Founder, Venerable Tarthang Tulku

Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche is the founder and Head Lama of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center in California, USA. Rinpoche was born in 1935 in eastern Tibet, where he studied with many of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist masters of the twentieth century. After leaving Tibet, Rinpoche taught from 1962 to 1968 at Sanskrit University in Varanasi, India, where he also established one of the first printing presses to print sacred Tibetan texts. The first lama of the Nyingma lineage to establish residence in the United States, Rinpoche founded Dharma Publishing and the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, where he has actualized a long-range vision of preserving the ancient teachings of the Buddha and transmitting them to the modern world.

In 2009, he founded the Guna Foundation to share these accomplishments and the wisdom tradition of Tibet with the world.