Thubten Yeshe (1935–1984) was a Tibetan lama who, while exiled in Nepal, co-founded Kopan Monastery (1969) and the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (1975). He followed the Gelugpa tradition, and was considered unconventional in his teaching style.

Lama Yeshe was born near the Tibetan town of Tolung Dechen, but was sent to Sera Monastery in Lhasa at the age of six. He received full ordination at the age of 28 from Kyabje Ling Rinpoche. Jeffrey Paine reports that Lama Yeshe deliberately refused the geshe degree, despite having studied for it:

Sera Monastery did award him an honorary geshe degree in the early 80s. He also used to joke that he was a Tibetan hippie: "I dropped out!"^{[citation needed]}

With the Chinese invasion in 1959 Lama Yeshe made his way to Bhutan and thence to the Tibetan refugee camp at Buxaduar, India. There his teacher Geshe Rabten entrusted to his care a younger monk, Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. The two would work together throughout Lama Yeshe's life.

The Venerable Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche (Tibetan: ཡེ་ཤེས་བློ་གསལ་, Wylie: Ye-shes Blo-gsal) is a lama and tulku in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism and abbot of the Samye Ling Monastery, Scotland, the first and largest of its kind in the West.

Born in 1943 into a farming family in Kham, East Tibet, he was given the name Jamphel Drakpa, or Jamdrak for short. He spent his early childhood close to nature helping with the family sheep and yaks and playing with the other children in the village. This changed when at 10 years old as he was selected to go with his elder brother Choje Akong Rinpoche - who had been recognised as a tulku by the 16th Karmapa - to the Lhakang Monastery where he was to receive an education. Although Akong was only three years older than Jamdrak, it was the tradition that where a tulku is the abbot of a monastery one of his brothers goes to assist him. It is said that many auspicious signs had been seen when Jamdrak was born and he had also been recognised as a tulku, but not officially confirmed due to the political turbulence of the time. At Lhakang Jamdrak was a reluctant but diligent scholar under a succession of lamas, but his studies were rudely interrupted by the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959.