Tibetan Center Enlightens

You may have noticed the brightly painted building right next to the post office, inscribed with the words “Mangalam Center.” This building is is owned by the Tibetan Meditation Center, along with almost the entire block — the building adjacent to the post office is just one part. The Tibetan Meditation Center is an institute with various locations in Berkeley that focuses on Tibetan Buddhism.

Inside the large wooden doors of the Mangalam Center is an extensive Translation Research Library where ancient Buddhist texts are translated from Tibetan or Sanskrit to English.“

Very few people speak those languages. We’ve had some scholars come in for workshops, but the center is still young. There’s no official team of translators working on the texts. Most of the people working as translators can at least read Tibetan,” said Mike Earles. Earles works at another branch of the Tibetan Buddhist Center, Dharma Publishing Bookstore. The bookstore sells Tibetan texts, books about Tibetan Buddhism, and other Tibetan religious objects. The bookstore raises funds for the center and the organizations it houses.

Earles works at the bookstore but is essentially “a volunteer in a Work Study program. I work at the store in exchange for taking classes at the Nyingma Institute. It’s near the UC Campus, and it offers classes in meditation and the like. There are several of us in the program living at the Nyingma Institute. We work and receive room and board and a small living stipend each month.”

Earles found the program online while reading about Buddhism. “I don’t claim to be Buddhist, because to a lot of people, it means taking certain vows that I haven’t taken. But it is something I’m very interested in. You don’t have to be Buddhist to be in the work-study program. There are ceremonies that we do at the beginning and end of each day, but they are optional.” The volunteers are rarely people who have been raised as Tibetan Buddhists. “Most of the volunteers are young Americans; I think that demographic especially tends to gravitate towards Buddhism. I started out interested in Zen Buddhism, which is a Japanese form of Buddhism. It’s very different from Tibetan Buddhism. It’s very elaborate compared to Zen, which is very sparse. It can be intimidating at first, but as volunteers, we’re encouraged to build our own relationship with the teachings.”

Volunteers from the work-study program work for different parts of the Tibetan Meditation Center. Earles is the only one who works in the bookstore because on his application, he mentioned he had experience working in a bookstore. Other volunteers work at the Nyingma Institute, which is the most public part of the center. The Institute offers classes on a 10-week cycle. They also have open meditation and teachings on Sundays that are free to the public (510-843-6812 for information on the program).

Behind Dharma Publishing is office space where a lot of work happens. The center houses four organizations. The largest is the Tibetan Aid Project, which assists Tibetan refugees.

“At first, we focused on supplying humanitarian aid,” said Rosalyn White, the Executive Director of the Tibetan Aid Project. “But as things got better, we started helping to build schools and monasteries, trying to rebuild the Tibetan culture. It became apparent pretty quickly that what the Tibetans really needed was books. We print Tibetan Buddhist texts and give them away for free to the refugees from India and Nepal. In the past twenty years, we have given out 3 million books to the Tibetan community.”

The project does a number of things to raise money for the Tibetan community. “We do five mailings a year and hold events to raise money. We also sell Tibetan prayer flags as a source of funds. We silkscreen some of them ourselves, and the smaller ones are made at our center in Brazil and then we sew them here,” White explained.

“Another organization working here is the Nyingma Trust. They sew prayer flags for our country center and also raise money to support our older community members by providing health care for them.”

The Tibetan Buddhist Center relies on a lot of volunteer work, and you don’t have to be part of the work-study program to get involved. To learn about part-time volunteering opportunities, contact Rosalyn White at rosalynw@tibetanaidproject.org or 510-848-4238.

Photos:

• Buddhism (Liam Klaidman-Rinat)