Ravi M. Gupta

Early life and education

In Boise, Idaho, he was raised and home-schooled along with his younger brother with a curriculum based mostly on the Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana), from which he learned English, comprehension skills, critical thinking, debate, and communication. He also took maths and science as separate subjects, as well as Sanskrit, which he loved.

At the age of thirteen he enrolled at the Boise State University, and in 1999 when he was seventeen he received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics as well as the university's highest honor, the Silver Medallion. He recalls,

On my first day, the chair of the English department sent me to the honors writing course because all the introductory classes were full. At first, I was so intimidated by the curriculum. Rather than contemporary novels and story books, it was full of classical literature like Shakespeare, the Iliad and the Odyssey. But everything changed when I realized how similar they were to our own epics in many ways. Homer's Odyssey spoke about valiant warriors and their code of ethics, just like the Mahabharata. And the conflicts Shakespeare's Hamlet faced were very similar to those of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.

He enrolled at the University of Oxford at the age of seventeen, the youngest student ever at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and in 2000 he received a Master of Studies (MSt) in the Study of Religion.

In 2004, he received a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Hinduism from the University of Oxford. At the age of twenty-two, he received his doctorate at the University of Oxford. His thesis focused on the early development of Vedanta philosophy in the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition, based on original manuscript sources.