Ringu Tulku Rinpoche has been teaching around the world since the early nineties and many of these teachings were recorded and diligently stored away. Many were also kindly sent in to Maria Huendorf in Germany to be archived. The aim of the Ringu Tulku Archive website is to present as many of these recordings as possible.
Since 2015, Rinpoche has been making audio recordings of most of his talks and teachings. These recordings are then automatically uploaded to the Archive and we are now able to share these recordings on the website almost as soon as they arrive. This means that Archive members can listen to these recordings as Rinpoche travels around the globe.
It is Rinpoche’s wish that as time goes on this website will become a key portal where he will be able to both communicate with his students and also deliver and curate longer courses and series of teachings for different levels and stages along the path. We hope that in the near future our Courses section will become alive with an array of rich and diverse courses that members of any level and experience can follow.
History
The online Ringu Tulku Teachings Archive is a continuation of the archiving process that began when Ringu Tulku Rinpoche started teaching in the west in 1990. Many places made audio recordings of these teachings and then shared them with Maria Huendorf in Hamburg. For the best part of two decades, Maria diligently gathered as many audio recordings as she could. These came in the form of tapes, then CD’s and then other digital formats. In more recent years video recordings were also made and sent to the archive. To help handle these much larger files, Arne Schelling joined Maria as the video archivist. Around this time, Maria was also assisted by Peter Schulz who bravely took on the huge task of digitising all the old audio tape recordings.
As Ringu Tulku Rinpoche began to teach more and more each year, the archive grew and grew. At the same time the technical ability to gather these digitised recordings onto to a website became more and more feasible for a voluntary organisation such as Bodhicharya. Or so we hoped!
In 2014, Paul O’Connor and Minna Stenroos met with Maria and Arne in Berlin and made an initial plan to take the idea of an online archive website forward. Paul built and maintains the main Bodhicharya website. Minna administers the existing online teaching both there and on the YouTube channel. It was felt that the sheer quantity of digital material now in the archive was starting to become unwieldy to navigate. It was also a shame that these teachings were not easily accessible to Rinpoche’s students. And so the project to find a large digital storage and delivery platform began.
The Archive website was launched in August 2017. As of August 2022, there are 770 teachings on the website.