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 Bodhicary ā vat ā ra ('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 She...