Thurman was born in New York City, the son of Elizabeth Dean Farrar (1907-1973), a stage actress, and Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr. (1909-1962), an Associated Press editor and U.N. translator. Ancestry of Uma Thurman He attended Philips Exeter Academy from 1954 to 1958, followed by Harvard University, obtaining an A.B. in 1962.

He married Christophe de Menil, an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune, in 1959; they had one daughter, Taya; their grandson was the late artist Dash Snow. In 1961 Thurman lost his left eye in an accident while he was using a jack to lift an automobile, and the eye was replaced with an ocular prosthetic.

Following the accident he decided to re-focus his life, divorced his wife and traveled from 1961 to 1966 in Turkey, Iran and India. He converted to Buddhism and became an ordained Buddhist bhikshu in 1964, the first American Buddhist monk of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He studied with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, who became a close friend.

In 1967, back in the United States, Thurman resigned his monks vows of celibacy and married his second wife, German-Swedish model, Nena von Schlebrügge, who was previously briefly married to Timothy Leary. Thurman and Schlebrügge have four children, the oldest being actress Uma Thurman.

Thurman obtained an A.M. in 1969 and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit Indian Studies in 1972 from Harvard. He was professor of religion at Amherst College from 1973 to 1988 when he accepted a position at Columbia University as professor of religion and Sanskrit.

In 1987 Thurman created Tibet House, U.S. with Richard Gere and Philip Glass at the request of H.H.XIV Dalai Lama. Tibet House is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help preserve Tibetan Culture in exile. In 2001, a 320 acre retreat center (formerly the Pathwork Center) on Panther Mountain in Phoenicia, NY was donated to Tibet House. Thurman and Schlebrugge renamed the center Menla Mountain Retreat and Conference Center. Menla (the Tibetan name for the Medicine Buddha) is currently being developed into a state-of-the-art healing arts center grounded in the Tibetan Medical tradition in conjunction with other holistic paradigms.

Dr. Thurman is highly regarded for his lucid, dynamic translations and explanations of Buddhist religious and philosophical material, particularly that pertaining to the Gelukpa (dge-lugs-pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism and its founder, Je Tsongkhapa.

Time chose Robert Thurman as one of the 25 most influential Americans of 1997.

In a 1996 interview for the Utne Reader, Robert Thurman answers general critics about idealizing Tibet:

The quality of Thurman's translation work has also been called into question. Toru Tomabechi, a graduate student at the University of Lausanne, writes that Thurman's translation of the Pañcakrama contains "disastrous" mistakes that seemingly result from "misunderstandings of Tibetan syntax" and "easily avoided" errors that betray "little trace of [the] minimal effort . . which we would naturally expect in any serious work of scholarship."