Tarthang Tulku
Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan lama in the Nyingma tradition, was born in eastern Tibet in 1935. As a young man, he received extensive formal Dharma training from many important teachers, including his root guru Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro. He left Tibet in 1958 and taught for several years at Sanskrit University in Varanasi, India, where he started a Tibetan printing press. In 1969, he relocated to Berkeley, California, with his wife, the poet Nazli Nour, and established the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center, Dharma Publishing, the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, and the Tibetan Aid Project. Today the center includes over 20 nonprofit organizations worldwide, and there are Tibetan Nyingma Institute satellite branches in the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil. In 1989, Tarthang Tulku founded the World Peace Ceremony in India, where, over the last 27 years, he has distributed more than 4 million Dharma books, free of charge, to the Tibetan diaspora. He has also restored monasteries and holy places in Tibet and India, and created the Odiyan Retreat Center in Northern California, a temple complex on more than 1,000 acres. He has written and edited over 100 books for Westerners, including Gesture of Balance, Knowledge of Freedom, and Revelations of Mind.
