Special Appeals
LAMA YESHE WISDOM ARCHIVE 2025 YEAR-END APPEAL
Dear Friends and Supporters of LYWA,
We are pleased to share our LYWA Strategic Plan 2025: The Enduring Wisdom of Our Lamas and invite you to explore our vision for the future. Over the past six months, the LYWA team, together with a strategic planning consultant, engaged in a process to get clean-clear on our shared vision—who we are, what we do best, and where we are headed. We outlined future projects for transcribing, cataloging, publishing and sharing the Archive, as well as strengthening our commitment to partnering with and supporting the entire FPMT family.
Together we reaffirmed our commitment to continue this work for many years to come—the vital task of preserving and sharing the invaluable wisdom of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. We recognize that for practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, especially students of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, LYWA is an essential resource for authentic Mahayana teachings. Through reflection, connection and discussion, we discovered new ways to sustain and grow this work, and we are happy to share the results with you.
In brief, the planning process helped us to identify LYWA’s core contributions: preserving the authentic legacies of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, ensuring accessibility for all, demonstrating the relevance of Buddhist wisdom in everyday life, and maintaining a global treasury of Dharma.
Guided by these foundations, our strategic plan focuses on four key priorities: Preservation, Access, Community, and Resilience. For more detailed goals and next steps, explore the LYWA Strategic Plan 2025.
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Lama Yeshe at Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal, 1980. Preservation: Safeguarding the Lamas’ teachings for future generations by completing transcriptions, training new transcribers, and migrating archives to a secure digital system.
- Access: Expanding reach through free publications and digital resources, including new books from both Lamas and ongoing collaborations with Wisdom Publications.
- Community: Strengthening engagement across the FPMT family through projects like the Family Feeling initiative, new course materials, and translation support.
- Resilience: Building the long-term stability of LYWA through succession planning and stronger organizational capacity.
Together with your support, we are committed to carrying these four strategic priorities forward to ensure that the timeless wisdom of the Lamas continues to benefit students around the world for generations to come.
As we put this vision into action, we’re launching our year-end appeal to raise $50,000 by December 31. Your support makes it possible for us to preserve these precious teachings and share them freely with students around the world. Please continue reading to find out what else we accomplished in 2025!
Rejoicing in Our Work Together: 2025 Highlights
In 2025, we advanced our mission with two new LYWA publications: Clean-Clear by Lama Yeshe and Rinpoche’s Animal Friends by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. As part of the Wisdom Culture Series, we also released two new Lama Zopa Rinpoche titles through Wisdom Publications—The Power of Meditation and How to Live and Die. All four books were offered free to LYWA Members as a membership benefit, with several hundred copies shipped worldwide and hundreds more delivered as ebooks.
We launched several new initiatives, including the Family Feeling Project, which distributed more than a thousand LYWA books free of charge to over twenty FPMT centers and study groups from New Mexico to New Zealand. We also began printing in India, where more than 4,000 copies of our popular titles were distributed to FPMT centers in India and to Kopan Monastery in Nepal, helping overcome customs barriers and high shipping costs for greater access. In September, we introduced Tools for the Path, a quarterly newsletter supporting FPMT leadership.
A new ebook was released this year, Teachings from the 51st Kopan Meditation Course. We also made available on our website the complete texts of Teachings from the Medicine Buddha Retreat, How to Practice Dharma and Teachings from the 24th Kopan Meditation Course (1991). Other offerings included a new collection of podcasts and video teaching excerpts posted on the LYWA YouTube channel, as well as three multimedia titles documenting my (Nick’s) trips to Lawudo in the 70's.
Access to Dharma continued to grow with new Russian and Portuguese translations of our books, nearly forty new pieces of advice added to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book, and new audio recordings added to the Lamrim Year Companion website. The Big Love Audiobook Heart Project also reached completion this year.
It’s been quite a year so far—thank you for helping us share the Lamas’ wisdom with the world! Your support is deeply appreciated.
Big love,
Nick Ribush
Director and the LYWA team
Read a summary of our achievements in 2024 below.
LAMA YESHE WISDOM ARCHIVE 2024 YEAR-END APPEAL
Dear Friends and Supporters of LYWA,
We are deeply grateful for your support and interest in our work. LYWA serves as a global resource for anyone seeking to discover or deepen their understanding of the Dharma. In a time of unparalleled access to information, we are constantly confronted with news cycles, wars, political corruption, and climate crises. No generation before us has had such immediate awareness of the world's profound suffering. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of these challenges. Now, more than ever, the Buddhist teachings of equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy are what we all need.
At the Archive, we offer a wealth of Dharma resources to help individuals navigate personal and global challenges. The wisdom and compassion teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche provide a steady foundation in turbulent times, guiding us step by step in cultivating greater inner peace. We support the global Dharma community by casting a wide net, offering resources through various channels, including books for free distribution and sale, ebooks on a wide range of readers, social media, multimedia, audiobooks, podcasts, videos on our YouTube channel, lightly edited transcripts, free audio on our website, an online image gallery, monthly e-letters and foreign translations of our publications.
To further preserve and share the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, we are working to expand our reach and continue serving as a vital resource for those seeking to cultivate compassion, wisdom, and stronger communities of care. To support these efforts, we are launching our year-end appeal with a goal of raising $60,000 by December 31. We invite you to join us in this important endeavor. Please read on to learn more about our recent accomplishments and the exciting projects we have ahead!
Dharma Books in Print and Digital: Compassion and Wisdom for Every Format
Our free print books and ebooks remain a popular resource for individuals and Dharma centers worldwide. This year, we published Silent Mind Holy Mind by Lama Yeshe and are excited about several new titles set for release in 2025. In February, we will release Rinpoche’s Animal Friends, a book featuring over 100 images and teachings from the plushie toys that appeared in Lama Zopa Rinpoche's video teachings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Spring, we will publish How to Have a Happy Life With a Good Heart, a cookbook with over 100 vegetarian and vegan recipes inspired by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Also forthcoming in 2025 is Clean Clear: Collected Teachings, Volume 2 by Lama Yeshe.
In addition to these titles, our LYWA editors, in collaboration with Wisdom Publications, continue to publish various lamrim commentaries by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, including recent titles such as The Power of Meditation, The Power of Mantra, Perseverance, and The Six Perfections, with many more to come.
This year we also launched The LYWA Kopan Ebook Project, which aims to convert Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings from the annual Kopan meditation courses at Kopan Monastery in Nepal into a series of ebooks. This project will include both previously published teachings available on our website and new, unpublished teachings from these courses.
DIGITAL DHARMA PORTALS: Accessing a World of Wisdom
We share the Dharma through various digital platforms, including the LYWA podcast, the LYWA YouTube channel, and social media networks like Facebook, which have rapidly growing communities, now reaching 150,000 subscribers. Twenty of our most popular titles are available as free audiobooks on Google Play and for purchase on Audible. Additionally, we now offer thirteen installments of the Big Love Audiobook Heart Project on our YouTube channel.
Our website serves as a central hub for thousands of visitors each month, offering a vast collection of Dharma teachings. This includes over 2,600 entries from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book, where Rinpoche's guidance offers valuable insights into life’s challenges. New teachings published this year include those from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s 40th and 52nd Kopan Meditation Courses, as well as a series of nyung nä teachings Rinpoche gave at Lawudo Retreat Centre in Solu Khumbu, Nepal, in June 1977. Several new teachings by Lama Yeshe previously shared in our monthly eletters have now been published as stand-alone articles on our website.
In addition to our website, we have two auxiliary websites that we maintain and update with new resources and teachings: the Lamrim Year Companion site, designed to help with accessing the daily meditations found in our popular publication, Lamrim Year, and Teachings from Tibet, inspired by many of the teaching transcripts we’ve received over the years from great Tibetan lamas and by our popular publication Teachings from Tibet.
Another special feature of the LYWA website is the online Image Gallery, where visitors can browse a collection of images organized by year, highlighting key moments from each period. A recent addition to the site tells the story of the Image Gallery’s history, offering readers a deeper understanding of the work and dedication involved in preserving historic images of the Lamas and the FPMT lineage.
Expanding beyond Borders: Communications, TRANSLATIONS and books to bendigo
We began publishing our monthly eletters over twenty-one years ago, and we’ve continued this tradition ever since. With over 250 eletters now in our archive, we’ve documented the growth and evolution of our work over the past two decades. Each eletter features the latest video teaching excerpts, podcasts, written teachings, foreign translations, audiobooks, and updates on current activities. With more than 13,500 subscribers receiving our eletters each month, we are able to keep our global community connected and engaged with the Dharma they cherish.
On our website, you can also find links to foreign translations of our materials in eighteen languages. Several LYWA titles were translated into Czech, Vietnamese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese this year alone. We are deeply grateful to the dedicated translators who make our publications and transcripts accessible to non-English-speaking audiences.
This year, LYWA sponsored a major shipment of free books to the Great Stupa Library in Bendigo, Australia. The shipment included over 14,000 copies of LYWA titles, along with twenty boxes of Dharma materials. These free books were distributed to more than ten Australian FPMT centers, expanding our reach and enabling Australians to access Dharma books without the burden of high shipping costs.
The Dharma Vault: A Wealth of Teachings, Transcripts, and Images
The Archive contains a wealth of images, audio recordings, video and transcripts of the precious teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. The collection is maintained in AssetBank, a digital asset management system that ensures the collection will be safely preserved and easily managed for future generations.
At present, the Archive contains recordings from over 2,100 teaching events encompassing approximately 18,000 hours of audio, almost 16,000 transcripts and hundreds of video recordings. Our Image Archive, managed in Lightroom, contains over 75,000 image files, including many unique, historically relevant images that document the Lamas' travels and teaching events, the origins of international Dharma centers, as well as activities of the many Sangha members, students and friends.
Together in Dharma: creating your dharma legacy and the LYWA Team
Discover how you can contribute to your Dharma legacy and leave a lasting impact by visiting our new Create Your Dharma Legacy page on our website. A planned gift will be vital in sustaining our efforts and making a meaningful difference for future generations. Learn how a legacy gift can ensure your Dharma impact lasts for generations by supporting LYWA's mission to preserve and publish the precious teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
Please be sure to visit Who We Are to learn more about the amazing team that makes this all happen.
It is only through your kind and generous support that we have been able to do all this beneficial work for the sake of all sentient beings. Please donate and help us make our year-end appeal a success.
Much love,
Nick Ribush
Director
You can donate directly on www.LamaYeshe.com, or send a check to this postal address. Thank you!