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Ribur Rinpoche Fund
As an act of remembrance and commitment to the ideals of the late Ven. Ribur Rinpoche, HTD has created the Ribur Rinpoche Fund to provide Tibetan monks and nuns living in the South Indian refugee settlements with medical insurance. Rinpoche always maintained a deep sense of responsibility to the monastic community living in the monasteries and nunneries in the settlements, particularly those in need of quality health care.
Rinpoche was a remarkable man. Following the Chinese occupation,
he was subjected to 17 years of imprisonment and torture, including
some 35 of the notorious "struggle sessions" during the Cultural
Revolution. He was exiled in 1985, never to see his homeland again.
I first met Rinpoche in 1996 in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas
at Dharamsala. I've never known a kinder being. He overflowed with
love, mischief and ferocious energy. He was always fun and
fascinating. No matter how painful his body, one always left him
with the surety that all good things were possible and liberation
inevitable.
During his imprisonment and after, a primary concern of Rinpoche
and something he spoke of constantly, was the future survival and
continuity of Tibetan Buddhism, which he felt was in the hands
of the trained geshes and khenpos and the monastic institutions
that produced them, nearly all of which were destroyed by the Chinese
in the 1960's. These great seats of learning, which were essentially
the Harvards, Princetons and Yales of Central Asia, have been slowly
rebuilt in exile, mostly in the South of India.
Rinpoche saw that ill health and accidents in the monastic population
were posing a serious threat to the transmission of knowledge and
spiritual practice to the next generation. For impoverished monks
and nuns living in remote refugee settlements, access to advanced
medical care was simply beyond their means and the monasteries
did not have the resources to cover catastrophic illnesses and
accidents.
Ribur Rinpoche's first and most urgent request of me was to create a medical fund to take care of these needs. In 1999 the Tibetan Health Initiative was launched to provide primary and catastrophic medical care, including life-saving operations to Tibetan monks and nuns in need. Hundreds of lives have been profoundly affected and in the process the monasteries have been greatly strengthened.
Over the years, we have evolved this innovative and unique model that is essentially an integrated medical insurance program. In January of 2003, we sponsored a major evaluation of the program by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The researchers' enthusiasm led us to undertake a major expansion of the Initiative in cooperation with the Biocon Foundation, which has led to our current enrollment level of more than 5,000 monks and nuns.
Through our expanded program, access to quality care can be in
reach for this entire community. A gift of $100 to the Ribur
Rinpoche Fund will pay health insurance premiums for more
than 20 monks and nuns for a year, while $250 will provide benefits
to more than 50. The potential of this program is great, and I
have personally pledged to match the moneys raised for the Fund to
help realize it.
In addition to profoundly impacting the Tibetan exile community,
we feel this innovative and unique program could serve as a model
for refugee health care around the world, and with your help we
will be able to share it with people around the globe.
Supporting the Ribur Rinpoche Fund offers a unique opportunity
to commemorate one man's remarkable life by transforming into reality
his vision of providing health care to the community he served
and loved. Your commitment will concretely change the lives of
these men and women for the better and make a genuine contribution
to the preservation of Tibetan knowledge and culture.
Thank you for joining us in this unique and important endeavor.
Richard Gere
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