Rob Nairn

Robert G. Nairn (died 30 September 2023) was a South African Buddhist teacher, author and populariser. He was born and grew up in Rhodesia. Nairn was a follower of Tibetan Buddhism, in the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Academic education and legal career

Graduating from the University of Rhodesia with an LL.B (Hons) (London), Nairn was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for postgraduate studies in UK and went on to study criminology, psychology and law at King's College London and to receive a postgraduate diploma in criminology from Edinburgh University. He then returned to Rhodesia to become an advocate of its High Court. which exposed the illegality in international law of the South African law that permitted prison officials to deny prisoners reading materials. This article was picked up by the US press, causing embarrassment to the apartheid government. As a result, Nairn was banned from South African prisons, cutting him off from his main research topic.

Buddhist path

Nairn's first contact with Buddhism was with a Theravadin monk in the 1960s, and he trained in this tradition for around ten years. From 1989 to 1993 he took part in part of a four-year isolation retreat at the Kagyu Samyé Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre in Scotland.

Nairn was the African representative for the late Akong Rinpoche and was responsible for eleven Buddhist centres in South Africa and three other African countries. the United States, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.