Ameshab Ngakwang Kunga Sonam (A myes zhabs ngag dbang kun dga' bsod nams, 1597-1659) was the long-serving twenty-seventh throneholder of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Deeply trained in his tradition, Ameshab was ordained as a monk around 1618 and undertook extensive scholastic study. After the death of his father and brother, however, in 1620 Ameshab returned his vows and was enthroned as Sakya Trizin. In the decades that followed, Ameshab widely promoted the transmission of the Sakya tradition and mediated peace amid rising military conflict in Central Tibet. A prodigious historian, Ameshab wrote impactful histories of the Sakya school; the Lamdré, or "Path and Result," tradition; and the Hevajra Tantra , which were read for centuries in Tibet and across the Inner Asian Buddhist world. Khenpo Kunga Sherab was born in Lhoka, near Lhasa, Tibet, and is a monastic scholar and teacher. He is the author of several studies in Tibetan on the Abhidharma and on Middle Way philosophy. He holds several advanced monastic degrees, including the Madhyamaka diploma, and shastri, acharya, and khenpo degrees from Dzongsar Institute for Advanced Studies in Buddhist Philosophy and Research, India.

Following his monastic education, in addition to taking on teaching roles at Dzongsar, from 2000-08 Khenpo Kunga served as abbot of Zurmang Monastery in Sikkim, India while teaching continuously at Dharma centers around Asia. In 2014, he received a MA and then, in 2023, a PhD in Buddhist studies from the University of Toronto. His major English-language academic work to date has examined the cultural history of practices used to identify incarnate lamas between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. He has long been involved in teaching Buddhist meditation and philosophy in settings as diverse as traditional Tibetan monastic colleges, interfaith institutes, Dharma centers across North America and Asia, as well as university classrooms. Since 2017, he has served as Buddhist chaplain at Warkworth Correctional Institute, in addition to serving other prisons in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Since 2010, Khenpo Kunga has worked as a team member on various international research projects examining Tibetan Buddhist history with colleagues in Canada, the United States, and Asia. Matthew W. King is Professor of Transnational Buddhism at the University of California, Riverside.

He specializes in Inner Asian Buddhism with a special focus on the Tibet-Mongol interface during the Yuan and Qing periods. He has published widely on the history of Buddhist scholasticism, medicine, and institution building, and on political theory in Inner Asia. He has also explored the history of Inner Asian Buddhist interactions with circulating intellectual traditions during this period, including European natural philosophy and humanism, biomedicine, nationalism, state socialism, and Buddhist Studies. His first book, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019), won several awards, including the American Academy of Religion's 2020 award for Best Book in Textual Study. His most recent book is In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Columbia University Press, 2022).