13/03/2026
As the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) reached its 50th anniversary in December 2025, we are celebrating this important milestone by sharing the inspiring stories of the students and centers who helped FPMT grow around the world.
Through their dedication, our beloved founders, Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, established centers, projects, services, and study groups across many countries. What began with a small group of students has grown naturally and organically far beyond the West and continues to benefit living beings everywhere.
“We should recognize our Western Sangha as a resource for the establishment of the Dharma in the West,” shared Lama Yeshe in 1983, the year before showing the aspect of passing, during a CPMT meeting in Italy.
Founded in 1981 by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Nalanda Monastery became the first Western Buddhist monastery of FPMT, following the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.
One of the most treasured voices in this living history belongs to Ven. Thubten Gyatso (born 1943, Dr. Adrian Feldmann), who was the very first monk to arrive at Nalanda—and its first director, serving from 1981 to 1985. He trained and worked as a medical doctor, and since 1975 he has been a Buddhist monk. He has also written an autobiography about his early Buddhist and ordained years, published as A Leaf in the Wind.
In a video filmed during Nalanda’s 40th Anniversary in a series of talks called “Honoring our Former Generations,” Ven. Gyatso shares a remarkable journey: from his medical school years in Melbourne in the 1960s, through a restless spiritual search that led him across Asia, to his ordination at Kopan Monastery in November 1975. He then joined the community of monks and nuns at Kopan for the next three to four years. Later, Lama Zopa Rinpoche requested that he serve as the SPC in Melbourne, where he worked for more than a year.
At the end of 1980, unexpected news changed his life plans. While he was doing prostrations under the bodhi tree, someone delivered a letter from Lama Yeshe saying, “I want you to go to France and set up a new monastery. Come and see me in Dharamsala.” He later met Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche in a small room in Dharamsala, where Lama told him plainly: “Elizabeth has bought this place in France, and I want it to be a monastery for my monks and nuns—you go there and set it up.” (You can watch Ven. Elisabeth Drukier’s interview here).
It was in that same meeting that Lama Yeshe gave the monastery its name: Nalanda—chosen in the spirit of the great ancient center of Dharma study whose ruins Ven. Gyatso had visited just weeks earlier and which had inspired him to vow to help establish monastic communities in the West.
Ven. Gyatso arrived to find a stripped, empty three-story building, about 200 years old, with no furniture and no fittings—and on his very first night, a thunderstorm of spectacular intensity. Undeterred, he spent the following weeks scrubbing every floor and wall by hand, building the dining room table and benches himself, and planting gardens. For the first few weeks, he worked alone, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monks and nuns began to arrive gradually—first Mike King from Manjushri Institute in England, then others—and the community slowly and joyfully took shape.
Ven. Gyatso’s account is a beautiful testimony to what determination and wholehearted willingness to serve can achieve. From a lone monk closing shutters in a thunderstorm to a flourishing monastic community embodying the vision of our Lamas—this is the story of how Nalanda began and such a fine example of the type of courage demonstrated by the early students of FPMT.
🙏Please continue to watch the video:
https://fpmt.org/fpmt-community-news/50-years-of-fpmt-ven-thubten-gyatsos-story/
