Light of Buddhadharma Foundation International was inspired and established by Venerable Tarthang Tulku, founder and Head Lama of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center in California, USA. Ven. Tarthang Tulku was born in Eastern Tibet, where he studied with many of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist masters of the twentieth century.

After leaving Tibet, he taught from 1962 to 1968 at Sanskrit University in Varanasi, India, where he also established one of the first printing presses abroad to print sacred Tibetan texts. Since 1969 he has lived and worked in America. There he has actualized a long-range vision of preserving ancient teachings of the Buddha and transmitting them to the modern world.

In 1983, Ven. Tarthang Tulku established the Yeshe De Project, which focuses on preservation and translation of sacred texts. In 1989, he founded the annual Nyingma Monlam Chenmo, now attended each year by more than 10,000 monks. He has also the founder of Dharma College which is based in the heartland of Berkeley, California.