Dear Friends,

Thank you for reading our monthly e-letter—we’re so glad to have you with us! Feel free to share it with anyone who might find it helpful.

In this issue, discover which new free book is now available to order (!), how we’re supporting FPMT centers, projects, and services, a newly released Lama Yeshe video, a Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching on the LYWA podcast, the latest installment of the Big Love audiobook project, new advices, and a report from the April 2025 CPMT meeting at Kopan. We also have an excerpt for this month’s teaching from the forthcoming Clean-Clear, which is being printed now. We’ve been busy—and we’re excited to share it all with you!

Now Available: Rinpoche’s Animal Friends

We’re delighted to announce that LYWA's latest free title, Rinpoche’s Animal Friends, is now available to order on our website! 

This special hardcover book features over 100 beautiful images of the soft toys that Rinpoche lovingly inscribed with Dharma messages and mantras. These cherished toys, later gifted to students around the world, are accompanied by a selection of short teaching excerpts that reflect Rinpoche’s boundless compassion and playful wisdom.

Copies will begin shipping this week to supporters who gave $100 or more during our year-end appeal. LYWA Members who haven’t yet requested a copy can also receive one free, including shipping—just let us know.

Stay tuned—more new titles are coming soon!

Supporting FPMT Centers with Free Dharma Resources

We want everyone to know that we are committed to helping each FPMT center, project, and service share the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche freely. Our goal is for every visitor at an FPMT location to be able to take home a free LYWA book. As a reminder, all LYWA publications—except Big Love—are available at no cost.

To support this, we’re now sponsoring free book shipments to both regional hubs and individual centers. Individual centers can receive a direct shipment of up to 2 boxes of our titles, or if you can collaborate with other centers in your region, we can send you many more, depending upon our current stock.

We also invite centers to collaborate with us on translating LYWA books into local languages, with no foreign rights or royalty fees required.

Please take a moment to complete a short survey to help us better understand how we can serve you. After you submit the survey, we’ll follow up to answer any questions and, if you’re interested, arrange a shipment of free books to your location. If you already completed a survey at the April 2025 CPMT meeting, we’ll be reaching out to you soon.

From the Video Archive: OM AH HUM Meditation

This month from the video archive, we bring you a compilation of Lama Yeshe’s instructions on how to meditate on OM AH HUM. These instructions were given during a weekend seminar on death, intermediate state and rebirth that Lama Yeshe taught in Switzerland in September 1983. These teachings are included in the LYWA free book Life Death and After Death.

Visit and subscribe to the LYWA YouTube channel to explore our complete video collection of teachings by Lama Yeshe and many from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, available from our archive. See the FPMT YouTube channel and the Rinpoche Available Now page on the FPMT website for many more videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings.

On the LYWA Podcast: To Achieve the Ultimate Peace

From our side, from us sentient beings, from our side, if we practice correctly, definitely, without doubt, definitely we'll achieve the ultimate peace. 
–Lama Zopa Rinpoche

This month on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive podcast, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains how to practice in order to achieve the ultimate peace for ourselves and all sentient beings. These teachings were given by Rinpoche in Singapore in January 1993. You can read along with the transcript on our website.

The LYWA podcast contains hundreds of hours of audio, each with links to the accompanying lightly edited transcripts. See the LYWA podcast page to search or browse the entire collection by topic or date, and for easy instructions on how to subscribe.

The BIG LOVE AUDIOBOOK HEART PROJECT

We are happy to share the latest audiobook installment of Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe, written by Adele Hulse. Organized by Janet Brooke, this heart project comprises narrations recorded by personal friends of the late Åge Delbanco (Babaji), one of Lama Yeshe's earliest students. This is a unique opportunity to hear this extraordinary account of Lama Yeshe’s life read by those who were there as the story unfolded—especially valuable if you don’t have a copy.

This month the Big Love Heart Project brings you Chapter 19: 1981: Public Life and Private Time, narrated by Richard Prinz, Sharon Gross and Bev Gwyn. Chapter 19 includes stories about Lama Yeshe's last trip to Lawudo, the Lamas’ extensive teaching tour to Australia, Europe and the United States and Lama's first mention of Universal Education. 

What's New On Our Website

This month we have posted two teaching excerpts from Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe.  In Tantra: Limitless Enjoyment and Freedom from Grasping, Lama Yeshe explains how to investigate the space-like nature of all phenomena and establish right view. The Benefits of Bodhicitta is a teaching by Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the negative mind and the nature and value of bodhicitta, especially for those wishing to cultivate world peace.

We’ve also added new entries to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book. Each year, we include over 100 new pieces of advice on various topics, bringing the total to more than 2,600 entries now available on our website.

• Experience COVID for All Sentient Beings: This advice was given to a geshe who had contracted COVID-19 in Singapore. Rinpoche said getting COVID is more precious than skies of wish-granting jewels because we can use it to destroy the self-cherishing thought.
• Problems Arising After Vajrasattva Retreat: A student wrote that they were having many problems after doing a Vajrasattva retreat. Rinpoche advised this was a sign that their past negative karma had been purified and they would have happiness in the future.
• Overwhelming Fear and Anxiety: Rinpoche explained the extensive kindness of sentient beings in this long letter sent to a student who had struggled with panic disorder, fear and anxiety for thirty-five years.

You can always find a list of all the newly posted advices from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on our website.

LYWA Goes to KOPAN: A CPMT Summit Report

In April 2025, LYWA director Nick Ribush and staff members, Jen Barlow and Sandra Smith, traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, to attend the international Council for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (CPMT) Summit at Kopan Monastery. The six-day CPMT meeting was inspiring and productive, with 185 participants from the FPMT centers, projects and services around the world.

Many issues impacting on the future of the organization were discussed and for LYWA staff, it was a valuable opportunity to learn from others, to strengthen our connections, and to raise awareness of the Archive’s work in publishing the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche.

The CPMT had an auspicious start, with a letter from His Holiness the Dalai Lama for participants. His Holiness said, “Buddhism is a source of wisdom—you can use it to transform your minds. This involves reading or listening to the teachings, thinking them over again and again, then meditating on what you have understood. I sometimes describe this as the way to be a 21st century Buddhist.” You can read the letter from His Holiness here.

Joyful news received at the CPMT Summit was that the incarnation for Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche has now been reborn in Nepal, according to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s observation. A search party has been formed to look for the incarnation and meanwhile, students have been advised to continue with Chanting the Names of Noble Manjushri and Migtsema practice. Find links to these practices here.

The CPMT Summit concluded with extensive offerings and prayers at Kopan Monastery on the anniversary of Lama Zopa Rinpoche passing into parinirvana on April 13. Then it was time for CPMT participants to return home to continue their work for the Dharma, FPMT and sentient beings.

As always, thanks for all your love and support, and don't miss out on reading an excerpt from Clean-Clear below.

Big love,

Nick Ribush
Director and the LYWA team

THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: What is Compassion?

What is compassion? It is the wish for others to be free from suffering and confusion. We all have some compassion, but it’s small and partial. For it to become great compassion we have to vastly augment the compassion that we already have. What is great compassion? It is non-discriminating compassion whose object is all living beings without exception; all those who suffer from ego conflict, dissatisfaction and confusion.

Our present compassion is very limited in experience, so as I say, we need to expand or develop it beyond limitation so that its object is all universal living beings. The cause of this limitation is the perception, or preconceived idea, that in the world there are some living beings who are my dear friends, who I hold close; some who are my enemies because they irritate me and who I hate or am jealous of; and others who are neutral, neither friend nor enemy and who I regard as strangers and don’t care about. I don’t know anything about these strangers, I don’t want to know anything about them, I just ignore them. And this just makes me more ignorant.

In order to develop great compassion, we need to balance, or equalize, this attitude. Because of our preconceptions, it’s normal for us to have friends, enemies and strangers. But the real scientific point is that we are just projecting our fantasies onto these three objects. As a matter of fact, they don’t objectively exist as friend, enemy and stranger as our fantasies project, and we have to recognize our limited reasoning for making these indefinite, temporal designations. Today, someone gets angry with us and we label that person an enemy; tomorrow that same person does something nice for us and we label them a friend. We need balance. Our extreme imputations are based on deluded logic that fails to recognize the totality of the human being.

When we look at the situation from the perspective of infinite time and space, we can see that each and every sentient being has been our friend, enemy, stranger and everything else countless times. So these relationships are nothing new. All those who are currently strangers or enemies have been friends in the past and all our current friends have also been enemies and strangers throughout our beginningless lives. In fact, each sentient being has been equally a friend, an enemy and a stranger infinite times. In order to realize this and become healthy, we practice the equilibrium meditation.

From the Buddhist point of view, as long as we have objects of jealousy or hatred, we are not healthy, we are mentally ill. It’s the same if we’re obsessed with objects of desire that we can’t let go of. Buddhist psychology holds that in order to be completely healthy we need to be free from exaggerated desire, exaggerated hatred, exaggerated jealousy and so forth. The point is that all living beings, objects of our desire, hatred or ignorance, are completely equal and we should be equally sympathetic to them all. Why? Because they are also equal in wanting happiness and freedom from misery. We’re all in the same situation, so there’s no reason to discriminate between sentient beings the way we normally do.

We have such a limited way of thinking. Say we ask somebody for something and they don’t give it to us. We think, “They’re so unkind. They won’t give it to me now and I’m sure they won’t give it to me in the future.” With our deluded, limited mind we’ve already decided about the future. All we can see is the present, but sentient beings give in hundreds of different ways. Sometimes we don’t even know who has given to us and who hasn’t; sometimes we don’t know how an enemy has benefited us or how someone of whom we’re jealous has benefited us. Sometimes the people who benefit us the most are those who don’t give us chocolate or kisses.

Getting back to the three objects of friend, enemy and stranger, they appear to us as they do because of our delusions and wrong conceptions, our unrealistic point of view. In reality, we should see them as the same, conceptually and emotionally, according to the logic above. We’re not just giving some small reason for saying they’re equal, like we have a nose, they have a nose, so we’re equal. Sentient beings are equal because we all seek happiness and a joyful life and freedom from misery, dissatisfaction and loneliness. Our enemies seek this, rich people seek this and so do poor people: all of us are in the same situation.

But then, the poor still think, “If I were rich, I’d be happy.” The rich think, “I’m rich but unhappy. Maybe I’d be happy if I had a private jet.” These are all deluded fantasies. It doesn’t matter what your status is, as long as you’re experiencing dualistic ego conflict, you’re always dissatisfied.

Excerpted from Lama Yeshe’s Clean-Clear: Refuge, Bodhicitta and the Nature of the Mind, forthcoming in May from LYWA. Edited by Nicholas Ribush.