Editorial

Warmest greetings from Nalanda Institute!

It has been one year exactly since Nalanda Institute held its first course on 7th July 2007. Since then, we had organized over twenty short courses that benefited more than 1,300 participants. Besides, we witnessed the first batch of 35 students graduating with Certificates in Buddhist Studies in December 2007. We also held a very successful conference late last year, with the theme “Educating Tomorrow’s Leaders Today”. The conference have had a positive impact since, resulting in the establishment of new Dhamma Schools in smaller towns and the revitalizing of existing ones nationwide. The first ever one-year certificate course for teachers of Dhamma Schools, which is still on-going at Nalanda, is also a culmination of the same conference.

We are very thankful to our facilitators and volunteers who laboured under ever closer datelines to prepare, promote, and then run our many courses. We are also grateful to our lecturers who showed us what joy it is to share the Dhamma with many. We thoroughly appreciate their sacrifice of time and effort to deliver those wonderful and memorable lessons. We owe a lot to the generosity and great support given by members of Nalanda Buddhist Society and Nalanda Vidyalaya. The Society has been financing all the expenses of the Institute, despite its own limited resources, so that we can offer all our courses freely to the public since inception.

Our vote of thanks would not be complete without thanking all the participants of the Institute’s courses. You are our raison d’etre. Your eagerness to learn the Dhamma in a proper and structured way has inspired us to continue our work. Of course, we hope to satisfy your learning needs further with even better programmes. We certainly welcome your valuable feedback on this matter. Please write to us about your views and aspirations for your own learning, as well as for the Buddha-Sasana. Share with us your hopes for the Buddhist community, and even your fears. We would like to hear from you!

When we pondered on how best to mark the first year of the Institute, we thought of producing something for the Malaysian Buddhist education community, hence this journal in your hands. We hope you will enjoy reading and benefit from the articles published here, and with confidence that we are all in this journey together, bring Buddhist education to even greater heights!

With metta,
H S Tan
Director, Nalanda Institute