Current Projects
The Archive's Dual Mission
The work of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive falls into two categories: Preservation and Publication.
The Archive holds a wealth of images, audio recordings, videos 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.
We prepare materials for publication through many avenues, including books for free distribution and sale, ebooks for a wide range of reading devices, social media, multimedia content, audiobooks, podcasts, videos on our YouTube channel, lightly edited transcripts and free audio on our website, and a monthly e-letter. We also support the translation of LYWA publications into more than eighteen languages.
You can read more in the LYWA Strategic Plan 2025: The Enduring Wisdom of Our Lamas, which outlines our four strategic priorities—Preservation, Access, Community and Resilience—and how we will continue preserving, sharing, and expanding access to the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche for the benefit of current practitioners and future generations.
Below you’ll find details on our current initiatives. We are so grateful for your support!
The Family Feeling Project
Free Books, Free Shipping to the Worldwide FPMT Network
“The name ‘Family Feeling Project’ comes from the way Lama Yeshe used to describe the atmosphere he wanted students in his centers to create. He likened the worldwide FPMT community to a global family, where the students should feel to be sisters and brothers and behave harmoniously while making the Dharma available to others. Of course, Lama pronounced it ‘pamily peeling,’ which was not only endearing but made it unforgettable.”
–Nick Ribush, LYWA director
Thanks to the generosity of benefactors and ongoing support from individual donors, we are now able to ship free books to any FPMT center, study group, project, or service anywhere in the world.
In 2025, LYWA launched a new initiative to make the invaluable teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche more accessible. Through this program, we offer support to the entire FPMT network with LYWA publications (excluding Big Love) completely free of charge. Our goal is for every visitor to an FPMT location to take home a free LYWA book to inspire and support their Dharma practice and connect to the FPMT lineage.
To make this happen, LYWA sponsors free book shipments to FPMT regional hubs and individual centers, study groups, projects and services. Each center or affiliate can request a direct shipment of up to two boxes of LYWA titles each year. Additionally, for centers that can collaborate regionally, we can provide larger shipments—200 to 300 copies per title for each recipient—depending on current stock availability. For more information about this project, please reach out to us!
We’ve also started printing books directly in India to make them easier to access and to reduce shipping costs and customs challenges. In June, a printer in New Delhi produced 2,000 copies of Becoming Your Own Therapist and 3,000 copies of our new catalog, which were distributed to several centers in India and to Kopan Monastery. Encouraged by how well this worked, we went on to print two more of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s titles—Virtue and Reality and How Things Exist—with 2,000 copies of each going to centers in India and Nepal.
Tools for the Path newsletter
In 2025, we launched Tools for the Path, a quarterly newsletter for FPMT leaders who manage and coordinate centers, study groups, projects, and services. This initiative is designed to strengthen connections across the FPMT network and to provide practical Dharma resources that support the work of FPMT leadership.
Each issue offers ready-to-share content for center newsletters, social media, and community outreach, including images, teaching excerpts, advice, and inspiring quotes. It also features updates on the Family Feeling project, study materials, translation support, and LYWA publications. Everything in Tools for the Path is created to be easily shared and used throughout the FPMT community.
You can explore past issues below:
The Kopan Ebook Project
In 2024, LYWA launched a new project which involves publication of a series of ebooks of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings from the Kopan meditation courses held annually at Kopan Monastery in Nepal since the early 1970s. All of Rinpoche’s teachings from the annual Kopan courses will be converted into ebooks, including those already published on our website and those not yet published.
The Kopan courses began in April 1971 with a ten-day program attended by about a dozen people. From these early beginnings, the Kopan courses evolved to become an annual event with over two hundred attendees from all over the world. Read more here about how the Kopan courses began.
Kopan Monastery is the heart of the FPMT, the international organization founded by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche to preserve and spread Mahayana Buddhism worldwide. The Kopan meditation courses were life-changing for countless students, and this is where many students met the Lamas, received teachings and became Buddhist. For more information about attending the annual lamrim courses at Kopan Monastery visit KopanMonastery.com.
LYWA’s Kopan ebook project is possible due to the generous support of donors like you. Your contribution plays a vital role in ensuring that these timeless teachings continue to inspire and transform lives for generations to come. Thank you!
Publishing the FPMT Lineage and The Wisdom Culture Series
LYWA and Wisdom Publications: Preserving the Lineage Together
After years of working with Rinpoche on his Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun and the course transcripts from the Third through the Seventh Kopan Courses, I had this dream of publishing a series of Rinpoche’s detailed commentaries on each of the main lamrim topics.
We finally started to make the dream a reality when, in the early 2000s, Ven Labdron (Trisha Donnelly) and later Namdrol Adams went through all of Rinpoche’s teachings, putting the relevant teachings into what we called subject baskets: everything Rinpoche had taught on each topic. In the meantime, Ven Ailsa Cameron edited all of Rinpoche’s teachings on guru devotion into Heart of the Path, which in retrospect became the first volume in LYWA's Publishing the FPMT Lineage series.
Then, in 2008, Gordon McDougall joined us and began editing the baskets, producing the next two volumes in the series: How to Practice Dharma and The Perfect Human Rebirth.
After that, Gordon began editing Rinpoche’s teachings from the path of the higher capable being (the great scope) for Wisdom Publications, producing Bodhichitta, Six Perfections, Patience, Perseverance, and related titles Power of Mantra, Power of Meditation and How to Live and Die. Books on the three lower realms, refuge, karma and the path of the middle capable being are to follow.
Now we are collaborating with Wisdom Publications to carry this project forward as part of their Wisdom Culture series. Wisdom is taking the lead on publishing the new volumes, while LYWA continues to support Gordon’s editing work and Wisdom’s efforts to bring the project to fruition.
–Nick Ribush, LYWA director
In the Wisdom Culture Series, Wisdom Publications will be making the subsequent volumes available, as well as other key works for the study and cultivation of the Mahayana Buddhist path, especially works of masters within the lineage of Lama Tsongkhapa and the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. “Wisdom culture,” an expression frequently used by Lama Yeshe, is a Dharma culture rooted in wisdom and compassion.
These titles in LYWA’s Publishing the FPMT Lineage series, the precursor to the Wisdom Culture series, are freely available through our website:
Titles in the Wisdom Culture series edited by LYWA editor Gordon McDougall and published by Wisdom Publications include:
Additional titles by LYWA editor Gordon McDougall and published by Wisdom Publications include:
All these titles have been offered to LYWA Members for free.
Preserving the Precious Archive for the Future
The Contents of the Archive
All LYWA materials—audio files, transcripts, images and archival video—have been carefully stored and cataloged. 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.
The Archive's massive photo collection includes images dating back to the 1940's and has been assembled over the last twenty years from contributions by donors from all over the world. Our Image Archive, managed in Lightroom, contains over 75,000 image files, including many unique, historically relevant images which 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. You can learn more about our Image Archive here.
The LYWA image collection was organized and enhanced in support of the publication of Lama Yeshe’s biography Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe, which consists of two 700-page hardcover volumes containing stories, teachings and more than 1,550 images drawn from the Archive’s collection. The FPMT also manages a large collection of images of Lama Zopa Rinpoche and of the myriad FPMT projects and social service programs around the world.
Our Digital Asset Management System: AssetBank
In 2016, LYWA and FPMT joined forces to merge our collections into a single digital asset management system called AssetBank. Previously, LYWA’s collection of audio recordings, archival video recordings, images and transcripts and FPMT’s collection of contemporary video, images and edited transcripts were stored, managed and accessed in systems which were independent of one another. We can now see the incredible benefits of storing all our digital assets in a single system:
Improve preservation and management: Our entire collection is stored in a supported, documented and secure system which positions us well for preserving these precious resources into the future.
Locate materials more easily: The system enables editors and teachers to find all kinds of related files in one place. No more looking in one system for transcripts, another for images, and yet another for video.
Eliminate duplication: Duplicate collections of images, audio and video were often being stored in multiple systems. As our collections of digital assets are categorized in a single system, we are eliminating duplication.
Expand the Archive: AssetBank offers us the opportunity to catalog much more than just our traditional "archive" materials (such as audio, video, image and transcript). As the primary archive of recorded teachings of the Lamas has been migrated to AssetBank, we are now working on cataloging book and magazine design files, education department materials, advices, mantras, articles and other publications.
Meet the future of publishing: As new forms of digital publishing emerge, such as multimedia presentations, having all transcripts, images and video related to the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche categorized, tagged and organized in a single system makes it easier for editors and designers to locate materials quickly for publication.
Increase access to the collection: Moving forward we will be able to offer teachers and book editors the ability to deep dive into unpublished archival material as a resource. And, we will have a vehicle for sharing over 140,000 images in our combined collection to FPMT students worldwide.
Our ultimate goal is to make Lama Yeshe’s and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings as easily accessible and widely available as possible. LYWA serves primarily students of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche but also students of Buddhism from all lineages and traditions. From introductory students and those simply curious about Buddhism in general to more advanced students looking to explore and research topics on their own, all can appreciate the breadth and depth of the teachings we have made available and have yet to make available.
In the years to come, this project will ensure that the precious words and images of our teachers are well cared for, preserving the teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and ultimately making its benefits available to all. Please work with us to realize this goal and make your contribution today. Thank you!