Tsong Khapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419) is widely regarded as the most important figure in Tibetan Buddhist history, having created the synthetic intellectual paradigm of the Geluk monastic order, which under successive Dalai Lamas came to dominate Tibet and eventually to influence Qing China's spiritual and cultural identity. Apart from composing authoritative philosophical masterpieces, Tsong Khapa increasingly has become recognized for his yogic spiritual accomplishments related to the Esoteric Community Tantra tradition. Robert Thurman is an American Buddhist author and academic who has written, edited, and translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in June 2019. He held the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. As President of the American Institute for Buddhist Studies, he convened the First Inner Science Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Amherst College in 1984.

He is also a founding trustee of Tibet House New York. John Campbell, PhD, is an independent scholar, accomplished yogin, and translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan texts. His main areas of research are practice systems of yoga and tantra in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. He is currently writing a book on the commentarial literature of Buddhist and Hindu tantric Buddhist practice systems in late first-millennium India. A former assistant professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, among other academic institutions, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the theory and practice of yoga (both contemporary and premodern), Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet, and surveys of culture and religion in South, East, and Himalayan Asia. He is currently the director of Sanskrit projects for the Asian Classics Input Project, developing the digitization of classical Sanskrit texts on Buddhist and Hindu spiritual sciences. He also advises the research of advanced graduate students in UVA's renowned Buddhist Studies doctoral program.