Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

As spring arrived and the year continued to unfold, with many in the northern hemisphere experiencing heatwaves over the last few weeks, our work at Study Buddhism carried forward with the same heat and momentum, leading to deepening engagement and continued technical innovation. During this three-month period, we welcomed 600,000 unique visitors, who read more than 1.1 million articles across our multilingual platform.

Our readers were most engaged with Fourteen Questions to Which Buddha Remained Silent (English), What Is Buddhism (English, Japanese), What Is the Dharma? (English), 8 Buddhist Tips for Dealing with Anger (English), and What Is Prayer in Buddhism? (English). English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Italian were the most widely read languages, with the majority of users coming from the United States, Germany, India, Italy, and France. These figures reflect both the continuing global reach of the Berzin Archives’ Study Buddhism project and the sustained interest in the reliable, carefully presented Buddhist teachings in multiple languages that we offer.

Our presence on social media saw exceptional growth this quarter, driven largely by the release of our interview with Venerable Matthieu Ricard. Over the past three months our YouTube content garnered 420,000 views—more than a quarter of a million of them from the Ricard interview alone, in which we explored modern society, the urgent need for altruism, and the worrying rise of artificial intelligence with no ethical boundaries. Altogether, viewers spent the equivalent of some 900 days continuously watching our videos. Meanwhile, over on Facebook and Instagram we delivered a further 300,000 views, many generated by older archival content that we continue to re-share with new audiences.

A major highlight of this quarter was the combination of extensive new content production—including the copyediting and publication of previously unpublished manuscripts by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey—with substantial technical upgrades to the website’s video infrastructure, search, server performance, and content management system. We also began the project of integrating an AI chatbot, enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation, to help visitors explore the teachings on our site. These developments strengthen both the preservation of authentic teachings and the long-term sustainability of our digital platform.

Here are some of our major accomplishments from March through May 2026:

Content & Translations

Composed and published:

• How the Prasanga Method Proves Something by Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II
• From Violence to Transformation in Buddhism and Islam by Dr. Mohammed Ashath

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

• Interview with Khandro Kunga Bhuma Rinpoche

Copyedited and published:

• 11 chapters (18 parts) from the unpublished manuscript of an expanded, re-edited second edition of Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice, vol. 1 – Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey
• 4 chapters (5 parts) from the unpublished manuscript of Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice, vol. 2 – Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey

Recorded, AI-transcribed, and copyedited seminars taught by Dr. Berzin:

• A Healthy Relation with a Spiritual Teacher (1 session)
• Karma (3 sessions)
• Buddhist Technical Terminology (1 session)

Copyedited transcripts of weekly classes by Dr. Berzin:

• 24 classes on Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior

Conducted AI transcription and copyediting of the English translations of:

• Yamantaka Guru-Yoga and Associated Practices – Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche I (3 parts)
• Yamantaka Self-Initiation – Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche I (6 parts)

Began copyediting 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 181 article translations from English into 13 of our other 36 languages, including:

• Italian (45)
• Russian (32)
• Spanish (22)
• Ukrainian (14)
• French (12)

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 Ling Rinpoche in Berlin, Germany
• Conducting of a video interview with Lelung Rinpoche in London, United Kingdom
• Conducting of a video interview with Lama Jampa Thaye in London, United Kingdom
• Conducting of a video interview with Venerable Losang Gendun in Helsinki, Finland
• Conducting of a video interview with Dr. Martin Kalff in Zurich, Switzerland
• Edited and released four longer-form videos from our interview with Venerable Guo Xing of the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, on Chan Buddhism, koans, Bodhidharma, and related topics. We published the full interview on YouTube with a dedicated playlist, individual thumbnails, video descriptions, teasers, and English subtitles. Then, we added subtitles for each video in over 40 other languages and created 8 Instagram-ready clips, 8 Facebook-ready clips, 8 X-ready clips, and 8 Shorts/Reels (mini-clips) from this content.
• Edited and released four longer-form videos from our interview with Venerable Matthieu Ricard. We published the full interview on YouTube with a dedicated playlist, individual thumbnails, video descriptions, teasers, and English subtitles and added subtitles for each video in over 40 other languages. We then created 22 Instagram-ready clips, 22 Facebook-ready clips, 22 X-ready clips, and 22 Shorts/Reels (mini-clips) from this content.
• Prepared 12 visual quotes from video interviews and other sources for Facebook, Instagram, and X
• Produced and uploaded 12 video clips optimized for: Facebook with 37-language subtitles, X with embedded English subtitles and Instagram in 9:16 vertical format with embedded English subtitles.
• Created 12 article-based posts introducing key content to social audiences
• Designed and dispatched nine newsletters to our over 10,000 Mailchimp subscribers

Technical Improvements

Homepage & Video

• Added a section on the homepage showing the top three most popular articles of the day (currently active for English, Russian, and Ukrainian locales)
• Integrated video search across the website, including a dedicated tab for videos alongside articles in the search results
• Overhauled the video management system by creating a dedicated database table for videos
• Refactored the video model to support fetching and importing video data directly from our Study Buddhism YouTube channel and saving it to the database
• Formatted video view counts into a user-friendly format
• Optimized and sped up full-text search for videos, making it up to ten times faster
• Added 14 new videos to the homepage rotation pool

Web Server

• Resolved server performance issues by fixing the “heavy load / queue full” message
• Dedicated more CPU and memory resources to the main site
• Improved security and performance following heavy bot activity
• Enabled HTTP/2 support and set up Gzip compression for faster page loads
• Configured HTTPS redirection at the Nginx server level
• Migrated the scroll-restoration mechanism from cookies to local storage to resolve cookie overflow and bad-request errors caused by excessive scroll-history cookies

New CMS & Administrative Features

• Overhauled the CMS to support video management
• Improved pagination styling across multiple admin views (document pool, glossary, redirects, tags, and users)
• Increased the pagination limit to 20 items per page (previously 10)
• Added search-by-title functionality in the CMS, retaining the search term in the search box for a better user experience
• Enhanced the document pool view with formatted dates for the created, updated, and published fields, a status tag for the published field, and corrected default sorting
• Added a “Delete” action in the CMS
• Cleaned up the CMS interface

Search

• Added search pagination styling and a wrapper for the Search and Tag pages
• Made search pagination responsive and optimized for small mobile screens
• Created support for exact-match searching using quotation marks
• Prioritized exact, un-stemmed matches (e.g., a search for “Mind” displays “Mind” before “Mindfulness”)
• Changed sorting to display first those articles matching the search term in their title
• Refactored the search-tab layout and moved search logic into the controller for cleaner code

Glossary & Site Navigation

• Refactored the glossary layout using modern CSS Grid
• Implemented breadcrumb navigation for the glossary index and letter-specific index pages
• Enhanced the “About Us” and “Messages from the Lamas” pages with multi-level breadcrumb navigation
• Fixed a user-interface bug in the breadcrumb styling

In Progress

• Integrating an AI chatbot into the website
• Adding retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to the chatbot so it can answer questions about the website’s content
• Creating new design elements and user-interface improvements for pages across the website

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:

• Our Website
• Our Instagram
• Our YouTube Channel