So What Am I Doing Here?

From the title you may be expecting something profound but I am going to have to disappoint you as I am still not sure what it is I am going to fill a blog with, so I thought for starters that I might try and give an idea of what I am doing here.

As most of you know I came to Nalanda for the five year Basic Program which started in February  and for the first time in many years I find it a pleasure to study, not always easy, but definitely a pleasure and that is a novel  experience.

Though methinks that when they say “Basic” they refer to the fact that it is the bare bones that us poor Western folk who have bumped into the Dharma need to study, as opposed to the content of the course being simple which the term can imply. I can vouch that this is not the case having often found myself in a perplexed state by something in the teachings. But this is purely my personal view due to atrophied brain cells brought on by lack of use, but I have to say that with constant exposure to the subject matter the old grey stuff may just be firing back into life after all these years!

So far this year we have looked at the Lam Rim, Tenets and are currently in the middle of Lorig which is a combination of Buddhist psychology and epistemology, from this we hopefully will have the tools to start changing the mind, the sooner the better is what I say.

Of the course you will undoubtedly hear more as my confusion or hopefully comprehension increases but I am very happy to be here and fortunate to have this opportunity to study the Dharma full time and in such a conducive environment.

I will sign off for now but would like to wish all the best to my Dharma buddies Steve and Andrew in Blighty who are jetting off to Kathmandu next week to create skies of merit at this year’s November course in Kopan Monastery, may you both have an amazing time and many realisations so that you can put me right on all the things I didn’t quite get!

Here is a link to the Nalanda website in case you’d like a more coherent view of what I’m doing!  

http://www.nalanda-monastery.eu/


There's always someone watching over you!



Well what do you know, I've created a blog!

When my friend Steve suggested about ten months ago that I start a blog for the folk who might wish to follow my progress at Nalanda Monastery I felt quite ambivalent as I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to. I mean, it’s not as if I’m singlehandedly trekking to the source of the Amazon (neither the river nor the website), although community life does have its challenges and trying to quieten the cacophony of thoughts in my head is, as they say like trying to herd cats and there are plenty of those around here as you can see.

 

Here are some I herded earlier!



Anyhow I digress, as you will find is my wont to do, so I have finally decided to enter the realm of blogging (with the much appreciated guidance of fellow Basic Program student and blogger Bork of whom I'm sure you will hear more in the future) in order to keep in touch with and mostly bore the pants off of all those out there who know me within whom there a faint glimmer of "I wonder what happened to that lanky buddhist bloke?"

Well here endeth my first post, please bear with me whilst I try to master the intricacies of this technological malarkey and I'm sure the format will be impermanent as I fiddle with all the possibilities available to me as a nascent blogger, it has taken me a couple of days to figure out how to actually type this post, so don't hold your breath if you're expecting frequent missives!

I hope that I can give an insight into this marvellous place and what I am studying in order to develop a more settled outlook on life and more importantly that I can occasionally make you chuckle at the ups and downs of life in a multilingual buddhist community.