The Name

Two roots, and why we keep both

Pāramitā (पारमिता) has two etymologies, and the tradition has carried both for as long as it has used the word.

The first reads it from parama — highest, furthest, ultimate. That gives the usual translation: perfection. Sanskrit grammarians read it this way.

The second splits it as pāra — the far shore, what lies beyond — and ita, gone. Then the word means gone to the far shore. Philologically this is the looser reading. It is also the one the tradition chose when it carried the term east: the Tibetan translation is literally “gone to the other side”, and the Chinese renders it “reaching the far shore”.

These are not two options to choose between. Parama, the highest, is the far shore. Pāram-ita, the going, is how anyone arrives. The word holds the destination and the journey in one term, and we have no reason to break it in half.

Which gives the school its thread, and it is short:

We arrive as we are — and that is not our fate. It is possible to go beyond every limit, to the far shore. That is worth living and studying for.

The first line is about admission: no selection by flexibility, years of practice, or level. The second is about the fact that a present condition is not a final one. The third is about scale.

Perfection, but not the counterfeit

Most schools in this field make small promises with precise dates: a certificate in twenty-one days. We are making a much larger claim and are honest about the timing — the far shore is not handed out at the end of a course.

So a course here is a stretch of the road, not the end of it. And parama means ultimate, not flawless: the word is about limits coming off, not about a posture matching a picture. That distinction separates this from yoga taught as fitness without lowering the bar.

The term itself belongs to the most ambitious path in the tradition. The six pāramitās are the practice of a bodhisattva — someone aiming at full awakening rather than a moderate result. The ambition is in the word already; we did not add it.

The name is kept half an hour away

Prajñāpāramitā, the wisdom that has gone beyond, is the sixth pāramitā, a body of texts, and a figure: the Mother of all Buddhas.

Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley keeps the Navadharma — nine sacred texts venerated as objects of worship. The Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā stands at the centre of those nine.

At Kwā Bāhā in Patan there is a manuscript of it copied, by tradition, by Ānanda Bhikṣu in 1225 CE, during the reign of Abhaya Malla. It is still read aloud. Not displayed — read. And the first scholarly edition of the text, published in 1888, was made from Nepalese manuscripts: the valley is where the Sanskrit survived after it was lost in India.

Patan is half an hour from Kathmandu.

So a school called Pāramitā arrives where the word has been spoken aloud over the same manuscript for eight centuries. That is a coincidence of name and place, and it can be pointed at on a map.

One word that made the same journey

The fifth pāramitā is dhyāna — meditation, contemplation. The word has a biography:

Sanskrit dhyāna became Pali jhāna, became Chinese chán, became Japanese zen. Not cognates, not lookalikes — the same word, worn down by three languages on the way east.

The same dhyāna is the seventh limb of Patañjali’s eightfold yoga, between concentration and absorption. One word stands in the list of pāramitās and in the yoga of Patañjali, and it named an entire school of East Asian contemplation.

This is a fact about a word, not a claim to a lineage. We do not teach Zen and do not call anything we teach by that name. Meditation here is called meditation. But the meeting point of Indian yoga and East Asian practice, which is where this school works, is not something we invented for a brochure — the language got there first, travelling India to the Himalaya to the east. Moving to Nepal puts us in the middle of that road.

Why the tradition matters less than the crossing

There is an old image: a man builds a raft, crosses the river, and does not carry the raft on his head afterwards. It did its work.

If the value of a method is that it carries someone across, then arguing over whose raft is the correct one loses its point. Yin, vinyasa, qigong, sitting practice — different rafts. The question is not which tradition is true, but what carries this person now.

That is why the school is broad on principle rather than out of appetite. It also raises the stakes: drop the authority of a tradition’s name and the whole weight lands on the teacher. Strong teachers are not a nice addition here. They are the load-bearing part.

Depth and height are one structure

In the Mahāyāna, prajñā — wisdom, the seeing — is paired with upāya, skilful means, the acting. Neither works alone: seeing without action is barren, action without seeing is blind. The better-known pair is wisdom and compassion, described as two wings, on one of which nothing flies.

Going deeper and going higher are the same pair. Depth without height turns into rumination; height without depth is spiritual tourism. A course that offers only deep relaxation is a spa, and one that offers only transcendence is something else again. Together, they are a school.