RYI STUDENT BLOG

It was the craziest, the scariest… It was the smartest step I’ve ever taken, buying myself that ticket to Kathmandu. Let me first say, I do not think a life in Nepal is for everyone. But when reflecting on the more than a year I’ve spent here I’m overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for what I’ve experienced so far, and also a trust that there is more to come. In my first year at the Shedra I had the great fortune of studying Śāntideva’s, “The Way of the Bodhisattva” – the title says it all. In his text, the first century Buddhist master expounds on the meaning of becoming a bodhisattva and I’d like to share a few thoughts on why the bodhisattva path is just as relevant and perhaps even more challenging within the capitalist societies of today's world. Entering the bodhisattva path is a willingness to transform into a super-human. According to the tradition, bodhisattvas are “… heroic, indefatigable beings…who generate the supreme thought of enlightenment and ...

During my second year of B.A studies at RYI, I had the opportunity to take Beginner’s Sanskrit language courses. This subject excited me because I fondly remembered taking Sanskrit classes during my fourth grade in elementary school. I still recall those lessons as being noteworthy experiences at the time. However, since I had only taken Sanskrit for a brief period, I had easily forgotten everything over these many years. My RYI Beginner’s Sanskrit group was comprised of students from all over the world. Our native languages varied from Nepalese, English, German, Bengali, Chinese, Bhutanese, Hindi, Italian and more. In the first few weeks of the class, my background in Nepali language played a significant role in helping me familiarize myself with Sanskrit scripts and vocabularies. However, when we were introduced to the dizzying arrays of declensions, conjugations and other grammatical rules, the course grew quite challenging—though in an interesting way! We had to memorize ...