Rangjung Yeshe InstituteWhen 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 […]
When classes moved online in the mid of the Semester around March 23, I faced them with a sense of “powering through.” When the summer program moved online, I thought, “It’s only two months.” I didn’t take too seriously my classmates’ concerns that the Fall Semester might also be online. Fast forward a few months and both the following Fall and Spring […]
I was already resigned to not see much of the sunshine this year, not because my clairvoyance detected the challenging year that the entire world had ahead, but because I decided to join the Translator Training Program and I knew that it was going to demand all my time and energy. But before going into the experience of training as an interpreter through an online platform, I need to take a […]
I am at Utpala Restaurant to pay my course fee for the spring semester. Someone mentions there’s a large gathering at the lha khang under the classrooms at RYI, and that lay practitioners are allowed in. I wander tentatively towards the gompa. Hesitant, I stand outside the hall, peeping in through the windows. I […]
I never thought I’d leave Nepal like this. Even though after being in a lockdown for almost half a year, still, when the time of departure comes, it still feels like something unexpected and out of one’s own control. As a counter measure to Covid-19 pandemics, Nepal suspended all international flights since March 22 and […]
We live in a world in which attention is a primary resource, a “pearl of great price”. It is our primary resource for the practice of dharma and for living an ethical and meaningful life. But it also has become a primary resource for toxic, extractive economical practices. Increasingly the global economy has shifted from […]
I won’t lie, every time the return to in-person classes gets delayed further I’m disappointed. I miss living in Nepal, I miss the Stūpa, I miss seeing everyone in class and talking in the hallways or at Utpala. But it’s not like I can do anything about it, so I’ve decided to accept it as a new […]
1. [A Whirlwind of Semester] This past semester has been very special in many ways. Having finished my first semester last year here at RYI, I was quite looking forward to forge deeper into the “torturing” yet enchanting Tibetan language. Everything was peaceful and on the right track before the reading week until the outbreak […]
During my time here at RYI, I began having a completely different experience to the Buddhism that I knew. Having grown up in a Buddhist family, I had some experience of Buddhist practice and culture, but had never fully immersed myself in any specific text where the Buddhist terminology is used. I had of course some idea of what they meant, but never […]
Studying at RYI has been the most precious time of my life. Philosophy classes at RYI taught by learned Khenpos (holders of the high monastic degree) enriched my view of Mahayana Buddhism. Other classes on Buddhist Ethics, History and Culture, Buddhism and Modernity, the Fundamentalism of Buddhism, Methodology of Buddhist Studies, and so forth, instructed […]