FPMT News Around the World

Lama Zopa Rinpoche with Lama Yeshe, with babies and Italian students, 1976. From the series of group photos taken at the end of a lam-rim course held at Taceno, Italy. Photo courtesy Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

The latest Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archives newsletter reports “editing work continues in earnest” on Lama Yeshe’s biography Big Love. For the past several years, Mandala has published excerpts of Big Love on our website. Now, the Archive has set up a Big Love blog, where they are posting more excerpts from the comprehensive account of Lama Yeshe’s life, compiled and written by Adele Hulse.

In other Lama Yeshe news, the Archive has also just posted Lama’s address to FPMT Center Directors in 1983, where he describes his thoughts about the organizational structure of FPMT centers and the Central Office (now known as International Office).

In the talk, Lama Yeshe sketches out some communications goals for FPMT, which Mandala has taken as inspiration over the last three decades. Both in print and online, we strive to support Lama Yeshe’s vision by sharing stories from different FPMT centers, projects and services.

Here’s what Lama Yeshe had to say:

[The Central Office] facilitates communication both between the centers and me and among the centers themselves. You see, we do have the human tendency to shut off from each other: “I don’t want you looking at me; I can see my own point of view, I don’t want to share it with you.” Each center has its own egocentric orientation: “We’re good enough; we don’t need to take the best of other cultures.” This is wrong. We have reached our present state of existence through a process of evolution. Some older centers have had good experiences and have learned how to do things well. Doing things well is not simply an intellectual exercise but something that comes from acting every day and learning how to do things until you can do them automatically. Thus it is good that the Central Office has a pool of collective experience so that all our centers can share in it and help reinforce each other. 

Mandala hopes to continue to support FPMT centers, projects and services through publishing accounts of successes and hard-earned knowledge, offering inspiration as well as concrete information, so that process of evolution can continue. 

With 158 centers, projects and services around the globe, there is always news on FPMT activities, teachers and events. Mandala hopes to share as many of these timely stories as possible. If you have news you would like to share, please let us know.

If you like what you read on Mandala, please consider becoming a Friend of FPMT, which supports our work.