RYI STUDENT BLOG

Method of Studies at RYI                 Being a student in RYI, I gain various knowledge and learning experiences. RYI offers various courses, such as languages, Buddhist Studies, and textual Buddhist treatises, from both traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings and modern academic perspective. The combination of two perspectives enables me to acquire both academic knowledge and practical experiences.                   By studying Nepali and Colloquial Tibetan in RYI, I gain both grammatical and experiential knowledge. Master class taught by the professors contains grammar, structure, syntax, and so forth. While doing language partners, I can experience Nepali and Tibetan cultures through the medium of local Nepali and native Tibetan speakers. Also, doing Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan here, I not only understand vario...

Generally speaking, the academic environment is consider to be a place of competition and incentive for  inflated egos. A place where the best ones are persons that, as having a superior status in comparison  from others, always keep a distance that shows and reinforce he or she superiority. As result, to the so  called lower ones there are only the hope to attain the same status, no matter what is necessary to do. Fortunately, in diametrical opposition, even the formal aspect of an university being sustained in RYI - Rangjung Yeshe Institute, here what we experience is a place where the teachers and colleagues support  each other and rejoice for others’ victories and achievements. A place where the role of the worldly identities are object of contemplation and gentle exercises of  transformation and purification. Nothing is discarded, everything is recognized in their wisdom aspect  and as skillful means to generate benefit to others. Who is in...

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...