RYI STUDENT BLOG

Far away from what we m ight call home, and yet Christmas here still feels like family. Never do I walk in the street without meeting a friend, or feel like a stranger in these streets that are so much like a village to us, full of known places and faces. Without any of the commercialization of Christmas, the Christmas song and advertisement overkill, or any of the family obligations, perhaps somehow even some appreciation of Christmas is born. Celebrating with close friends, thinking of the values Christmas used to represent, I find myself enjoying it, and realize it actually shares a lot with the way Buddhists celebrate holidays: generosity, sharing, charity… and of course, going to see the new Star Wars movie, where many of the remaining RYI students and staff met the day after Christmas. Which goes to show that things aren’t so different here, sometimes… and have become much more like home than strange cities where you never meet anyone you know in the movies by chance. So...

What it means to share our favorite pizza with someone else? What it means to repay the kindness of our parents & people around in deepest sense? What it means to be a ‘True Warrior’?  For Bodhisattva Shantideva, it is not an uncanny affair but an ‘indispensable attitude’ or a ‘truth’ for fulfilling our own aspiring vision of ‘paradise’ of peace & harmony, yet we keep on forgetting such a simple raw blatant truth, we miss it. Though, we don’t miss to ‘look’ but we do miss to ‘see’ it, we ‘hear’ but we don’t ‘listen’, Shantideva keeps on striking the same chord again & again through his amazing lines of reasoning on ‘meditation on bodhichitta’ in the text Bodhicharyavatara.  I am fortunate along with many other friends to study this awesome text with, Khenpo Urgyen’s in-depth commentary & our eloquent translator Joost, and right now we have just finished with the meditation chapter. Part of the chapter was on generating bodhichitta through ‘equalizing ...

    Normally socializing can be a bit difficult especially when we are new students. However, joining in Shedra Futsal Group made my social life easy and fun.  Every semester, we RYI students make up teams and play together in an Arena. For me, Shedra Futsal Group became the bridge to connect with others shedra students and teachers of RYI.  It is coherent that there are many benefits of playing soccer. It increases our aerobic capacity, lowers body fat, increases bone strength and improves cardiovascular health and so on. These are just few health benefits of playing soccer.  On top of that, there are many social benefits by engaging in soccer group.  Personally, this is the best thing that I always look forward on Friday. The wonderful thing is that I get to burn my unwanted fats and most importantly, I get to socialize with other students, teachers besides my class mates.  What I really like about Shedra Futsal Gro...

I have first come to Baudhanath in the autumn of 2001, met Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and stayed for the annual seminar. On its last day I went up to Rinpoche and asked if I should stay on for the winter programme, and he told it's a wonderful idea.  This was my first introduction to Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy in the Tibetan tradition as we studied The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa. The next year the BA programme started at RYI for the first time, and I stayed for one year, but felt more inclined to go for retreats. I felt at the time like focusing on meditation practice and was not sure if academic studies were my thing.  After quite a few years of doing this and that, basically roaming around in Samsara, I started to feel again a very deep urge to study the Buddha Dharma in earnest. That was exactly two years ago, while I was living in Bodhgaya and Rinpoche arrived there, as he does almost each October. Approaching him, he immediately saw right...