Our Mission

H. H. the Dalai Lama asked His friends to establish a Tibet House US (THUS), as a Culture Center, during His first US visit in 1979. His Holiness’ long term, unwavering focus on Tibet Houses around the world fulfills his expressed wish for people to discover the evident fruits of the wisdom and compassion principles central to Tibetan culture, also found in all world religions. Now, Tibet’s mainstream, buddhistic yet pluralistic culture of ecological wisdom, social compassion, and international peace is on the brink of extinction. Preserving, promoting, and presenting that culture, we encourage all planetary fellow citizens to love Tibet and join the effort to protect it.

Now in its 36th year, THUS does the work in its Cultural Embassy in New York City, in its Menla Tibetan medicine healing center in the Catskill mountains, and through its online global outreach to all those interested in Tibet. THUS shines a bright light on Tibet’s culture, showing its orientation toward enlightenment’s sciences and arts, which delivered to the good people of that land meaningful and cheerful lives for over a thousand years. Though it took them fifty generations, the Tibetans transformed their nation from a conquering empire into a largely demilitarized country, valuing learning, self-realization, kindness, and creativity. Tibet’s vast high plateau is as big as the US west of the Mississippi. Its snow-fed glaciers give rise to Asia’s greatest rivers, sustaining billions of people and animals. During the millenniums of imperialist invasions all around it, its remote land was a secure treasury for Asia’s most sophisticated spiritual arts and sciences. Today, with its unique culture mostly suppressed on its own soil, its key people in diaspora in exile display their extraordinary qualities as models for others. We all together are enduring this chaotic era, all being deeply troubled by our short-sighted leaders, by their wars, interior violence, their ruin of land and sea, climate and atmosphere, and their reckless devastation of our planetary home. We find encouragement by learning how Tibetans were happy in balance on their high plateau.

THUS’ City Center is a cultural embassy in 7,000 square feet, with gallery and lecture space, a shrine room, photographic archives, audio-visual resources, a 1,000+-volume lending library, and offices. THUS also was given and has developed the beautiful 330 forest acre Menla Spa Resort and Conference Center in a Catskill hidden valley near Phoenicia, New York. The Menla ( “Medicine Buddha”) Center serves as THUS’ transmitter of Tibetan healing arts and enlightening sciences, Tibetan Medicine wisdom being a most important offering of Tibetan culture to a world filled with suffering beings. From these two Centers, THUS reaches out to the world through our websites, www.thus.org and www.menla.org, offering extensive learning programs, conferences, exhibits, print publications and media productions, all to help people cultivate a better quality of life within the the frameworks of their own cultures and spiritualities.. THUS works with the Tibetan diaspora institutions in India—Norbulingka Institute, the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, Tibetan Medicine Institute, and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives—and with the Tibet Houses in New Delhi (the original), and, in their various stages of development, Tibet Houses in Frankfurt, Mexico City, London, Moscow, Zurich, Milano, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Taipei, to promote Tibetan culture worldwide, helping more people to learn to love Tibet.