After his high school graduation, he received the Presidential Scholars Medallion from U.S. President Richard Nixon,[6] then attended Princeton University in 1972.

While in India, Roach learned about a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in New Jersey led by a Lhasa born lama, Sermey Khensur Lobsang Tharchin.

[8] In 1983 he was ordained as a Gelugpa Buddhist monk at Sera Monastery in South India, where he would periodically travel and study.

[15] In 1981, Khen Rinpoche, the teacher of Roach, challenged him to apply Buddhist values to the "dirtiest business and make it clean".

By the time Roach left the firm in 1999 as vice president, the company's annual turnover was $100 million per year.

[20] He founded this project in order to create a complete and accessible version of Kangyur and Tengyur in electronic form along with related philosophical commentaries and dictionaries.

ACIP contains more than 8500 texts - almost half a million pages, which he provided for free, and has digitized 15286 books over the course of 31 years.

[23] The Asian Classics Institute (ACI) pursued multiple projects to foster the learning and preservation of Tibetan Buddhism and meditation.

In his 2015 book "A Death on Diamond Mountain",[25] journalist Scott Carney wrote:As for the chief diamond procurer at Andin International, Michael Roach selected Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat as his primary source for diamonds.In 1996, Christie McNally became Roach's student and they began a "spiritual partnership", a Buddhist practice that encourages both partners to reach extraordinary goals.

When news of the marriage emerged in 2003, Roach explained to the New York Times that they had wished to honor their Christian heritage and that he wanted McNally to be entitled to his possessions if something happened to him.

[28] Roach was part of a handful of Western Tibetan Buddhist teachers facing such allegations in the 2000s including Surya Das and Ken McLeod.

[34] Thorson and McNally left the Diamond Mountain property on Monday, February 20, at 5 am and were picked up on a public road according to an email from their assistant to the board of the university.

In an interview with NBC News, Robert Thurman, Columbia University Professor of Buddhism, says Roach's organizations have "a lot of good learning in it".

[41] Roach has been uninvited to teach at FPMT centers across the globe in addition to being publicly rebuked by the office of the Dalai Lama.