buddha with a caliber pistol; another revealed a Buddha hidden in the folds of a ship's sail – both echoing the avant-garde experiments of renowned contemporary Tibetan artists like Gade.

In the late 1970s, inspired by a major Tutankhamun exhibition, Wylie became fascinated with Egyptology. He and his wife, Sharrie, took hieroglyphics lessons from Egyptologist Emily Teeter, and Wylie carved a statue of King Tut from cherrywood. He also dabbled in aviation, fencing (he was the Seattle City champion), and, ever the spiritual maverick, called himself “a Buddhist by philosophy.”

Though Wylie never lived again in Durango, the region never left him. When he died prematurely in Seattle in 1984 at the age of 57, his final wish was to be buried in his hometown. A service was held by Father Richard Sherburne, a Jesuit priest and friend, and his ashes were laid to rest beside his beloved brother Clifford at Greenmount. There, beneath the stone that bears the Tibetan name given to him by the Dalai Lama, rests a boy from rural Colorado who became a guardian of Himalayan knowledge, a scholar, an artist, a polyglot, a pilot, a fencing champion, and as he liked to call himself with a wink, the “Blue Shaman from Durango.” His tombstone is a quiet reminder that Durango’s influence once reached the peaks of the Himalayas and the corridors of Cold War diplomacy.