RYI STUDENT BLOG

Congratulations to Sophie Greenewalt, who after only two years of Tibetan study is already translating for the Shedra! The she recently translated for a three week short course on The 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva taught by one of our monastery’s newer teachers, Lopon Drupgyu Tendar. In Sophie’s own words: 'I like to listen so I figured I would like translating. In the past three weeks I have learned that translating is more than just listening. I have never had to listen so carefully and I have never been responsible for someone's words in such an immediate way. Nor have I been put on the spot for such an extended period of time.  It's not easy. But, fortunately, I had this opportunity to practice and am slowly becoming accustomed to awkwardly molding Tibetan sentences into English in front of a room of staring people. One has to start somewhere and translating for a short course was a good place to start. I hope the Shedra will continue to provide opportunitie...

The months of March/April are a really nice time to be in Nepal. The temperature in the last weeks has been on average 27 degrees Celsius throughout the day and thus the field trip organized by the shedra was a very much welcomed change of the schedule. The main destination of the two busses filled with students that left Boudha at 8:00 in the morning, was Namo Buddha.  This very important Buddhist pilgrimage site is related to one of the marvelous deeds performed by Buddha Shakyamuni in the lifetime directly preceding his enlightenment. It is said that the Buddha, at that time a young prince, after having seen a starving tigress that was unable to provide its cubs enough food, out of pure empathy and altruism, created a wound in his arm from which the tiger could drink to recoup her strength and then gave his entire body to the tigress, and was devoured. On the way to Namo Buddha one passes the actual campus of the Kathmandu University (KU) in Dulikhel and we used that oc...

As part of the second year philosophy class we need to write a term paper. This time our instructor, Khenpo Sherab Dorje, and translator, Catherine Dalton, gave us a wonderful opportunity to choose our topic from the text we are studying, Madhyantavibhanga by Maitraiya, and to analyze it through our own unique perspective and original ideas instead of copycat the ideas of the philosophical texts. I thought it was a great chance to write about a topic that I am not forced to write about, but to develop my thoughts about a topic that really interests me and that has had an important influence on me through listening and reflecting on it. Therefore, for my paper topic I choose “time.” In class one day we had a discussion on that topic, and that teaching had a great impact on me. My reflections on time floated in my mind for days, and that is why I would like to share these thoughts with more people. Through my understanding and what we discussed in class, ‘time’ is totally a mental a...