E-letter No. 270: December 2025

Dear Friends,

We hope you are safe and well. As we near the end of 2025, we are also wrapping up our year-end campaign. We want to thank everyone for your generous support and for consistently showing up when it’s needed. We are deeply grateful to you.

In this issue, we’re rejoicing in our shared mandala of community goals. We feature a multimedia presentation of my personal reflections on fifty years of FPMT, a video of Lama Yeshe answering student questions about fear and anger, a podcast teaching with Lama Zopa Rinpoche remembering karma in everyday life, several newly published teachings on our website, new advice from Rinpoche, and a prayer for peace by Thangtong Gyalpo as our monthly teaching.

Thangtong Gyalpo was a revered 15th-century master and an amazing yogi, known for building iron bridges, practicing medicine, inventing Tibetan Opera, and much more. I got a statue of him (see the monthly teaching below) on one of my 1990s trips to Tibet from the Drubthub Nunnery, which he may have founded, but in any case is dedicated to him. The Drubthub Nunnery (or Drubthop Lhakhang) is a significant Tibetan Buddhist nunnery located on the slopes of Chagpori hill, near the famous Potala Palace, and is a small but culturally rich site with caves and statues, offering a glimpse into Tibetan monastic life. The famous Tibetan Medical College once stood at the top of Chagpori but was destroyed by the Chinese in 1959 and replaced with a radio tower. One of our teachers, Gomchen Gampala, seen here in our opening image, was an emanation of Thangtong Gyalpo.

Growing the Family Feeling

A key focus of our 2025 strategic plan is strengthening community across the FPMT family. LYWA plays a vital role in preserving the Lamas' teachings and making them available worldwide. This past year, your generous support helped launch the Family Feeling Project, which provides free shipping of LYWA books to the FPMT global network. We also expanded accessible study resources, including updates and improvements to our Lamrim Year Companion site, which supports daily lamrim meditation and reflection alongside the beloved Lamrim Year. In addition, we have a forthcoming study resource for the popular title Freedom Through Understanding, launching in 2026.

Along with these projects and offerings, LYWA encourages translations of our titles by supporting FPMT centers and translation projects. We have also developed a new quarterly newsletter, Tools for the Path, to support FPMT leadership with helpful resources and timely information. As we close the year, your generosity helps sustain and grow these vital projects ensuring the Lamas’ teachings continue to benefit students now and for generations to come. If you haven't yet contributed to our year-end campaign, please consider giving today. Thank you so much!

LYWA Multimedia: Fifty years of FPMT and Wisdom Publications

I was asked to write something for FPMT’s remembrance of Lama Yeshe’s founding of the organization fifty years ago this month. Coincidentally, Lama and I founded Wisdom Publications back then, too (December 1975). Just getting in under the wire! Here's the multimedia presentation titled Fifty Years of FPMT: A Personal History where I recount the whirlwind early years of FPMT in 1975 from Lama giving initiations and teachings at IMI, to the Lamas' second world tour where seeds of many Western centers were planted.

Find LYWA's complete multimedia collection on our website. We are pleased to offer a growing collection of multimedia titles on a range of topics, presenting the teachings in all their multimedia aspects: transcripts enhanced with images, audio, and video from the teachings, as well as informal video, related advice, and other materials in the Archive.

From the Video Archive: Fear, Anger, and Action

This month we are featuring Lama Yeshe’s question and answer session following Lama’s discourse on Anxiety in the Nuclear Age. Lama answers questions about fear, whether killing is ever justified, and the most effective way to handle anger. These teachings were hosted by Jan Willis at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983. 

Visit and subscribe to the LYWA YouTube channel to explore our complete video collection of teachings by Lama Yeshe and many from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, available from our archive. For many more videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's teachings, visit the FPMT YouTube channel.

On the LYWA Podcast: Karma in Everyday Life

It is extremely important to reflect, to meditate, to think deeply about karma so that it does not become just a word.
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche
 
This month on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive podcast, Lama Zopa Rinpoche leads a recitation of the Heart Sutra, The Foundation of All Good Qualities by Lama Tsongkhapa, and Shakyamuni Buddha's mantra, then describes the importance of karma in everyday life. These teachings were given during a lamrim course led by Rinpoche at Maitreya Instituut in the Netherlands in August 1990. You can also read along with the transcript on our website.

The LYWA podcast contains hundreds of hours of audio, each with links to the accompanying lightly edited transcripts. See the LYWA podcast page to search or browse the entire collection by topic or date, and for easy instructions on how to subscribe.

What's New On the LYWA Website

This month we've posted a new teaching on our website, Making this Precious Human Life Meaningful. Lama Zopa Rinpoche advised that practicing contentment, patience and the good heart can bring happiness for oneself and others in this teaching given in Madrid, Spain, on October 19, 2018. Visit FPMT’s Rinpoche Available Now for more teachings from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s 2018 Europe tour, with videos, audio recordings and transcripts from centers in Spain, Germany and Switzerland.

We've also added two new teachings from Lama Yeshe, excerpted from Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe. In our first excerpt, Heaven Is Now!, Lama Yeshe talks about the conflicts that arise when we are burdened with limiting concepts. In the second teaching, Internal Vehicles: Mental Attitudes, Lama Yeshe explains the meaning of yana. These and other excerpts are available on the Big Love Teaching Excerpts webpage, organized by chapter, with new content added monthly.

Don't miss the new entries we’ve added this month to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book. With more than 100 new pieces of advice published each year, the collection has now grown to over 2,600 entries on our website.

• Using Feng Shui to Help Others: Rinpoche gave this advice to a student who practiced feng shui and was benefiting many people throughout the world.
• Generate the Path to Enlightenment in Your Heart: In this letter, Rinpoche advised a student to study and practice lamrim, starting with guru devotion, the root of the path. Rinpoche also recommended preliminary practices and explained that renunciation and bodhicitta are essential foundations for attaining enlightenment.
• The Best Thing Is to Actualize the Path: A student wrote that childhood abuse was affecting their relationship with the guru. In response, Rinpoche explained karma and the sufferings of the lower realms, and emphasized that Dharma practice can free us from suffering forever.

You can always find a list of all the newly posted advices from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on our website.

Thank you for being part of our community and for all your support this year. May the coming year bring peace, joy, and clarity to your heart and mind as we continue this shared path of wisdom and service.

Big love,

Nick Ribush
Director and the LYWA team

THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: PRAYER FOR PEACE

Advice given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche: 

When there was unceasing war in Kham (Me Nyak), Tibet, and nobody was able to create harmony, the Great Lord Yogi (Thangtong Gyalpo) came to Kham, generated bodhicitta, and just by merely saying these true words and sprinkling flowers, all the vicious minds (jealousy and anger) were completely pacified and the war that had been continuous, ceased. There were prosperous harvests and so forth. The country became auspicious and peaceful. This is blessed vajra speech.

This is one of the prayers of the Great Tantric Yogi Thangtong Gyalpo. The other prayers that he composed were to stop famine and epidemics.

His Holiness Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, who is a guru of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (His Holiness received the Sakya Lam Dre teachings and initiations, including Dorje Phurba from him) and also one of the main teachers of His Holiness Sakya Trizin, was invited to one part of Nepal by the Nepalese government. I checked what could be most beneficial for them and what prayer was most needed to benefit them. It came out that the best practice for them to do was these three prayers composed by Thangtong Gyalpo. So then I decided to give the oral transmission of these three prayers. That is how I found out about these prayers and I received the oral transmission from His Holiness Chogye Trichen Rinpoche.

Through whatever merits have come from making this translation available, may wherever this text is (whichever country) and also by reading this prayer, cause all the people's hearts be filled with loving kindness, bodhicitta, and the thought to only benefit and not harm. May the sun of peace and happiness arise and may any wars that are happening stop immediately. May there be harmony, peace, and may there never be war or violence again.

OM MANI PADME HUM

Great Loving Victorious One (Maitreya Buddha), Transcendental Sublime Compassionate Eye Looking One,
Wrathful Victorious Hayagriva, Fully Accomplished Totally Pure (Jetsun) Tara and so forth,
Merely hearing your holy names eliminates all dangers,
Objects of refuge in the nature of compassion, please pay attention!

When the sentient beings of the time of quarrelling and five degenerations
By the explosion of the great ocean of evil karma and jealousy
Are tormented by the intensive suffering of fighting and quarrelling
Please dry this up by the power of transcendental wisdom and compassion.

By letting great rainfalls of the nectar of loving kindness fall
On the migratory beings who are enflaming the conflagration of hatred-fire
Please grant blessings with the recognition of each other like father-mother
Then increase happiness and auspiciousness.

May the multitudes of the vicious evil spirits
Who enter the mental continuum and
Change it instantly to the mind of asura
From now on never run in this area (country/world).

I am requesting for even all the sentient beings who have died in the war
To abandon from that time onward all the evil karma, cause and effect,
Then having entered and been born in the Blissful Field (Amitabha's Pure Land)
To lead all others to that Pure Land.

Please bless all those who are born and die (samsaric beings)
To have a long life, no sicknesses, to pacify all quarrelling and fighting,
Enjoy the ten virtues, have rainfall at the right times, always have good harvests
And for all the habitat and inhabitants to be auspicious and increase.

By the ultimate reality which is pure by nature,
By phenomena having ultimate reality, cause and result are unbetrayable,
And by the compassion of the Guru, Mind-seal Deity and Rare Sublime Ones,
May these pure extensive prayers be completed.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche translated Prayer for Peace by the great yogi Thangtong Gyalpo at the time of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Rinpoche also recommended Thangtong Gyalpo’s prayer Liberating Sakya from Disease for protection and healing during the COVID-19 pandemic.