Become a Member of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive...
 Report
to Members 2006 •
Join Now with your credit card on-line •
A Message from our Spiritual Director • Our
Five-Year Plan •
The Membership Program: Preserving
the FPMT Lineage •
Benefits of Membership • Why
an exclusive Members' area? •
Other Membership Payment Options •
Our Members
A Message from our Spiritual Director Dharma books plant the seed of the path to enlightenment
in the mind of the reader. That imprint ripens, realizations
come, and liberation is attained. Books open the wisdom eye;
you can understand death and the nature of mind; they teach
you how to develop compassion; they bring world peace.
The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive publishes authentic Dharma
books. When you read and practice them, you can understand
karma, how everything comes from the mind, that the external
cause is not the only one. This can lead you to a happy death
and a happy rebirth.
Book sponsors offer all the above benefits to others and
cause them to open their minds. Each person transformed brings
peace into the world. It becomes an extremely practical thing.
Sponsoring books is for people who like to spread Dharma.
If you organize a meditation course, only a few people
get to hear the teachings, whereas if you publish a book,
you
can help thousands more. Books reach every corner of the
earth.
Until you change your mind, no matter how well-off you
are, you still make mistakes in your actions. To stop
your own suffering, you have to stop creating negative actions;
to stop creating negative actions, you have to eradicate
your negative mind. Books teach you how to do that.
An additional benefit of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive books
is that they are offered free of charge and thereby reach
many people who might not otherwise have a chance to contact
the Dharma. Also, when you contribute to or distribute Archive
books, you create the charity of Dharma, the highest form
of giving. Moreover, when you donate money to the Archive,
you accomplish material charity; and since the Dharma teachings
in these books show readers how to protect themselves from
suffering, you also accomplish the charity of saving others
from fear. Thus, by the one action, supporting the Archive,
you achieve all three forms of generosity. If, on top of
that, you give with bodhicitta—the determination to
attain buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings—your
donation
becomes the cause of enlightenment.
Therefore, I would be grateful if you could make a general
donation to or become a member of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
Thank you so much.
-Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Preserving the
FPMT lineage: Our Five Year Plan
In 2003 we launched our membership plan in Singapore
and are now bringing to the rest of the world. What we’re
trying to do is raise $600,000—which seems
to be an impossibly large amount of money. But what we need
to do is to employ more editors so that we can tackle in
a properly organized way the huge volume of teachings by
Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche that currently sit, unchecked
and unedited, in our vast collection of transcripts dating
back more than three decades.
You can read the five-year plan of what we’d like
to do, but basically, we need at least six editors working
more or less full time for five years to prepare for publication
all of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s lam-rim teachings and Lama
Yeshe’s tantric commentaries. Of course, there’s
more in the Archive than that, but once those teachings have
been attended to we can deal with the rest.
You can also read an interview
with Director Nick Ribush that was
published in Snow Lion Magazine which talks about our current
plans.
We'd like to invite you to become a Member
with a pledge of at least US$1,000. We hope that you’ll
be so inspired by our five-year plan that you’ll not
only consider doing this yourself but you’ll also try
to find friends to join as well. As you can see, at $1,000
each, we need 600 members to reach our goal.
Join Now with
your credit card on-line
The benefits of Membership
The main benefit is that you’ll be playing a key role
in bringing the essential teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama
Zopa Rinpoche to tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands
of people all over the world. During the last millennium,
many lam-rim texts were written in Tibet, all based on Atisha’s
Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. In our tradition,
the most important extensive lam-rim texts are Lama Tsong
Khapa’s
Lam-rim Chen-mo and Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation
in the Palm of Your Hand. Now we
have a chance to make a highly significant addition
to the genre by working together to prepare and publish the
many lam-rim commentaries he has given since 1971 at Kopan
and many other FPMT centers all over the world. As the thousands
of us who have benefited from Rinpoche’s teachings
will attest, they are extremely effective and totally relevant
to the world today. Bringing them out in print will be one
of the greatest contributions to peace and happiness in the
world ever made.
You’ll also be helping us make available Lama Yeshe’s
tantric commentaries. Several have already been published—Introduction
to Tantra, The Tantric Path of Purification, The
Bliss of Inner Fire and Becoming the Compassion
Buddha—his Manjushri
commentary is almost ready to go and, as you will see in
the attached brochure, many more await preparation.
More direct and tangible benefits for you personally will
be:
- A free copy of each free book published by LYWA in the
future.
- A free copy of each Lama Yeshe or Lama Zopa book edited
by the Archive and published by Wisdom Publications in the
future.
- A one-year subscription to Mandala
magazine.
- One year of monthly pujas done by the Kopan monks and
nuns: choose from Medicine Buddha, Tara, Guru Puja and King
of Prayers. Also, you may specify to whom you would like
the pujas dedicated. To find out more information about
these pujas click here.
- Access to an exclusive members-only section of our Web
site containing special, unpublished teachings unavailable
to others.
We hope you will be able to join. Thank
you so much. Use our on-line
donations pages to remit your membership subscription
and your preferences for pujas. If you cannot manage $1,000
all at once, we offer you the option of donating $250 a quarter
over the next year or monthly payments of $100, $50, or $30.
To sign up for automatic debits, simply contact
us with your credit card information and tell us how you
would like to subscribe. Or, you may make your payments each
month online, or send a check with your membership donation(s)
to LYWA, PO Box 356, Weston, MA 02493 USA.
Of course, we don’t need 600 members to start. In
fact, we already have four editors working part-time on Lama
Yeshe’s and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings. As
we receive more funds we will be able to add more editors
and give more time to this project.
We have launched our Membership drive wordwide
with an appeal in Singapore and a mailing to all our benefactors
in November 2003. Our thanks to those who have already joined
as members. Click here to see the list
of current members.
Please email our director Dr.
Nicholas Ribush if
you have any questions about our membership plan. Thank you
so much.
Why do we have an exclusive
Members' area?
One Lama Yeshe Wisdom
Archive supporter wrote asking about why we have created an
exclusive Members' Area, where only those who give a certain
amount of money can gain access. They wrote:
“I feel queasy about there being a premium for people
who give a certain total within a certain period of time.
If I understand correctly, there are two levels of benefactor
and those with more money and/or fewer other commitments
will
have access to certain Dharma materials and everybody else
will be shut out.
“To me, creating an upper level despises the smaller
gifts of the less well-to-do (smaller only in denomination,
certainly not in spirit) and I'd be literally scared to do
that. I mean I think no good can come of it, any according
of status or privilege on the basis of wealth being some
manifestation of what is traditionally called 'grinding down
the face
of the poor.' Since we are only typing and not face-to-face
I may seem edgy and confrontational and truly that's not
how I feel. I'm just trying to discuss the philosophy of
what is
happening. Maybe sometimes we have to decide whether we believe
in karma or in the principles of fundraising in the U.S.?”
Director Nick Ribush replied:
“The thing is this...we need to find $600,000 so that
we can hire at least 5 editors for 5 years to make the
teachings we have in the Archive available to everybody.
The way we're
trying to do this (and remember, I have been raising money
for Dharma projects for more than 30 years, so have a bit
of experience with what works and what doesn't—see
my article on fund
raising for more details) is to institute a membership plan where people
who contribute $1,000 get certain benefits, one of which is
access to a restricted area of our Web site containing certain
works in progress. What the members get there are mainly the
transcripts that are in the process of being edited because
of the money they have offered...it's like a sneak preview.
Eventually, everything in the temporarily restricted area will
be in the public domain, so in the long term, nothing is being
kept from anybody. Like you, I live in the real world, and
sometimes people need to be enticed to part with $1,000. If
they didn't, I'd just put the word out and tomorrow I'd have
$600,000. If indeed there is a better way, tell me and I'll
do it, no problem.
“In the meantime, we are putting more and more free
teachings on the main part of the Web site, we have just
printed 15,000 copies of The
Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind,
10,000 copies of Virtue
and Reality are on press, 15,000
copies of our free Anthology will soon be available, and
people who
have signed up for our free monthly e-letter get another
free teaching every month.”
Please email our director Dr.
Nicholas Ribush if you have any questions about our membership
plan. Thank you so much.
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