THE SNOW LION NEWSLETTER

Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archives

Nick Ribush was one of the first Westerners to be ordained a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. A founder of Wisdom Publications, Ribush is today the director of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, a collection of thousands of teachings by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who pioneered the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Journalist Lawrence Pintak spoke with Ribush about his work and an ambitious new initiative launched by the Archive to dramatically expand access to the teachings of these important lamas.   Let's start with the basics, what is the Archive?

Since Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche started teaching Westerners in the early 1970s, we've been recording their teachings, initially by hand and then in the mid-70s we got electricity at Kopan Monastery [in Nepal] and started taping. So we have more than 30 years of teachings, more than 10,000 hours of audio, and somewhere around 80,000-100,000 pages of transcripts that have not been edited. A lot of effort has gone into collecting and transcribing these teachings, but the bottleneck has been the lack of funds to support qualified editors to prepare them for publication.

You have launched a new initiative to dramatically expand the work of the Archive. Can you tell us about it?
The goal is to raise $600,000 in order to hire five editors for five years to really make a huge dent in our collection of teachings, particularly Lama Zopa's lam-rim teachings. What we are trying to do is get 600 people to join as life members of the Archive in return for a donation of $1,000 each. The details and benefits of membership are posted on our website, www.lamayeshe.com.

Why is it so important to make these teachings available?

More than 50 percent of our tapes are Lama Zopa's lam-rim teachings, which are fundamental to our tradition, to our organization (the FPMT) and to all schools of Tibetan Buddhism. From the very beginning, the lamas' main form of teaching was the one-month Kopan Monastery lam-rim meditation course, which continues to this day.
So these teachings play an important role in the ongoing study of the lam-rim?

I see coming out of Lama Zopa's teachings the ultimate modern lam-rim commentary. There are hundreds of lam-rim commentaries in all the Tibetan traditions, some of which have been translated into English. But very few have actually been taught and published in English.

What kind of response have you had so far to the initiative?

Very good. We've had about 50 people come forward and join as life members already. But I'm not waiting for the $600,000 to start the work. There are now four people employed part-time working on Rinpoche's lam-rim teachings, starting with the very first Kopan course recorded, going through each course and editing each transcript, most of which run 400 to 500 pages, making them consistent and editing them into one coherent document, which we are then putting onto the Lama Yeshe Web site in a special members' area.

But at the same time, the editors are electronically chopping up the transcripts and putting the relevant teachings into topic baskets, such as "the perfect human rebirth," "impermanence and death," "refuge," "karma" and so on, the main headings of the lam-rim. Then when we've been through all the transcripts of teachings in that way, we're going to have to tackle each topic basket and make one coherent commentary on that particular subject that includes everything Rinpoche has said about it. To do this, we'll be following the headings, sub-headings and sub-sub-headings of the main lam-rim text that the Gelug teachers tend to follow these days, Pabongka Rinpoche's Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. So when we publish these commentaries, they will follow the outline of that text.
Of course, as well as lam-rim, there are many other teachings, tantric commentaries and other texts given by the lamas, and we'll also have people working on those.

Despite the lack of funds, the Archive has always given away Dharma books. How did that come about?

Buddhists have created merit for centuries if not millennia by sponsoring the publication of books that were given away free. And often this was done in the memory of deceased relatives and loved ones. So I thought this would also be good practice to try to introduce into the West. So we went out with this first free book, by Lama Yeshe, sent it to a lot of people and said we have many more teachings we would also like to distribute free if you would like to contribute.

We had published four free booklets by the Dalai Lama at Wisdom and they were well received, but the response to the Lama Yeshe book was just overwhelming; the spontaneous, unsolicited positive reaction of people who'd received it just blew me away. And people sent money, so that enabled us to publish another couple of free books, Advice for Monks and Nuns and Virtue and Reality.

So over the years we've published about 15 free books including one by the Dalai Lama, Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment, and some of these have been reprinted many times. In all, we've printed and distributed more than 200,000 free books so far.

And you're on the Web.

Yes, we get some 3,000 visitors a week. Most of the teachings there are available to everybody, but we have started a members' area where more detailed specialized teachings will be available to members only.
Which is part of the new fundraising initiative.

Yes. If it works, it will make an enormous difference to the amount of material we can make available for the benefit of all sentient beings. At the moment we've barely scratched the surface. Since the teachings can't be made available until they've been edited, getting the money will allow us to hire the editors who are there waiting in the wings.

For more information, see www.lamayeshe.com.