The year was 1982. Land was purchased in the late summer/early fall in Shelburne, MA for the first North American Vipassana Center: Dhamma Dhara. Goenkaji conducted a course there in 1983, and for a while, this was the major hub of Dhamma activity for this tradition in the Western hemisphere. It was an enormous effort to sustain the new center.
Early on, there was a request for supportive materials from the students completing the courses and hoping to continue their practice at home. There was no outlet for recordings or books. At first, an old student would copy the approved discourses on cassette tapes and rubber band them up to distribute at the center after the courses. Even though the student had a good volition, it was still not desirable to have an exchange of money on center property, even to cover the expenses. Goenkaji strongly encouraged that these kinds of transactions occur offsite to protect the pure non-commercial atmosphere. A search began for someone to create a small business separate from the Vipassana organization that could focus on providing supportive Dhamma books and audio materials to the students.
An old student who was in Shelburne to sit a course in the winter of 1985-86, was approached about taking on the task. As she lived in a remote area of California, hoping to one day find a way to serve the Dhamma from that location, she gratefully accepted. With a generous loan from two old students to fund the start-up, Pariyatti Book Service was formed. Even though it was to be operated as a small business, it was understood that financial profit would not be a priority.
The simple enterprise operated out of a small room in a shop building. The product list was printed on a single sheet of paper and the books offered were only those approved by Goenkaji.
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It was a bit of a challenge keeping the inventory available as the books from overseas were mostly sent by sea mail, which could take several months to arrive. The local postmaster was delighted in receiving the uniquely packed shipments from Sri Lanka containing books from Buddhist Publishing Society (BPS). |
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A spontaneous merger between a retail and a wholesale business
At around this time, another old student named Rick Crutcher asked for Goenkaji’s approval to establish a different business called Vipassana Research Publications of America (VRPA) with an aim to bring Tipiṭaka books from India to America.
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The Tipiṭaka is a vast record of the Buddha’s teaching. Back then, Vipassana Research Institute in India was printing 112 volume Tipiṭaka sets in Devanagari script Pāli. VRPA brought over 50 full sets to North America and distributed them free of charge to university libraries, Pāli scholars, monasteries, etc. At the same time, because it was convenient shipments were also set up for the other VRI books, with the goal of distributing them wholesale to the bookstore markets of North America in order to help the public be aware of Vipassana. Pariyatti Book Service was VRPA’s biggest customer. VRPA set up a little office on Roosevelt Avenue in Seattle, USA, in 1995. |
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There was never an intention for VRPA to be a retail business. The office was set up like a warehouse and was not near a commercial center. But someone had the idea to build a website and sell the books online. This was totally new; a revelation. That’s why a merger was able to proceed between Pariyatti Book Service and VRPA. It was a momentous change. The inventory at Pariyatti was sold at cost, a date was set between the friends, and everything at Pariyatti was packed into a van and Rick Crutcher arrived with a truck with a trailer. They met at Denny’s in Grants Pass halfway to make the exchange, and the second phase of Pariyatti was set into motion.
Entering the Digital Age
Back at the office in Seattle, efforts were made right away to set up the new Pariyatti organization. The first website was built in only two days using the clunky early technology that was available. Pariyatti actually launched its website at about the same time as Amazon. Both companies were online booksellers based in Washington State but that is where the similarities ended. It became clear that the bookselling industry was quickly changing when Amazon would purchase books from Pariyatti at wholesale price, and sell below the retail price at which Pariyatti sold them. But Pariyatti's mission was never to make a profit, so early on this encouraged creative thinking about accomplishing the mission of bringing people into contact with the teachings of the Buddha.
Pariyatti had already established a relationship with the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS) in Sri Lanka by this time and had a small inventory of their books. We would place an order to restock occasionally. At some point Pariyatti wanted more copies than BPS could provide for one of the popular titles: The Life of the Buddha. Crutcher sent a letter to the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi asking why BPS didn't have a North American distributor. Bhikkhu Bodhi surprisingly suggested that Pariyatti be the distributor. We agreed after obtaining Goenkaji's approval. Also, Rick requested that BPS set up an email account so that correspondence could go more quickly. Ven. Bodhi responded by email, so therefore we helped BPS enter the digital age!
The story continues as it soon became apparent that BPS still was unable to supply some of their most popular titles in the quantities VRPA/Pariyatti required. In June 1998 Bhikkhu Bodhi suggested as a solution that VRPA/Pariyatti would co-publish their titles in America, which we have been doing since—under the imprint BPS Pariyatti Editions (BPE). In fact, the most popular book sold at Pariyatti is our edition of The Noble Eightfold Path by Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
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As Pariyatti grew, the organization began to have more contacts in the field: other publishers and book vendors in the Buddhist realm. The focus in the book marketplace at the time was mainly on the Mahāyāha tradition, including Zen. The Theravāda tradition—Pariyatti's scope—was less known back then in America. Wisdom (Publications)—already well-established and carrying a successful line of mostly Mahāyāha books—was planning to cease their retail and distributing activities to solely focus on publishing. Wisdom had been the American distributor for the Pali Text Society (PTS) for several years and offered Pariyatti to take it over. So, we also became the distributor for the highly esteemed Pāli Text Society of the UK. Read more on this in previous feature article Distributing PTS. |
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Expanding our publishing arm, we started printing new titles such as The Gem Set in Gold and important works by Vipassana teachers like Paul Fleischman, as well as republishing some core titles from the Vipassana Research Institute (VRI) based in Igatpuri, India, under the imprints Pariyatti Press (PP) and Vipassana Research Publications (VRP). These titles, just like the BPE titles, are printed according to the standards required by North American bookstores. This was an immense amount of work, and Pariyatti began to provide right livelihood to about 8 full-time staff. Read more on Pariyatti publishing (previous feature article).
Becoming a sustainable non-profit
In the late 1990s, Pariyatti never had a surplus. The organization was sustained by generous contributions from a founding supporter. After the dot-com bust, funds were not as easily available, and Pariyatti started the process of becoming a registered non-profit organization so that donations could allow operations to continue. In 2002, Pariyatti received recognition from the US IRS as a 501(c)(3) Charitable Non-Profit Organization. In addition, it was necessary to gradually reduce the staff. Around that same time Pariyatti moved to Onalaska, Washington.
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In the mid-2000s Pariyatti streamlined operations and learned to operate with a very small hard-working team leveraging technology and the support of many volunteers.
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The programming was expanded to offer more resources in more languages. Additionally, the Pariyatti Learning Center was created to provide free online Pāli courses, while other free services—such as Treasures and the Daily Words (ultimately accessible via email, RSS feeds, and a mobile app)—were rolled out, improved, or scaled up. |
20 Years of Daily Words |
As Goenkaji emphasized that studying Pāli helps meditators develop inspiration and understanding of the theoretical aspect of Dhamma, Pariyatti also began facilitating residential Pāli workshops for old students. With the first workshop held in 2012 in the USA, to date workshops have taken place all over the world: in Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, and Spain—all on a donation basis.
A few years before Pariyatti’s 30th anniversary, our pilgrimage program launched, offering Vipassana meditators the opportunity to visit important sites related to the Buddha and the Sangha in India and Nepal (as well as occasional other itineraries) without having to navigate the unfamiliar and often demanding logistics of travelling in that region. Pilgrimages to Burma/Myanmar are currently on hold due to the military coup that took place in February 2021 and the subsequent social, political, and economic turmoil, but the Along the Path itinerary has been on the calendar ever since, roughly three to five times a year, during the best travelling seasons.
Running at a surplus, the pilgrimage program contributes directly to Pariyatti's financial sustainability. The costs for joining a pilgrimage are kept low however; similar routes with other travels agencies are much more more expensive. There are also scholarships available for those (who fit the criteria) who would otherwise not be able to join. It is such a unique offering; a Pariyatti pilgrimage has been likened to a ‘mobile meditation retreat’ by past pilgrims. While the course-like structure of regular sittings supports deep meditation; the shared periods of Noble Speech allow for building friendships on the path.
eBooks for the global community
For a small organisation like ours, traditional publishing was historically capital intensive; offset print runs required an upfront investment of thousands of dollars. Because the larger the print run, the lower the cost per book, deciding on copy counts was always a balancing act. Additionally, because we serve a global community, shipping costs were another crucial factor to consider in our operations. We always tried to keep them as low as possible, shipping with a variety of companies, choosing one or the other depending on format, size, weight, and destination of the shipment.
Amazon was not the first to offer eReaders and eBooks, but they drove the adoption of the format by providing free 3G wireless access, allowing readers to purchase and download books directly to their Kindle devices from anywhere. When Amazon consolidated its publishing tools into the early Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) portal for authors and publishers in 2011, we started offering eBooks, giving readers an alternative that avoided shipping fees entirely. We started by making new releases available in eBook format; today most of the Pariyatti Publishing catalog is available in ePUB, Mobi, and PDF format.
Maturing from 30 to 40
In the past ten years we have kept maturing and expending our services, aiming to offer as many resources freely or at as low a cost as possible. We have made it our policy to offer a free PDF of every book Pariyatti publishes. For copyright purposes the PDFs are non-printable, but this way everyone can have access to our titles for free. The eBook bundles that include re-flowable formats ePUB and Mobi are kept at a fixed low price as well.
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Over a hundred Pariyatti audiobooks have been released in recent years for free download or streaming. Many of our audiobooks are Bodhi Leaves or Wheel Publications (BPS) and are narrated by volunteer narrators; several of our own original publications have also been released as an audiobook, as read by the author. |
Our Dana Distribution Fund allows us to give books away to monks, nuns, monasteries, and Vipassana centers; our Books for Prisoners Fund supports book donations to prisons ans prisoners. View all Funds.
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In 2019, a volition that traced back to around 2005—when current Executive Director Brihas Sarathy was involved as a volunteer and later board member—finally came to fruition with the publication of Dhammapada: Verses & Stories. It was the first title released under the imprint MPA Pariyatti Editions (MPE), which publishes works from the Myanmar Piṭaka Association (formerly the Burma Piṭaka Association).
Covid
When Covid hit in 2020, most of Pariyatti’s staff was already working remotely (except our on-location warehouse/bookstore staff member in Onalaska). Where the majority of the world slowed down during the initial lockdowns and the subsequent waves of restrictions, Pariyatti staff kept operations running as usual—some departments even scaled up their output, as we were well aware that it was an opportune time for our audience to dedicate time to their practice of Dhamma while they had to stay confined to their homes. We wanted to support them in inspiration and practice.
In April 2020, when about half of the world's population was under some form of lockdown, we started Dhamma Story Time (DST), a series of sessions in which volunteers read inspirational excerpts from our catalog. Although with a modest number of participants at times, the reading sessions were well-loved and ran for a good three years.
DST fell under the umbrella of Pariyatti Presents…, an event program that we had set up in 2017 to foster learning from authors and other speakers, as inspiration for all on the path of Dhamma. The initial idea had been to invite speakers to the USA for in-person events, but due to logistics only one event had actually taken place thus far. With the wide-spread adoption of Zoom during the pandemic, we decided to move onto this medium and facilitate online events, with the first taking place early 2021. These have continued steadily since, with several events in the sub-series Reflections from Vipassana teachers scheduled for the final quarter of 2026.
Meanwhile, our publisher dedicated significant additional time to editing audiobooks to accommodate an influx of volunteer narrators with extra time on their hands, supporting this wonderful opportunity for them to develop their paramis through Dhamma work.
Changing (publishing) landscape
Our publishing model had started changing as well. We had been experimenting with print-on-demand (POD) since our distributor at the time launched that option in 2012. We incorporated POD for a few titles but in the end we found their workflow to be cumbersome. When KDP and Amazon’s digital publishing infrastructure earned wider credibility as a reliable alternative to traditional print runs we started using it for print books as well—around 2020—as it made our new releases more easily available globally, without those high international shipping costs. We’ve rolled out POD for our entire catalog since then; the POD volume grew rapidly from 3,167 units in 2020 to over 13,500 units per year.
With increasingly less space needed for Pariyatti Publishing stock, we started looking for a smaller urban warehouse location. In the rural town of Onalaska, Washington, we had struggled at times to find employees, so in July 2021 we moved the bulk of our warehouse operations across state lines to Hillsboro, Oregon. We expected that a satellite city would provide us with a larger pool to draw from, and so far it’s worked out well.
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Our Hillsboro site is our main location for processing orders, but for now we keep the warehouse in Onalaska on, for some back-stock books on pallets, books set aside for distribution to prisoners, and stock for the Day-11 store and the Bargain Bin. |
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As worldwide interest in the teachings of the Buddha continues to grow, we know that a lot of work remains to be done. Pariyatti, throughout its history, has been guided by a volunteer Board of Directors, to whom we would like to express extra gratitude during our 40th anniversary. Alongside their ongoing stewardship, the hands, hearts, and minds of many volunteers have been instrumental in other projects over the past decade, like the Pariyatti Journal, our new mobile app, and in bringing Wisdom titles to the Indian market.
May these ongoing efforts continue to be of much benefit and support to practitioners everywhere in their study and practice of Dhamma.