Our Founder

Tarthang Tulku is one of the last remaining lamas to have received a complete education in pre-1959 Tibet. After teaching at Sanskrit University in India and founding Dharmamudranalaya (Dharma Publishing) in India, he settled in Berkeley, California in l969. Here he founded the Tibetan Nyingmapa Meditation Center, the Tibetan Nyingma Relief Foundation, Dharma Publishing (USA) and the Nyingma Institute within the first four years of his arrival.

For many years, Tarthang Tulku taught and wrote extensively. Now he is on retreat, focusing mainly on his mission to rebuild the valuable monastic libraries of Tibet and freely distribute reproductions of rare books of ancient Tibetan wisdom to as many monasteries and practitioners as possible in the Himalayan region. Over the past twenty years, the Nyingma community has worked continuously to fulfill this mission, publishing and distributing thousands of these sacred Tibetan texts each year.

In addition, he has guided the creation of the Odiyan Retreat Center in Sonoma County, and made it the foundation for his efforts to establish the Dharma in the West in a traditional retreat setting. At Odiyan practitioners and scholars can become immersed in the meditations and trainings of the Nyingma lineage.

As Head Lama of the Tibetan Nyingmapa Meditation Center, his mission is to preserve and transmit the symbols, sacred literature, teaching, and forms of Tibetan Buddhism. He provides both vision and spiritual guidance to the Nyingma organizations that he has established worldwide and to the students who make up the Nyingma community.

He has founded the Nyingma Order, consisting of individuals who have lived in our community on a nominal stipend, and worked with him on a full-time basis from 15-40 years. The members of the order have made religious commitments to dedicate their lives to the Dharma and the welfare of all beings, uphold the teachings of the Nyingma lineage and to follow the Bodhisattva Vow and Buddha's Eightfold Noble Path, and to support each other as community.

He also has thousands of students with whom he has held private interviews, seminars and trainings since l969, others who have read his books and feel a kinship through his insights, and those who have studied at the Nyingma Institutes and centers in Berkeley, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan and India.