Tenam became a monk at 15 years old. He studied at
Dzogchen Monastery for 5 years. At the end of 1988 he started a
2-year pilgrimage through Tibet, taking a few months at a time to
do retreats in caves. In 1991 he went to India to study at the new Dzogchen
Monastery in the south. Two years later, he went to Sikkim to
visit relatives and study English. In 1994 he came to the Nitartha
Document Input Center and since then he has been working for Nitartha International. In 1996
he came to the US with Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and has been
traveling the world with him as his attendant. In 1998, Tenam and
Gerry Weiner developed the Nitartha-Sambhota
Tibetan Software and the Sambhota Unicode Software to help
digitize and preserve important Tibetan texts. He is currently
working on many Nitartha Publications projects. Tenam is Director
of the Nitartha International Document Input Center in Nepal.