RYI STUDENT BLOG

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...

                                                                In the last winter break I went to Lumbini, the birth place of the Buddha for about ten days of semi retreat. There, I've decided to visit the ancient town of Kapilavastu, where prince Sidhartha grew up and left at the age of 29 in search of enlightenment.      As it was the time of unrest in the Terai and there was no public transportation, I rented a bicycle and paddled though the plains for a whole long and beautiful day. The area of Tilaurakot, which is about 25 km from Lumbini inhabits many ancient ruins of sacred places for Buddhists, including the birth spots of previous Buddhas. In Kapilavastu  itself one can stroll though the ruins, and even the famous “eastern gate” from which prince Sidhartha left through on...

One of the best things of studying in Nepal is definitively the amount of holy sites which can be visited. As I had visitors coming to Nepal this summer, it was a great chance to visit again many of these sites, such as Swayambunath, Namo Buddha or Pharping. We also went to Lumbini, where I had been before, yet this time I also got to visit the ruins of the ancient city of Kapilavastu, where prince Siddhartha lived till, at the age of 29, decided to renounce the kingdom. What the archaeologists have identified as the ruins of Kapilavastu, the capital of the Sakya kingdom, are located around 30 kilometers to the west of Lumbini, near the present town of Tilaurakot. Thought little remains of what was the residence of the prince Siddhartha, today mostly covered by forest, perhaps the most impressive is the wall, very wide and solid, surrounding the whole town, its undulations being witness to the movements of the ground from the time it was built. ...

During last our reading week a group of RYI students went to Lumbini (in present-day Nepal), the birthplace of the lord Buddha Shakyamuni (563 BCE to 483 BCE) on pilgrimage by bus. It was 232 km from Kathmandu city, but the road there was very good quality. We left at 7:30 am from Kathmandu city and we arrived there around 8 pm, but as it was dark we could not see much further than the bus station. There was no electricity at that time but the sky was bright and full of stars. Then we contacted our friend lama Lhag Pa, and he welcomed us to his monastery, the ‘German Monastery’ (a Tibetan Buddhist monastery sponsored by Germans). He invited us to stay in his monastery until we returned, and the monastery cooked for us every day.   The next day I walked outside and looked around. The landscape was full of trees and grass, especially rich kusha grass. In Tibet kusha grass is a holy grass because the lord Buddha Shakyamuni achieved enlightenment while sitting on a b...