Dr. Alexander Berzin: The Second Serkong Rinpoche & Berzin Archives

By 1997, having traveled extensively teaching and working on projects for His Holiness since 1984, I decided to move out of India for a combination of personal and professional reasons. I felt that I had gained as much as I could from having India as my home base. Similar to what I had felt when I had decided to leave academia, I felt that to grow further, I would need to return to the West. It was difficult communicating from India with my American publishers, Snow Lion Publications, and I wanted to have long-term regular students rather than being what I called a “jet-set guru,” flying into a place for a few days once every year or two. 

Besides this idea of settling in the West, there were several other possibilities of what I could do – continue being a traveling teacher but spending longer in each place, settle in Mongolia and help with the revival of Buddhism there, and so on. All would be beneficial, so I asked His Holiness’s advice. His Holiness said to choose something that hardly anyone else is doing and that you are good at. He trusted me to make the right decision. 

Over the close to thirty years in India, I had approximately 30,000 pages of translations I had made, of unpublished manuscripts of books and articles I had written, of transcripts of teachings I had translated or given, and of the handwritten reading notes I had made. I also had hundreds of audio tapes of further teachings that needed transcribing. These were all invaluable, especially the teachings of His Holiness, Serkong Rinpoche, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey and the other great lamas I had studied with. I decided that, in accord with His Holiness’s advice, the best thing I could do was to make them available to the world. They had been of great benefit to me, and I imagined that, similarly, they would be of benefit to others. 

Since I had already published several books with Snow Lion, I discussed with them the idea of compiling a series of volumes containing selected items from this material and they agreed. I had had a laptop since 1985 and, already, about half of this material had been digitized. The rest was either handwritten or typed. I had made photocopies of most of them, but now they too needed to be digitized. With a small grant I received, I hired Peter Green, whom I met at Snow Lion, to start this enormous task and, although he worked at it part-time for a couple years, he could only complete a small portion. Peter later went on to become a librarian at Princeton. 

Once I moved out of India, I spent the next year trying out different places as a new home base – Munich, Seattle, Mexico City and Wales – but, for various reasons, none of them worked out. A few years earlier, at a teaching I was giving in Berlin, Aldemar Hegewald, a young German originally from Colombia, came up to speak with me after the talk and we decided to keep in contact. Each time I came to Germany, we would spend time together and soon became friends. We have remained close friends ever since then. He went on to engage in a very successful career as a neurosurgeon specializing in spine surgery, but at this time he was in medical school and sharing an apartment in Berlin with a friend who was being transferred to another city. He suggested that I move in and share the place with him. 

I already knew German from high school and college, although it was rusty, and already had tried living in Munich. But there, I had stayed in the apartment of the Dharma center, taught at the center and had to ask permission if I wanted to go teach elsewhere. In Berlin, there was the Buddhistische Gesellschaft, where I had taught many times before. It was just a set of rooms where various Buddhist groups held classes. I could hold classes there and remain independent, and so I accepted Aldemar’s offer. An additional benefit of living in Berlin was that it afforded easy access to Russia and the Eastern European countries, where I knew that His Holiness would consider it important for me to continue teaching. I still give occasional Zoom lectures to groups of my students in Russia and Ukraine. 

I moved to Berlin in December 1998 and shared the apartment with Aldemar for the first two years, until he moved closer to his medical school, and since then I’ve lived there by myself. For the first few years I held a weekly class at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft. It was quite far, however, from where I and most of my students lived. Since the classes were small and I didn’t advertise them, we eventually switched to holding them in my apartment.  

Despite the age difference, Aldemar and I were very compatible. For relaxation from his studies, he read through a German encyclopedia, from cover to cover. Over the years, our intellectual conversations have been a highlight of our relationship. He is now the head of the department of spine surgery at a large orthopedic hospital in North Germany, near the border with Denmark, and lives nearby with his Italian wife, who is also a practicing physician, and their two children. 

One of the first things I did once I had settled into Berlin was to have all my handwritten and typed material scanned for safekeeping. Photocopies of them were not enough and, besides, they were starting to fade. Aldemar then suggested that I put all my material on a website. By the mid-1990s, the Internet had become well known and now, at the turn of the century, websites were starting to become popular on it. I saw that books had a limited distribution and had to wait for a second edition before any changes could be made. A website would avoid such problems and could even be searched.

In addition, because I took the initial scope lam-rim teachings seriously concerning working to benefit my future lives and to do so by building up the karmic causes, I also thought that the positive force (“merit”) from making them available to the world on a website would have two karmic effects on me. As a ripening cause, it could result in my gaining a precious human rebirth in my next lifetime. As a cause similar to its result, in that next lifetime, I could be born where these teachings were available on this website, I could be instinctively drawn to them, and I could be inspired not only to put them into practice but also to work to make them further available.

Although gaining such a rebirth is as rare as the proverbial blind tortoise surfacing, only once every hundred years, at the exact spot on the ocean where it would stick its neck through a golden yoke afloat on the surface, nevertheless if you build up the causes for a precious human rebirth and the circumstances are there, such a rebirth should follow. The method is to keep strict ethical self-discipline and to supplement it with the practice of the other far-reaching attitudes (paramitas) of generosity and so on as well as making appropriate dedication prayers of the positive force of constructive acts you do. I have been following this method as best as I can.

A few months later, not having yet taken steps to carry out Aldemar’s suggestion, Wolfgang Saumweber, a German businessman whom I had met on my travels, wrote and offered to make a website for me. Its first version, berzinarchives.com, went online December 1, 2001. Its founding principle was that it would be nonsectarian and always free of charge and without advertisements. 

The experience I gained organizing the large medical project in the USSR prepared me for organizing the Berzin Archives project on a large scale. To run it as Executive Director, Business Manager and Content Manager, which I still do today, I taught myself the basics of Information Technology (IT) regarding the construction, maintenance and administration of a complex website. Rudy Hardewijk, a Dutch programmer, stayed with me for a few months in Berlin and developed the website further. But then Christian Steinert, a German student of mine and master programmer, took over as web developer. Steinert also translated my Dharma classes at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft. He went on to attend the first three-year master’s program at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute and then to teach the daily review sessions of the second three-year course. He occasionally teaches at Buddhist centers in Switzerland, where he currently works and lives.

Having taught in so many countries, I saw that not everyone understands English; people appreciate learning the Dharma in their own language. To meet their needs, I started by having the website translated into German, which turned out to be popular. Therefore, over the next few years, I slowly expanded to Russian and other European languages as well as Chinese, Hindi, Tibetan and Mongolian. Although I never had studied the Romance languages, my background in Latin enabled me to oversee these language sections. Having spent so many years in India, plus my knowledge of Sanskrit, made supervising the Hindi section quite easy.

While working to add more content to the website, I reported our progress to His Holiness whenever he taught in Europe and sought further guidance. I translated several more Kalachakra initiations for him and dealt with the press at several of his teachings. For example, when conspiracy theories were spread about His Holiness’s motives for conferring the 2002 Kalachakra initiation in Graz, Austria, I served as the spokesperson for handling the damage control. When anti-Dalai Lama protests were especially boisterous both outside and inside the venues for his teaching events, His Holiness asked for my recommendations to give to the organizers and the local authorities as to how best to handle the disruptions they caused.  

In 2003, Andreas Killmann moved to Berlin to work for the Ministry of Justice of the German Government, where he is still employed as a legal advisor. He soon joined my classes at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft and became both a close friend and my main advisor. In February 2005, he counselled us on the bylaws for the Articles of Association with which I established a German non-profit association, Berzin Archives e.V., to support the website, and Aldemar agreed to be the Chairman of the Board of Directors. Since then, Andreas has taken care of all our legal needs, networking with tax and legal professionals as well as German administrative bodies, landlords, banks, insurance companies and so forth. As the project has grown over the years, sometimes with as many as eighty freelance staff, it has been supported exclusively by donations and grants. People have been extremely generous.

Andreas’s job at the Ministry is to evaluate proposed new laws to determine whether any points in them conflict with existing regulations or even precepts in the German constitution. Being an expert in finding flaws, he does this as well for our project. I call him “Mr. Cup Half Empty” in relation to my being “Mr. Cup Half Full.” Whenever I have a new idea for the website, I first check it with him. He invariably represents the side of caution and points out possible risks in whatever I propose. This often leads to an animated debate, but I usually have to admit that he has a point and, together, we find a middle path. I am extremely grateful for his help in minimizing problems with the project.

In 2009, His Holiness, knowing of my efforts in promoting a Buddhist-Muslim dialogue, asked me to make the content of the website available also to the Muslim world. So, over the next several years, I had seven of the Islamic languages prepared, starting with Arabic. To be able to oversee it, I taught myself the Arabic script. 

Knowing basic Hebrew grammar and vocabulary from my childhood study enabled me years later to conduct research in the original Arabic for a comparative study of love in Buddhism and Islam. Again, the Harvard Sinology research course taught me to use ingenuity to do this. By using an Arabic search engine of the Quran, I could find all the verses containing inflections of the Arabic word for love. Then by consulting word-for-word translations of the verses, I could learn the Quranic concept of love. 

[See: The Practice of Love in Buddhism and Islam: A Comparison and Islam and Buddhism on Overcoming Self-Centeredness and Developing Love]

In 2011, Matt Linden, a British professional photographer and videographer, joined as English editor-in-chief. He fit in well with our multilingual approach, being fluent in Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) and knowing Tibetan, French, German, Italian, Finnish, Swedish and some Japanese. Having learned in my travels that many people prefer listening to teachings rather than reading, I soon started to have Matt prepare and add multimedia content to the website, both audio and video. 

I had first met Matt in 2006, when I had attended a conference in London on the cultural interaction between Islam and Tibet. At one of the sessions, Joona Repo, a Finnish doctorate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), approached me and told me how much he had benefitted from the Berzin Archives website. Matt, who had just graduated from SOAS, was his partner, and the two of them joined me for dinner the next day. We had stayed in touch since then, meeting whenever His Holiness taught in Europe. The two of them attended Lhasa University for two years and, afterwards, studied in Dharamsala. 

Joona went on to become the FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition) translation coordinator. 

In 2013, Yury Milyutin, a Russian digital marketing strategist, joined the team as my assistant. At the age of fifteen, he had won the strategy video game championship of all of Russia. As a young man working as a yoga teacher in Kiev, Ukraine, he had come up to me at the end of a seminar I taught there, and as happened with Aldemar, we had kept contact afterwards and had met whenever I had taught in Kiev. When he expressed interest in working on the website, I invited him to Berlin.  

By 2015, the programming for the website had become obsolete, and so despite Berzin Archives having become a well-known “brand,” I decided to commission the creation of a new website. For marketing purposes, Yury recommended that we change the name. At first, I was against the idea, but upon reflection, I realized that my resistance was due to my grasping at the website as “mine.” Understanding the faults of such grasping, I agreed to the change. Searching for a new name, I found, to my surprise, that “Study Buddhism” was still available. It would take the emphasis off me and put it more properly on the Dharma. Also, in the future, it would be easier to find in search engines. It was a big gamble, since initially the change would cause us to drop in ranking on Google, but we decided to take that chance. That’s how we came to rebrand Berzin Archives as Study Buddhism.

With the support of a generous patron, I hired the top IT company in Berlin, Edenspiekermann, to construct the new website as Steinert no longer had any time. Julia Sysmäläinen, an award-winning Finnish font and graphic designer and information architect designed the new format and, after completing the project, joined our team. Yury supervised the construction so that it stayed in accord with our needs. He continued with us for a few more years, helping us to expand our Internet presence, and then returned to Kiev. When the war broke out, he was able to escape to Portugal with his Ukrainian wife.

The new website went online in May 2016. We soon expanded onto an assortment of social media platforms and started a YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/studybuddhism, with Matt managing both from his home base in Helsinki. I invited Maxim Severin from Moscow, Russia, who had attended my teachings there, to join as a data analyst and arranged for him and his family to relocate in Berlin. Through Yury, I also hired Andreii Zdorovtsov in Dnipro, Ukraine. He took over as web developer to round off our key staff. When the war broke out in Ukraine, we first helped his wife and children relocate in Germany and then he was able to join them as well.

Over the years since then, with this dedicated team I have been expanding the website further in accordance with His Holiness’s commitments. For promoting basic human values and secular ethics, which His Holiness explicitly asked me to include, I have added an extensive section on universal values. For fostering religious harmony, I have focused not only on inter-religious harmony between Buddhism and Islam, but also intra-religious harmony among the various types of Buddhism. For this, I have had the website translated into the languages of all the remaining Asian Buddhist countries. 

For fostering non-sectarianism, Matt has video-interviewed over fifty Tibetan Buddhist, Chinese Buddhist and Theravada teachers from all traditions including Bon, as well as university professors of Buddhist Studies and scientists researching meditation and animal intelligence. They are available on our Your Tube channel with subtitles in all our languages. 

For preserving and promoting the Tibetan language, I have had our colloquial Tibetan language section expanded to over five hundred articles. Recently, a Tibetan monastery in India asked permission to reprint and distribute one of these articles at a public teaching they were holding. And for repaying the kindness of India, I have made the website available in ten Indian languages.   

Now, in March 2025, the website has over sixteen thousand articles spanning our thirty-seven language sections, and in 2024, it received 3.2 million unique visitors. In addition to carrying out administrative work for the project, I continue to do research and to write new material despite having just turned eighty. 

Following His Holiness’s advice to always rely on the Nalanda masters, I have been compiling, analyzing and translating from Sanskrit, when available, otherwise from Tibetan and occasionally Chinese, what they have written about karma and ignorance. I’ve been organizing their explanations in terms of the four tenet systems. Like the relation with a spiritual teacher, karma and ignorance are topics only poorly understood by most Western practitioners. 

I also maintain a daily meditation practice, which has evolved over the years. At first, I practiced, in Tibetan, the long sadhanas of all the major deities for which I had received an initiation, whether or not they entailed a lifelong daily practice commitment. Once I had done the retreats of all of them and started my extensive travel, His Holiness gave me permission to abbreviate them all to just the visualizations, the bodhichitta and voidness sections and the mantras. 

His Holiness always explains that the main point of Dharma practice is to overcome self-grasping and self-cherishing. Without this orientation, reciting sadhanas has little effect. Therefore, nowadays, although I maintain the abbreviated practice of sadhanas plus some other practices for which I have commitments, I have followed His Holiness’s example and emphasized, instead, analytical meditation on bodhichitta and voidness. For voidness meditation, I use the five great Madhyamaka lines of reasoning and the verses from Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara (Engaging in Madhyamaka) that His Holiness says that he himself contemplates daily. Like this, I incorporate analytical meditation on whatever topic I might be currently working on for the website – for instance, karma.

While writing this account of my life, I have focused in my voidness meditation on analyzing some of the personal issues that I have had to deal with – specifically, the feeling I had that I did not exist and the bat-like aversion I had to having a solid, fixed identity. I wanted to gain more clarity as to what the actual cause of my problems had been. Since making such analyses plays such an important role in my life, and since it might be helpful for some readers who have studied voidness to see how such an analysis works, let me outline what I have found. 

With an automatically arising deluded outlook toward a transitory network (’jig-lta lhan-skyes), you project a self-established (inherently existent) self as either identical with or as the possessor of something in the aggregates (such as the vows and behavior of a monk or of a layperson), and you grasp to it as your true identity. This is based on having fallen to the extreme of absolutism – grasping for a self-established self. If, on the other hand, you fall to the extreme of nihilism, as I had done, then you imagine that the self does not exist at all, and so you reject projecting it on any identity, and thus you become the bat. A variant of this nihilist view is grasping for a self-established self that has no identity. This variant was more in line with what I had suffered from.

A “self” dependently arises not only on the basis of a continuum of five aggregates and on mental labeling. A “self” also dependently arises in contrast with an “other,” but only on the basis of both self and other being devoid of self-established existence and not on the basis of both being self-established. I had grasped at my “self” as having self-established non-existence and at the body’s physical sensation of touch as the “other” having self-established existence. Being uncomfortable with feeling that I was non-existent and rejecting any true identity as a monk, a layperson and so on, I had imagined that by touching things, such as store windows as I walked down the street, I could establish that I was in fact existent. It was as if I could draw my existence from the store windows. 

It has been many decades now since I compulsively touched store windows, but there are undoubtedly traces still left of the underlying misconceptions that brought on this behavior. Nevertheless, the more precisely I analyze the issues that used to trouble me by fitting them into the Madhyamaka technical framework and discovering how well that framework describes them, the more confident I become that the correct understanding of voidness within that framework is the deepest antidote to suffering. I certainly cannot claim to have fully and correctly understood voidness, but whatever level of this understanding I have reached up till now has been enormously helpful. If others also take His Holiness’s advice seriously and practice analytical meditation each day, I am sure that they too will benefit from it.   

In addition to analytical meditation, I also practice what is known as “glance meditation” to review the teachings to keep them fresh in mind. Each day, then, I speed-read through a series of ten short texts I have studied on lam-rim, lojong, and voidness. I use my English translations of these texts because they convey more meaning to me than the Tibetan originals. 

I picked up the idea to train like this from having traveled with His Holiness and the First Serkong Rinpoche. In between appointments and when in a car or on a plane, both would quietly recite texts from memory at super-fast speed. Just to recite the texts as an exercise in memory is of limited benefit. More importantly, training like this is an effective way of putting their content all together and becoming automatically mindful of it in response to daily events. It is the basis for being able to translate the Dharma teachings into instinctive behavior. 

This method of gaining familiarity with the teachings also accords with Serkong Rinpoche’s guideline advice that we need to be able to bring to mind the entire lam-rim teachings in the time between putting one foot in the stirrup and swinging the other leg over our horse. When death comes, it doesn’t wait for you to set your motivation and then slowly to establish a constructive state of mind. 

Another important aspect of my present life is physical exercise. Back in 2007, I had suffered a minor back injury. After I had recovered, I joined a fitness club at the repeated requests of some of my students and began attending exercise and water aerobics classes. In 2011, rather than exercising in a group, I started working out with a personal trainer, Sebastian Werner, three times a week. I found all this exercise not only helpful for my back and my health, but also great fun and have kept it up since then. In 2018, I had an attack of angina pectoris due to a clogged heart artery and had a few stents put in. I firmly believe that all the physical training I had been doing saved my life. It had strengthened my heart so that the angina did not bring on a heart attack.

In summary, ever since I heard that lecture about how Buddhism was spread and adapted from culture to culture, I have been unwavering in my resolve to likewise serve as a bridge between Buddhism and the modern world. Similarly, ever since I offered to serve His Holiness for the rest of my life, I have never wavered from my commitment to help him build that bridge. Thus, I have tried to harness to that task all that I studied and all that I did. 

Further, ever since I became a disciple of the First Serkong Rinpoche, I have not wavered from working to make his teachings available to the world. First, I did this as his translator, and since then I have been serving as a bridge between him and his next incarnation. Whenever I have spent time with the Second Serkong Rinpoche, I have not only told him many stories about his predecessor’s life but have also passed on to him whatever I could remember of what he had informally shared with me from his vast store of learning and insight. I have especially included the unique interpretations he had shared of certain profound Dharma points that he had gained in his analytical meditations so that now, in his next life, he could continue and go further in his analysis. Although I had suspected that the First Serkong Rinpoche had consciously chosen and prepared me for that role of passing his teachings on to his next incarnation, Rato Khyongla Rinpoche, a close friend of the First Serkong Rinpoche, confirmed this to me a few years ago, not long before he passed away.

With the permission of His Holiness, I even gave the young tulku the lung, the oral transmission, of a special lineage his predecessor had passed on to Thurman and me of Tsongkhapa’s text on interpretable and definitive meanings, Drang-nges legs-bshad snying-po. Thurman had worked on this text for his Harvard PhD thesis and, when the First Serkong Rinpoche and I had visited him on one of Rinpoche’s Western tours, he had requested the lung. The First Serkong Rinpoche’s father, the great yogi Serkong Dorjechang, had received the lung from Tsongkhapa in a pure vision, but Rinpoche had never passed it on to His Holiness. Rinpoche told me he had been waiting until he had achieved full realization of some special insights he had gained from the text. 

This text is 303 pages long in its Western edition, and Rinpoche used to recite it from memory at super speed as part of his daily practice. He had even given Thurman and me the lung in the classic manner, from memory. The Second Serkong Rinpoche wanted, in turn, to receive the lung from me and so I agreed, but first I needed to ask permission from His Holiness. Even though I had never had the opportunity to study the text, His Holiness told me that having heard it from the First Serkong Rinpoche was enough to qualify me to pass it on. I had to practice for months reading it out loud so that, when I gave the lung, I could do it in an acceptable fashion. 

The First Serkong Rinpoche had told me that Tsongkhapa’s In Praise of Dependent Arising holds the essence of Drang-nges legs-bshad snying-po. I had received teachings on it from Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey and had translated it into English. Although I cannot recite this much shorter work from memory, I have followed Rinpoche’s tradition in a much more modest fashion and have also included it in the texts I speed-read each day as part of my meditation sessions. In fact, I include it in both my morning and evening practice. 

After completing just part of the Geshe training at Ganden Jangtse Monastery in South India, the Second Serkong Rinpoche decided, in 2008, to disrobe. He returned to Dharamsala and after a period of adjustment to his new life, on the advice of His Holiness he continued his studies at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics. Not being a monk, he could not study the Vinaya, the monastic rules of discipline, which is part of the Geshe curriculum, and so could not receive the Geshe degree. As part of his training, however, His Holiness advised him to supplement the Gelugpa education he had been receiving with study of the Nyingma approach to Madhyamaka and to voidness meditation. The First Serkong Rinpoche had been expert in all four Tibetan Buddhist traditions, especially Gelugpa and Nyingma, and now the Second Serkong Rinpoche has likewise become well-versed, as a start, in both the Gelugpa and Nyingma approaches to voidness.

His Holiness also advised Rinpoche to improve his English and so he sent him to Canada for two years to study it at a college there. This experience of being treated like every other student and not being venerated and treated special as a Rinpoche has helped him relate quite easily to the Western students that now come to his teachings. He is very personable and, like the First Serkong Rinpoche, has a great sense of humor and does not make a distance between himself and others. 

Also like his predecessor, he has taken full responsibility to help the people of Spiti, where he had been reborn. In 2009, he founded the Serkong School in Tabo for kindergarten up to grade ten and personally teaches Dharma to the Spiti youth who come to Dharamsala to complete their high school education. Tabo contains the oldest surviving Buddhist monastery in India – it was founded over a thousand years ago. Rinpoche has taken the responsibility to preserve it. He has also had a new monastery built in Tabo and is in charge of its administration. 

In 2024, he founded the Serkong Academy in Dharamsala for the study of Buddhist logic, debate and philosophy for Western, Indian and Tibetan laypersons. He also liaises with the Central Government of India on behalf of Spiti and for special projects, such as the recognition of Tibetan as an official language of India. As an Indian citizen and not a Tibetan refugee, he is often asked to take care of official dealings with the Indian government on behalf of the Private Office of His Holiness.  

In addition to all that, Rinpoche also occasionally teaches in Spiti and in Dharamsala, where he currently lives, and has made several foreign teaching tours. He has become an excellent teacher, equally skilled in explaining both beginner and advanced level topics. Since he has begun giving teachings, he has entrusted our Study Buddhism team to collect and archive their recordings. We have been slowly working on these recordings, transcribing, retranslating where needed, editing and putting them up on our website. In this way, Study Buddhism is becoming the vehicle for preserving and transmitting the teachings of the Serkong lineage. Rinpoche presently serves as the spiritual advisor to our online project. 

Having transmitted the lung of Tsongkhapa’s text on definitive and interpretable meanings from his predecessor to him, as well as some special features of his predecessor’s style of teachings, the Second Serkong Rinpoche has told me that he regards me as one of his teachers. Although my Dharma education and understanding cannot compare with his and although I continue to learn a great deal from him and regard him as my teacher, nevertheless I have studied various topics in the Dharma that he has not yet had the opportunity to learn. Therefore, last year (2024), he asked me to join him in Austria and to assist him in teaching the chapter on the twelve links of dependent arising from Chandrakirti’s Prasannapada (Clear Words). I not only led the question-and-answer sessions each evening, but Rinpoche also gave me permission to clarify points during the lectures when his English or the English translation from his Tibetan was unclear. When he would mention an advanced point but not give the background information for people unfamiliar with the topic to be able to understand, I would fill it in. During the weeklong teaching, Rinpoche was not feeling well for several days. He asked me to take over the afternoon session each day, where the students requested that I summarize the morning’s lecture and asked more questions. Rinpoche and the students were very happy with this style of co-teaching. 

We decided that it would be of benefit to continue doing this and agreed to do so, when possible, whenever he would be teaching some advanced topic. I am grateful beyond words for this unexpected opportunity to be able to help make Serkong Rinpoche’s wisdom available to the world in two of his lifetimes. I look forward to being able to help him help others for years to come.     

As I wrote in the abstract, one of the lessons I hope readers will learn from my life story is to risk taking advantage of opportunities that arise in life to do something positive – whatever those opportunities might be. According to the Buddhist teachings on karma, one of the results of our previous karmic actions is the result that corresponds to its cause in our experience and in our behavior. This refers to encountering situations that offer us the opportunity to repeat an instinctive type of constructive or destructive behavior we have. We need to use discriminating awareness to decide whether or not to take advantage of the opportunity to repeat something similar to what we have done before. 

For instance, in my life, two situations arose at around the same time. One was the opportunity to study with Tibetan Buddhist masters in Dharamsala and translate texts for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The other was to start on the track for becoming a professor at Cornell University. I had the instincts and propensities to do both. The teachings of karma would explain that encountering these situations and having these instincts were the result of previously having been a Buddhist teacher and translator. Whether or not we believe in past lives, this is the Buddhist explanation. 

I could have chosen following either path or even doing something else, but to me the choice was obvious. The instincts drawing me to India, the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama were more compelling than those drawing me to a university teaching career or to anything else. Although returning to India was risky, I went and took full advantage of the opportunities there. The same was the case when I chose to study Chinese at Princeton, to teach in the communist countries, and to return to the West and live in Berlin. The point is that just as the lam-rim graded path teachings instruct us to take advantage of having attained a precious human rebirth, we need to apply that guideline to golden opportunities that arise in life. 

Another lesson that I hope readers have learned from my example is that, with a good motivation, a lot of hard work and supporting conditions, it is possible to improve your personality. Our personalities are a blend of a wide range of mental factors. They include disturbing ones such as anger, positive ones such as compassion, and neutral ones such as concentration. Each of them spans a spectrum of strengths, from weak to strong, with which they can manifest. Although at birth, each of them has the potential to manifest within a certain range depending on our past life behavior and the circumstances in this life that trigger them to arise, that range can be modified during our lifetime. 

For example, during childhood and university days, my arrogance, selfishness and emotional turmoil were strong, and my empathy, compassion and peace of mind were weak. Over the course of my lifetime, I have reversed their strengths. Although sometimes I am still arrogant, selfish and emotionally upset, episodes of them have gradually become shorter, less frequent, and weaker in strength. On the other hand, episodes of empathy and compassion are longer, more frequent and greater in strength, and I have become much calmer and have more peace of mind. This is all due to the kindness of my teachers to train me and all the study, meditation and works that I’ve done. 

Having read about my example, I pray that whatever the circumstances of your life may be, you will take advantage of opportunities that arise to further your growth, to work on becoming a kinder person and to benefit others.