Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

As the summer months arrived and much of the northern hemisphere slowed down for the holidays, the work at Study Buddhism carried on at full pace. During this three-month period, we welcomed 570,000 unique visitors, who read more than 1.25 million articles across our multilingual platform. Although summer traditionally brings a dip in visitor numbers, the number of articles read was the highest of any quarter so far, telling us that our readers are staying longer and going deeper into the material rather than simply passing through.

This quarter, our readers were most engaged with What Is a Bodhisattva (Japanese), What Is Buddhism (Russian and English), the Sutra of Golden Light (Russian), Praises to the Twenty-one Taras (Tibetan), and 8 Buddhist Tips for Dealing with Anger (English). English, Russian, German, Spanish, and French were the most widely read languages, with the majority of users coming from the United States, Germany, Italy, India, and France.

Our video work gathered fresh momentum over the summer. Our YouTube content drew 220,000 views and 9,200 hours of watch time — the equivalent of more than 380 days of continuous viewing — and over 2,000 people joined as new subscribers to the channel. That is a rise of more than 50% in views compared to the same period last year. Over on Facebook and Instagram, our videos were seen a further 250,000 times, driven largely by the short-form clips and Reels we now produce from both new interviews and older archival material.

On the content side, a highlight of the quarter was Dr. Berzin’s new translations from Sanskrit of selected chapters of Nagarjuna’s Root Verses on Madhyamaka and Chandrakirti’s Clear Words commentary on them, published alongside further previously unpublished manuscript material: a third volume of Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey’s Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice, and chapters from Dr. Berzin’s own manuscripts on the Tibetan culture of Central Asia and on the future of Buddhism. We also recorded fifty seminar sessions taught by Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II, each accompanied by review and question sessions with Dr. Berzin and published ten major sadhanas translated from Tibetan by Dr. Berzin.

Technically, this was one of the most significant quarters in the history of the website. We started work on an AI chatbot, enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation, that answers questions using the content of our own site; we’re slowly rebuilding the homepage around a simpler, more inviting structure; and we launched a dedicated video section drawing directly on our YouTube channel. Considerable work also went in under the hood — a new web server configuration, a rewritten redirect system, and optimized database queries — all of which have made the site markedly faster for visitors everywhere.

Here are some of our major accomplishments from June through August 2026:

Content & Translations

Composed and published:

• “Verification” Rather Than “Wisdom,” “Imputation” and “Mental Labeling” – Dr. Alexander Berzin
• Artificial Intelligence and Spiritual Mentorship in Buddhism and Islam – Dr. Mohammed Ashath

Translated from Sanskrit by Dr. Berzin and published:

• Nagarjuna’s Root Verses on Madhyamaka, selected chapters (3 parts)
• Chandrakirti’s Clear Words Commentary on “Root Verses on Madhyamaka”, selected chapters (2 parts)

Compiled from a published video interview, copyedited, and published:

• Interview with Geshe Lhakdor

Copyedited and published:

• The Process of Death, Bardo and Rebirth (2 parts) – Dr. Alexander Berzin
• 3 chapters (7 parts) from the unpublished manuscript of Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice, vol. 3 – Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey
• 3 chapters from the unpublished manuscript of The Tibetan Culture of Central Asia: Buddhism, Medicine, Calendar and Astrology – Dr. Alexander Berzin
• 11 chapters on historical lessons from the unpublished manuscript of Buddhism at the End of the Twentieth Century: Where Do We Go from Here? – Dr. Alexander Berzin
• 10 sadhanas of Yamantaka, Guhyasamaja, Chakrasamvara, and Vajrayogini, translated from Tibetan by Dr. Alexander Berzin

Recorded seminars taught by Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II, with review and question sessions by Dr. Berzin:

• Nagarjuna’s Taking Suffering on the Path (11 sessions)
• The three types of compassion in Chandrakirti’s Engaging in Madhyamaka (12 sessions)
• Chandrakirti’s Clear Words Commentary on “Root Verses on Madhyamaka” (9 sessions)
• Atisha’s Bodhisattvas’ Garland of Gems and Togme Zangpo’s Thirty-seven Bodhisattva Practices (18 sessions)

Copyedited transcripts of weekly classes by Dr. Berzin:

• 13 classes on Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior
• 21 classes on Tsongkhapa’s Lam-rim chen-mo

Continued copyediting of the AI transcriptions of classes at the Serkong Institute taught by Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II, Geshe Tenzin Gurmyi, and Dr. Atisha Mathur:

• First-year course on Logic and Debate

Completed and published 175 article translations from English into 13 of our 36 other languages, including:

• Italian (38)
• German (22)
• Russian (21)
• Ukrainian (21)
• Kannada (15)

Continued composition by Dr. Berzin of an extensive commentary on The Gross and Subtle Varieties of the Two Types of Dependent Arising in Purchog Ngawang Jampa’s commentary on In Praise of Dependent Arising.

Multimedia & Social Media

• Conducting of a video interview with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche during his teaching tour in Taipei, Taiwan
• Conducting of a video interview with Marc-Henri Deroche, Associate Professor at Kyoto University and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, dzogchen, and mindfulness, in Kyoto, Japan
• Conducting of a video interview with Professor Seiji Kumagai of Kyoto University’s Institute for the Future of Human Society, a specialist in Madhyamaka philosophy and in the Buddhism of Tibet and Bhutan, and the creator of Japan’s first “Buddharoid” monk, in Kyoto, Japan
• Conducting of a video interview with Reverend Takafumi Kawakami, head priest of Shunkoin Temple, a Rinzai Zen sub-temple of Myoshin-ji, in Kyoto, Japan
• Edited and released four longer-form videos from our interview with Marcia Binder Schmidt, on dzogchen, crazy wisdom, and related topics:

1.      Published the full interview on YouTube with a dedicated playlist, individual thumbnails, video descriptions, teasers, and English subtitles
2.      Added subtitles for each video in over 40 other languages
3.      Created 4 Instagram-ready clips, 4 Facebook-ready clips, 4 X-ready clips, and 19 Shorts/Reels (mini-clips)

• Edited and released six videos from our interview with Ling Rinpoche, on facing adversity, faith in Buddhism, and other topics:

1.      Published the full interview on YouTube with a dedicated playlist, individual thumbnails, video descriptions, teasers, and English subtitles
2.      Added subtitles for each video in over 40 other languages
3.      Created 6 Instagram-ready clips, 6 Facebook-ready clips, 6 X-ready clips, and 24 Shorts/Reels (mini-clips)

• Edited seven videos from our interview with Lelung Rinpoche, four of which have been released so far:

1.      Published on YouTube with a dedicated playlist, individual thumbnails, video descriptions, teasers, and English subtitles
2.      Added subtitles for each video in over 40 other languages
3.      Created 7 Instagram-ready clips, 7 Facebook-ready clips, 7 X-ready clips, and 21 Shorts/Reels (mini-clips)

• Prepared 12 visual quotes from video interviews and other sources for Facebook, Instagram, and X
• Produced and uploaded 12 video clips optimized for:

1.      Facebook: 37-language subtitles
2.      X: embedded English subtitles
3.      Instagram: 9:16 vertical format with embedded English subtitles

• Created 12 article-based posts introducing key content to social audiences
• Designed and dispatched six newsletters to our over 10,000 Mailchimp subscribers

Technical Improvements

AI Chatbot & Retrieval-Augmented Generation

• Introduced an AI chatbot that answers visitors’ questions using the content of our own website
• Added retrieval-augmented generation, generating embeddings for the Essentials section as a first testing ground
• Tested a range of AI models, including Google Gemini, Grok, and locally hosted models, and settled on Gemini for production use
• Built the chat interface, with a fixed input bar, automatic scrolling, a “Thinking…” animation, and messages shown in the reader’s own time zone
• Set up live updating so that answers appear without the page needing to reload
• Added error handling so that quota limits and service interruptions produce a clear message rather than a broken page
• Restricted the chatbot to administrators for the present testing phase

New Homepage

• Reorganized the homepage, combining three older sections into a single, simpler “Explore Buddhist Teachings” area
• Added a “Start Reading” section for newcomers
• Added a “Buddhist Wisdom in Brief” section featuring YouTube Shorts, playable directly on the site
• Added a “Top 5 Most Read” articles section, a sample of the Glossary, and a “Tags” section
• Improved the layout, video display, and button styling across the homepage for better readability on both desktop and mobile devices

Video & YouTube Integration

• Created a dedicated section of the website showcasing all the videos from our YouTube channel, with the ability to filter by speaker or teacher
• Developed three alternative designs for the video pages, including a swipeable single-video view and a filterable grid by teacher
• Added videos and interviews to the profile pages of our Authors and Experts, with teachers identified automatically from video titles
• Set up automatic synchronization between our YouTube channel and our own video database
• Added new teachers to the content management system, with a ranking for sorting
• Enhanced the mobile view of all video sections

Search, Tags & SEO

• Enabled searching and listing of all videos from the main search page
• Fixed search in Japanese and corrected search ranking
• Added a Tags section to the homepage with a link to a full tags page, breadcrumb navigation, sorting by level (Essentials, Tibetan Buddhism, Advanced Studies), and Ukrainian translations
• Excluded the Advanced Sadhanas pages from search engines and from the sitemap, so that their use is restricted to practitioners and are unavailable to the general public

Content Management System

• Enhanced the Document Pool with location paths, filtering, and sorting
• Enabled sorting of Authors and Experts alphabetically by full name, and added a position field for custom ordering
• Enabled senior administrators to delete tags and edit translations directly within the CMS
• Fixed the language switcher and the full-screen HTML editor in the administration panel
• Removed obsolete components inherited from the old administration panel

Performance & Infrastructure

• Upgraded Ruby, the core programming language behind the website, to a newer version for better security and stability
• Migrated the web server from Passenger to Puma behind Nginx, with cluster mode and explicit timeouts for greater stability under load
• Enabled Nginx to serve cached pages directly, so that popular pages are delivered in microseconds without involving the application at all
• Raised server connection and file limits to resolve the errors visitors had occasionally seen under heavy traffic
• Rewrote the redirect system to match addresses instantly rather than searching through thousands of rules in turn — up to 900 times faster for the slowest redirects, with around 40% less processing needed for ordinary page requests
• Optimized the database queries behind the site’s navigation, language selectors, and section navigator, eliminating over 200 unnecessary queries per page view
• Expanded automated testing to cover redirects, page performance, and glossary items
• Corrected the daily scheduled tasks that clear the cache and refresh the homepage and sitemap
• Fixed a range of smaller issues, including horizontal scrolling, broken links on author profiles, and background colors

Thank You for Your Support

None of this progress would be possible without your steadfast support. Your generosity allows us to continue preserving rare teachings, expanding multilingual access, strengthening our technical foundation, and making authentic Buddhist wisdom freely available worldwide.

With your help, we remain dedicated to our mission to “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

• Study Buddhism Website
• Our Instagram
• Our YouTube Channel