RYI STUDENT BLOG

Chö kyi Nyima Rinpoche urges us to become scholar-practitioners. At the same time, Rinpoche and other lamas, khenpos, lop ö ns and the texts themselves often warn us against becoming merely “dry scholars.” The tri-fold approach to studying philosophy that is urged upon as at RYI—listening, contemplating, and meditating—is precisely a method to bring vitality to study, to make it into lived experience. One of the texts that we study is Ju Mipham Rinpoche’s Gateway to Knowledge . It is easy enough to imagine that this compendium of abhidharma, tightly packed with taxonomies, categories and lists, would be a dry philosophical text. As a phenomenology of all that appears and all that we experience, however, I find the more I study it, the more I think about it, the more it is on my mind, then the more the text comes alive and presents itself in life, as life, as if I can read it there everyday, everywhere. For example, suffering—the first noble truth (which Mipham details acc...

Goethe once wrote:  “Mountains are silent teachers that make taciturn students.”  I really like this sentence, because it's so true. Mountains have something fascinating about them, and I heard so many people say that it is almost impossible to not start thinking when you see those majestic, beautiful things. That mountains seem to be floating on clouds, as if not really real and without any contact to the ground, and also both so far away and very close at the same time. To me it is no wonder that people start believing in gods or the like, just looking at mountains. I guess Nepal with all it's mountains is basically predestined to spirituality, just because of having mountains. Right now it's Friday, I'm in Bandipur, one of my favorite places in Nepal, and enjoying the view (with mountains, of course). The philosophy class was cancelled (the Khenpos are on a short retreat with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche), but I still feel like I'm getting a little class...

Among the philosophy classes at Rangjung Yeshe, I often like the Khenpo classes the most, and this year I have the opportunity to attend two of them. With these classes one gets to understand well the traditional perspective of the various topics of Buddhist philosophy, which can be not only very meaningful in themselves, but also necessary in order to really know what Buddhism is. There is no ‘a real Buddhism’ separate from its traditions, and whether ancient or not, other than knowing them, there is no study of Buddhism. Yet its topics are far from being easy, which combined with the structure of Sanskrit and Tibetan languages make the oral explanations from the Khenpos even more important, as they avoid both misunderstandings and non-understandings.  One of the texts we are studying, the 'Gateway to Knowledge' from Mipham Rinpoche, is regarded as a foundational text, dealing with Abhidharma material. At first one may think the foundation should be easy, but desp...