The Garden of Maitreya is affiliated with the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. This page traces the lineage we belong to; who founded it, who carried it forward, and why it matters that this tradition reached Romania.
Everything written here is drawn from official FPMT sources, linked at the foot of each section.
THE TRADITION: LAMA TSONGKHAPA AND THE GELUG SCHOOL
The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition is rooted in the Buddhist tradition of Lama Tsongkhapa of Tibet; the great fourteenth-century philosopher, meditator, and reformer whose synthesis of Madhyamaka philosophy, Vinaya discipline, and Vajrayana practice gave rise to the Gelug school. His two major works; the Lam Rim Chen Mo (Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment) and the Ngag Rim Chen Mo (Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path of Mantra); remain the intellectual and practical foundation of the tradition to this day.
It is this tradition; transmitted through an unbroken lineage of masters from Lama Tsongkhapa to the present; that the Garden of Maitreya seeks to study, practise, and preserve in Romania.
LAMA THUBTEN YESHE (1935 — 1984)
Lama Thubten Yeshe was born in Tibet in 1935. At the age of six, he entered Sera Monastic University in Tibet, where he studied until 1959; when, as Lama Yeshe himself has said, “In that year the Chinese kindly told us that it was time to leave Tibet and meet the outside world.”
In India, his education continued with courses in Vinaya and Abhidharma. One of his principal teachers, both in Tibet and in exile at Buxaduar, was Geshe Rabten; a highly learned practitioner famous for his single-minded concentration and powers of logic.
Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, together as teacher and disciple since their exile in India, met their first Western students in 1967. By 1971, they had settled at Kopan, a small hamlet near Kathmandu in Nepal. In 1974, the Lamas began touring and teaching in the West, which would eventually result in the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition.
On July 4, 1974, Lama and Rinpoche received their passports at Kopan Monastery and departed on their first teaching tour to America; a tradition of annual Western teaching tours that would continue for many years thereafter.
What made Lama Yeshe extraordinary was not only the depth of his realization but his capacity to transmit it across cultural distance. He understood the Western mind intuitively; its questions, its resistances, its hunger for something real; and he met it with directness, warmth, and an almost startling joy. He did not ask Western students to become Tibetan. He asked them to become awake.
Lama Yeshe passed away in 1984. An authoritative two-volume biography, Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe, was published by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive in 2020.
Source: fpmt.org/teachers/yeshe
LAMA THUBTEN ZOPA RINPOCHE 1945 — 2023
Born in the Mount Everest region of Thami in 1945, Rinpoche was recognized soon afterwards by His Holiness Trulshik Rinpoche and five other lamas as the reincarnation of the great yogi Kunsang Yeshe. Rinpoche was taken under the care of FPMT’s founder Lama Thubten Yeshe, soon after leaving Tibet, in Buxa Duar, India, in the early 1960s. Rinpoche was with Lama Yeshe until 1984, when Lama Yeshe passed away and Lama Zopa Rinpoche took over as Spiritual Director of FPMT.
At Geshe Rabten’s suggestion, Zopa Rinpoche began to receive additional instruction from Lama Yeshe; a teacher-disciple relationship that would shape both of their lives and the lives of countless students around the world.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche led FPMT for nearly four decades after Lama Yeshe’s passing; guiding its expansion to over 160 centres and projects in more than forty countries, establishing monasteries, retreat facilities, schools, and hospices, and inspiring a global network of practitioners through his tireless dedication to the welfare of all beings. His vision for FPMT included the construction of holy objects in every country where the Dharma had not yet taken visible form; a vision that directly inspired the Stupa of All Buddhas project in Bucharest.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche passed into parinirvana on April 12, 2023, at Charok House, Aptos, California. His passing was mourned across the entire Buddhist world and celebrated by those who knew that a being of his calibre does not simply disappear.
Source: fpmt.org/teachers/zopa
THE FOUNDATION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF THE MAHAYANA TRADITION
The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition is an organization dedicated to preserving and spreading Mahayana Buddhism worldwide, creating opportunities to hear, reflect, meditate, practise, and actualize the faultless teachings of the Buddha; and, on the basis of that experience, to spread the Dharma to all beings. It provides integrated education through which people’s minds and hearts can be transformed into their highest potential for the benefit of others, inspired by an attitude of universal responsibility and service. The organization is rooted in the Buddhist tradition of Lama Tsongkhapa of Tibet, as taught by its founders Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche.
Today FPMT encompasses over 160 centres, projects, and services in more than forty countries. It maintains the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive; one of the world’s largest repositories of recorded Buddhist teachings in English; publishes Mandala magazine, operates the FPMT Education Department, and coordinates a global network of registered teachers, translators, and study groups; of which the Garden of Maitreya in Bucharest is one.
Source: fpmt.org
OUR PLACE IN THIS LINEAGE
We are a small study group in a city where Tibetan Buddhism arrived late and is still finding its footing. We make no claims to greatness. What we do claim is continuity: the teachings we study, the practices we follow, and the transmission we hold were passed to us by teachers who received them from teachers who received them from Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche; who received them from their own masters in an unbroken chain reaching back to Lama Tsongkhapa, and beyond him to the Buddha himself.
That is the lineage. We are grateful to carry even a small portion of it.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
All biographical information on this page is drawn from official FPMT sources:
Lama Thubten Yeshe — biography: https://fpmt.org/teachers/yeshe/
Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche — biography: https://fpmt.org/teachers/zopa/
Joint biography of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche: https://fpmt.org/teachers/yeshe/jointbio/
The Beginnings of Lama Yeshe’s Work in the West: https://fpmt.org/mandala/archives/mandala-issues-for-2000/march/the-beginnings-of-lama-yeshes-work-in-the-west/
Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s story of meeting Lama Yeshe: https://fpmt.org/teachers/zopa/articles/lama-zopas-story-of-meeting-lama-yeshe/
FPMT International: https://fpmt.org
Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive: https://www.lamayeshe.com
— Garden of Maitreya, Bucharest
gardenofmaitreya.com 