Library of Tibetan Works and Archives
Culture Research and Publication
Since the forceful invasion of our country, Tibet and as soon as we were forced to leave our heavenly abode & flee to India, our temporal and spiritual leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai lama, with great far sighted vision of reviving & preserving our rich culture & heritage on this global platform, he established Tibetan government in exile (CTA). And also fulfilling the needs of all the Tibetan people, he established schools, centers for education and the monasteries for spiritual study and practices. And for the general public, he established Tibetan settlements. Moreover, from all the projects those were being established for preserving & expanding of Tibetan educational systems, one of the first among them was the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives in 1971, and gradually Tibetan Publication & Cultural research Department has become one of the pioneering departments of this institution.
As we learned that initially this department was formed as an editorial committee and their members were Dakyab Rinpoche, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, Tashi Tsering and few others. Gradually this department made steady headway into being a Tibetan Publication project, and it has been continuing until now. After being formed as a separate department, first & foremost head of this department was Tashi Tsering who is the present director of AMI, Dharamshala. He took preretirement from the institute in the year 1999. After him Geshe Ngawang Lungtok from Gomang Monastery became the head of the department. Then from the year 2005, Sangye Tandar Naga took the responsibility as the head of this department until now. At present, we have four members of staff led by our head, Acharya Sangye T. Naga, Geshe Ngedon Gyatso, Geshe Lobsang Yarphel, and Shastri Kunsang Choedon.
This department fulfills two main activities: firstly most of the Tibetan related publications are published from here and also in the recent years, as with growing facilities we were able to publish good number of well-researched and essential books in terms of quality & quantity. There have been several times that we had to publish out of order in sequence because of their urgency.
Generally most of our books except a few are published 500 copies, and we reprint them as soon as it’s out of stock. Sometimes when we publish large books, then it crosses the limit of our publication budget and thus we had to stop publishing any kind of book for the time being. Mostly the topics/titles of our books are on Traditional fields of learning including history. We do not publish any religious text in particular as these are being published by the respective monasteries. However when we feel it is absolutely necessary, of course we publish. And we hope to fulfill the needs of the Tibetan language readers by publishing some new long story books that were published in Tibet.
Secondly, our department provides a Tibetan Language teacher for the Tibetan Culture workshop &Intensive Translation Program for 2 and 3 months respectively. Furthermore, we hold a morning language class every day for one hour at least six months in a year.
In total we have been able to published 407 Tibetan books and 234 English books since 1972 & 1973 respectively.