My First Year at RYI
It’s been just slightly over a year since I first came to Nepal,
and the question which comes to mind is the one which I was asked most when I
was back in Singapore last December: 'What have you learnt?' I'm not sure what
my friends were expecting - some kind of Buddhist halo around my head perhaps? 😊 They must have been
disappointed, I think.
Academically, it has been a tremendously enlivening (at times
even tear-your-hair-out challenging) year at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute -
from Prof Julia Stenzel, I learnt about the broad outlines of Buddhism's 2600
year-history (further back, if you count the past Buddhas!), and took a deep
dive into Shantideva's 8th-century Buddhist classic, the Bodhicaryāvatāra ('The Way of the Bodhisattva')
taught in the traditional Tibetan Buddhist style in which a lopon or khenpo
(the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a university professor) reads and expounds
on the text verse by verse, with the help of Lopon Drubgyud Sherab and Inka
Wolf.
Through Fr. Greg Sharkey, a Jesuit priest, I became acquainted
with Hinduism and Newari Buddhism (Nepal's indigenous form of Buddhism, which
uniquely preserves Buddhism in a Hindu matrix (Fr Greg Sharkey, quoting Sylvian
Levi), as it would have been lived in India in its first centuries. Prof Dan
McNamara introduced my classmates and I to Buddhism’s key spiritual technology
i.e. the practice of meditation.
I've taken courses in Basic Colloquial Tibetan and Nepali (with
Prof Judith Debbler and Ngawang Choegyal, and Pavitra Paudyal respectively),
and I love seeing how a society's values and history gets reflected in its
language (with the rule of anticipation, for example, in Tibetan, and with the
dizzying number of conjugations that delineate social rank and distance in
Nepali).
Being able to attend the Fall Seminar taught by Chokyi Nyima
Rinpoche (RYI’s founder and the abbot of Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery (the
monastery within which RYI is hosted) was also a precious highlight of the
year. I love how Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche takes such a keen interest in his
students – he pops into our classes every now and then just to say hello, and
it invariably brightens our day when he does so.
All said, I've had some great teachers and made some really good
friends here that have given me a great deal of support and encouragement, and
I've had the good fortune to visit a few Buddhist pilgrimage sites with some of
them, in particular Lumbini, the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama.
I've had some hair-raising moments - including having stayed for
1 week with a Canadian guy who was later arrested by Canadian authorities on
charges of pedophilia, getting serious food poisoning that required re-hydration
at a local hospital, as well as being trapped in my bathroom for 4 hours before
I was freed by my housemate John Allen and landlord Mr Tenpa's combined
efforts.
And I also wrestle with a complex sense of guilt and gratitude
with regards to my mum, whose selflessness is what has allowed me to embark on
this mad learning adventure in the first place.
But I think if I had to say what the one most precious lesson
for me has been, it would probably also be the simplest (on-going,
work-in-progress) realization:
Observing my mind and my reactions to things, I see how I've
been conditioned to feel a perpetual sense of lack, which I incessantly try to
fill through a non-stop process of measurement and achievement.
So, I tell myself that happiness is just around the corner with
the next checkbox ticked, the next purchase, the next trip, the next
awesome/great/wonderful/spectacular accomplishment, when it has already arrived
and is sitting quietly in the corner, waiting for me to notice it and say
hello.
I have learnt and am learning simply this - that life is already
fulfilling in the imperfect here and now. It is here in the constant background
drone of the refrigerator, in the silken spider thread that strings together the
hanging flowerpots, in the breeze overhead that ruffles the prayer flag on the
neighbor's roof, the cackle-chatter of the crows and sparrows.
The Nepalese capture this sense in their most common term of
greeting "Sanchai chha?" "Sancho" is the Nepali word for
"well, healthy, perfect", but when "ai" is added, rather
than intensifying the sense of 'perfection', it tweaks it down a little.
So when you greet someone with "sanchai chha", there
is the acknowledgement that life is a little less than perfect, but that that's
good and fine and right - how things are and ought to be. Some might see it as
defeatism, but it's a wonderful reminder for perfectionist me that this is just
right, that in the imperfect we have already arrived.
That when a drizzle seems to mar an otherwise beautiful sunset, as it did yesterday evening, sometimes that's exactly what's needed to produce a double rainbow in the sky, the moon a little silver disk in between the two rainbows.
(My phone camera couldn't capture the second rainbow but it was
there!)
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