RYI STUDENT BLOG

This is my last semester at RYI!!! Amazing, we are already at the second half of the spring semester. When I started my BA years ago, I thought this time would never come and four years felt like a lifetime. However, now I feel like it was only yesterday I arrived in Kathmandu, and I almost wish I could do the whole thing again. It was so nice to come to Nepal and know absolutely nothing about Nepal! At that time I did not even know that buff momos are better than vegetable momos, and I still enjoyed the Nepali traffic because it was “fun” compared to the traffic back home:) The only bad thing I can say about the early days was that I didn’t realize how amazing an opportunity it is to get to study Tibetan, Philosophy, and so forth in such an amazing monastery, and therefore I was quite lazy. I could have learned the basics of Tibetan and academic paper writing much earlier if I had been smarter back then. In spite of that however, I am so happy that I decided to stay in Nepal and...

I took this photo when I finished school one day, chancing upon the monks who had just finished their evening Puja. Their yellow robes were rather conspicuous against the white walls and marble ground. This reminds me of some words said by previous masters in those commentaries, that one should respect even tiny piece s of red or yellow cloth , as they are representations  of the auspicious Three Jewels. In this so-called " time of degeneration " , we are still able to study full-time the dharma, the scientific method that brings mundane and super-mundane benefits to both ourselves and others, and get to call ourselves practitioners , I guess for this , or for this scene alone , I am already grateful. This is my first time in this country. As a first-year BA student at Rangjung Yeshe Institute, my focus here is on the Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy. The language course here is very intensive: B efore I came here, I’ve finished the alphabet and pronun...

  Once, in the middle of a conversation, someone asked me: “Why are you here at RYI?” For a few seconds, many things came to my mind, but my answer was pretty straightforward: “I am here because I want to study the Dharma”.  Later on, I thought that this was an interesting question; a question I have asked myself several times throughout the academic year in different ways. Usually, at the beginning of the semester, when everything is smooth and relaxed, the question arises as a joyful expression: “Why have not I come here earlier?” However, with the stress for the assignments and the exams, the question turns into a more comic expression. Sometimes with a certain rebellious mood: “What the heck am I doing here?” Or some other times even with a deep existential inquiry: “What is the real meaning of all these studies?” Luckily, all these questions vanish when the exams are over and I am enjoying my holidays…   Nonetheless, I want to answer again this questi...