How the Khyentse Foundation Promotes Buddhist Teaching and Scholarship
/
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche established the foundation in 2001. Photo: Anang1550/shutterstock
Based in San Francisco, the Khyentse Foundation is one of a number of U.S. charitable organizations inspired by Buddhist thought and teachings. Established in 2001 by Buddhist scholar, teacher, author and filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (also known as Khyentse Norbu), the foundation is dedicated to the support and enhancement of Buddhist study, practice and scholarship around the world. Its focus areas are monastic education, scholarships, endowed university professorships, children’s education and the translation and publishing of Buddhist texts.
The Khyentse Foundation may operate in a niche space in the broader philanthrosphere (see my profile of another Buddhist-inspired funder here), but Khyentse Norbu and his team have addressed a set of challenges that will be familiar to funders of all stripes, such juggling an endowment, tapping reserve funds to compensate for an increase in grantmaking, and acknowledging that some outcomes can’t be easily measured.
Here are some things to know about Khyentse Norbu and the Khyentse Foundation.
It’s a modern-day patron of Buddhist education
Born in 1961 in Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu has studied with some of the leading Tibetan Buddhist masters of the 20th century, oversees monasteries in Bhutan, India and Tibet, and has established dharma centers in Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His creative endeavors include “Living is Dying,” a book examining Buddhist teachings on mortality, and his most recent film, “Looking for a Lady With Fangs and a Moustache,” in which the protagonist embarks on a search for Buddhist wisdom.
Why did Khyentse Norbu start the Khyentse Foundation? As he put it in an interview for Lion’s Roar magazine, Buddhism originally flourished in Asia thanks to its practitioners, but also thanks to its royal patrons — the Chinese and Japanese emperors who paid for monks’ education and living expenses. “But now, it’s modern times and there aren’t big royal families acting as patrons,” he said. “Our aim as Khyentse Foundation is to take their place.”
The Khyentse Foundation is a public charity that raises money and doesn’t derive its assets from a single source. But Khyentse Norbu determined that rather than constantly fundraising to pay for ongoing costs, the foundation should amass an initial endowment of $2.8 million to support its top priority, monastic education. After Khyentse Norbu’s students raised that amount in 18 months, the foundation’s leaders pivoted to raising funds for its scholarship program, and things took off from there.
It’s part of an informal network of like-minded organizations
The Khyentse Foundation is one of a handful of organizations implementing Khyentse Norbu’s vision for preserving and promoting the Buddha’s wisdom.
In 2009, the then-eight-year-old Khyentse Foundation convened more than fifty of the world’s leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers and discovered that 95% of the Tibetan Buddhist canon only existed in classical Tibetan. In response, the foundation began funding a project to translate those works into modern language and make them accessible to the public for free. The project, dubbed “84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha,” was spun off as a standalone 501(c)(3) in 2013. Khyentse Norbu is the founding chair and a board member.
Khyentse Norbu also founded and currently chairs Lotus Outreach, which seeks to provide at-risk women and children with access to education, healthcare and safety. “What began as a small project aiding Tibetan refugees in 1993,” he said on the organization’s site, “has expanded to be an international organization with affiliates in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia dedicated to helping some of the most forgotten, neglected and suffering groups on this earth.”
Finally, Khyentse Norbu is the “inspiration” behind two organizations focused on Buddhist education for children — Middle Way Education (located in Woodstock, New York) and the Middle Way School (Saugerties, New York), where he serves as an advisor.
Its grantmaking dramatically increased through 2022
The Khyentse Foundation received $9 million, $4.8 million and $2.7 million in incoming contributions in the fiscal years ending June 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively. The year 2022 marked the first time its expenditures exceeded income, which prompted the board to tap into the foundation’s reserved assets. “This was not unexpected, however,” wrote executive director Cangioli Che in the foundation’s 2022 annual report, “because we had expanded our activities and made significant investments in endowed chairs, schools for children, translation projects, outreach initiatives, and so on.”
To that point, of the $8.4 million the foundation spent in the fiscal year ending in 2022, the top three purpose areas were the support and expansion of academic study of Buddhism in universities (41% of total funding), translating the Buddha’s teachings into the world’s modern languages (13%) and the preservation of Buddhist texts (11%). The foundation had $48.5 million in net assets at the end of the fiscal year, down 20% compared to $60.3 million the 2021.
Grant recipients included Middle Way Education (two grants totaling $273,455) and the Middle Way School (a $89,396 grant). Others included the Buddhist Digital Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which received three grants totaling $675,000 supporting digital archiving efforts, and Head of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center in Berkeley, California, which netted three project grants — including one for promoting engagement among millennial and Generation Z demographics — totaling $298,337.
“We always need to think ahead”
Khyentse Norbu himself appears to take a relatively hands-off approach to the foundation’s day-to-day operations. (The foundation declined to comment for this piece.) He did, however, deliver a speech to the board of directors in December 2022, and I suspect that his thoughts, which were published in the foundation’s 2022 annual report, may resonate with funding leaders across the board.
Consider, for example, his musings on what is often called performance measurement. Khyentse Norbu acknowledged that the foundation can engage in measurable activities like “facilitating study, research and translation, and organizing events.” That said, there’s a limit to how much the foundation can know with some degree of certainty, such as “if the dharma practice is flourishing or declining. We may say that it’s declining, but how do we know?”
Funding leaders and nonprofits can track how many people, say, attend a community event, but beyond asking every individual to fill out an in-depth survey, how can they know if the programming cultivated a sense of belonging or if that feeling stayed with them six months later? At the expense of reading too much into Khyentse Norbu’s comment, he seems to be saying that there are some things you can’t measure with absolute quantitative precision — a lesson, perhaps, for those in the sector who emphasize metrics above all else when it comes to evaluating impact.
Khyentse Norbu also acknowledged dramatic changes in communication, particularly as it applies to engaging young people. “There is just so much information, so much education, so many things to read, and so many things you hear,” he said. “So how we facilitate educating, teaching and translating — that is going to be a forever ongoing, evolving challenge.” Again, I imagine funders looking to engage younger audiences (and potential donors) can relate.
Moving forward, Khyentse Norbu encouraged the foundation to take an open-minded approach in all facets of its work. “We can be brave in investing in projects, maybe by closing one eye and jumping in to see whether they could lead us somewhere,” he said. “This is just to remind ourselves that we always need to think ahead.”
