Alexander Berzin began his study of Buddhism in 1962 and received his PhD in 1972 from Harvard University. Inspired by the process through which Buddhism was transmitted from one Asian civilization to another and how it was translated and adopted, his focus has been, ever since, on bridging traditional Buddhist and modern Western cultures.Dr. Berzin was resident in India for 29 years, where he studied and practiced widely the Tibetan traditions and translated for many of the greatest masters, including occasionally the Dalai Lama. He helped organize several international projects for the Dalai Lama, including Tibetan medical aid for victims of the Chernobyl disaster; preparation of basic Buddhist texts in colloquial Mongolian to help with the revival of Buddhism in Mongolia; and initiation of a Buddhist-Muslim dialogue in universities in the Islamic world.Since 1980, Dr. Berzin has traveled the world, lecturing on Buddhism in universities and Buddhist centers in over 70 countries. A prolific author and translator, Dr. Berzin has published 17 books. At the end of 1998, Dr. Berzin returned to the West with about 30,000 pages of his unpublished manuscripts, transcriptions and translations. Convinced of the benefit of this material and determined that it not be lost, he named it the “Berzin Archives” and settled in Berlin, Germany. There, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, he set out to make this vast material freely available to the world on the Internet, in as many languages as possible.Thus, the Berzin Archives website went online in December 2001 and is now available in 37 languages. The present version of the website, (http://studybuddhism.com) is the next step in Dr. Berzin’s lifelong commitment to building a bridge between the traditional Buddhist and modern worlds. By guiding the teachings across the bridge and showing their relevance to modern life, his vision has been that they would help to bring emotional balance to the world.