Buddhist Dharma in the UK

Buddhist Dharma in the UK

Buddha Dharma Sangha

Kagyu Samye Dzong opens Wednesday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm. Courses are given by eminent Tibetan lamas as well as experienced western students.
Telephone 0171 928 5447
ROKPA London carries out soup-runs every Saturday and Sunday, supplying food, clothes and bedding to the homeless in London. Anyone interested in helping should contact ROKPA on 0171 254 5004
Samye Ling Scotland 013873 73232

Tibetan Buddhism in London

Leaving the giant greenhouse of Waterloo station, the Eurostar trains on their way to the continent purr past the new Tibetan Buddhist Centre of Kagyu Samye Dzong.
A branch of Samye Ling monastery in Scotland, Anila Zangmo lived there for twenty years including eleven years in retreat before coming down to head the centre in April 1998.
Talking to The Middle Way/David Kelly she describes becoming a nun in 1985 as �the best choice I have ever made in my life.�

Being ordained seemed like a natural choice, dedicating myself to practice, by becoming a nun your time is totally dedicated to the Dharma. You can do this as a lay person but then you have more responsibilities to a job and family life. In this way, I can work full time for the Dharma.
It�s not a hardship being a nun, you have to look at what you give up and if you decide that family life isn�t what you really want then you have to make a choice.
It�s really having a family life or not that might seem like a drastic choice for people.
When you are living in a community like Samye Ling even if people are not monks and nuns they are still part of the family. Living in a community gives a lot of support to people, you are not lonely you are not living by yourself in a little flat in the city. That can be very hard for people. I think a Dharma community is a healthy set-up when you are working with like-minded people with the same goals as you.
Life in a London centre is very different to retreat in Scotland. Before it was get up at four in the morning, sessions, and meals at a set time, everything is by the gong. The discipline is very helpful to support the meditation because that is what you are there to do. The focus is meditation, you are really meditating all day long.
Sometimes you are doing group sessions in the shrine room but most of the time you are on your own.
Now it is the complete opposite, but I find it very stimulating. I enjoy the feeling that I can be creative, there is so much variety in starting a centre. The very beginning of a centre is planting a seed in the ground and then watching it grow. You have to care for the seed for the plant to grow, it feels a bit like being the gardener!
What we need at the moment is to get established in peoples� minds that we actually exist, it takes a few years even before people realise that there is a Kagyu Dharma centre in this place.
Samye Ling hasn�t bought the centre, the owner wants it used as a Dharma centre and I was sent down to look after it. It has just come together like a miracle really, completely unexpected and completely perfect because it is a fantastic spot. In the centre of London, it is quiet, there are no neighbours there is outdoor space we are next to a park and it is big. It�s really really lovely.
The property was a hundred year old Christian school, originally a whole Christian complex where the car park now is there used to be a church and a vicarage with a famous rose garden
An old lady came one day and pointed out where everything used to be, now all that remains are a few bricks.
There�s been quite a few people coming here who used to go to school here and did their examinations in what is now the shrine room. They feel happy to see that it hasn�t been torn down, I think that it�s being used for a similar purpose is quite nice.
This is my first time in this situation, I am not a professional centre manager
It is not as if I have big visions for the future. Samye Ling is my training ground and my back ground and it will colour my vision for the future.
What I saw there was such a vast scope of activities. Dharma is obviously the central focus, we are a Kagyu Dharma centre. Teachings are the main objective of us being here but as in Samye Ling there are so many other activities such as Tai Chi workshops, yoga classes
other group meetings. We will also be doing Akong Rinpoche�s Taming the Tiger therapy. What we can offer is the space for therapists to use.
The emphasis in the Kagyu tradition is meditation practice. Gelugpa emphasise the scholarly intellectual side and use debate. I think that can be very useful to sharpen the intellect. She laughs when she says, �I think I need that myself!�
For the Kagyu it is definitely the meditation. Milarepa is carrying the victory banner of the Kagyu lineage as the perfect practitioner.
Meditation is the heart of Buddhism in any tradition. Whether Theravadan, Zen or Tibetan Buddhist without the practice of meditation you are like the bird with one wing.
You need the Right View, the theory, the knowledge, the teachings. We need to know why we are meditating, and instructions on how do we do it.
But you also need the other wing of sitting meditation. Without those two together, you are a bird with only one wing.
For new comers to Buddhism, I only have to look back at my own first time I had a lot of impressions that I had to digest before I could get to the heart of what the teachings were about. I think it really takes time to understand the Buddha�s teachings never mind what form they take or what form they are presented in.
The first impression of Tibetan Buddhism is that it is very colourful that it has a lot of images, symbolism. At first this can seem very foreign to people but the teachings that we need are basic, beginners meditation.
I think if people come to a Buddhist centre it is because they have some interest there, it means there is an open mind. When you get the basic teachings on how to work with the mind it is pretty straight forward then, it makes a lot of sense to people. You don�t give beginners advanced teachings
I think in the west Buddhism is becoming so popular because people are starting to see that even though we have all the material wealth we still have so much suffering. Despite the affluent society there is mental suffering. Sometimes it seems that there is more mental suffering in the west than in the east.
In the west, we have all the problems of isolation, people are very lonely. We are losing the ability to communicate because of the way society is set up. The family structure is very broken in the west where as in the east you have very warm family relations, supporting the child as it grows up, more of a healthy person if you grow up with warmth love and kindness in your childhood.
In the west people are now recognising that even if we have everything in terms of material wealth, if we don�t understand how the mind works we are still not happy. So people see it is important to work on the mind and that is where Buddhism has something to offer. In Buddhism we learn how to deal with our mind and we learn how to deal with other people, we learn how to gain a balanced peaceful mind.
We learn about loving kindness and compassion. From the Tibetan point of view if you want to put the teachings into one word it is compassion.
From the Mahayana point of view we should abandon our selfish attitudes and turn our minds to loving kindness.
Just having a centre in the city brings a lot of strength to many people, even though they may not live in the centre. The fact that the centre exists is a type of refuge. Even though you may not come more than once a week the fact that it is there gives a lot of strength to people. An oasis in the city.

In February and March 1998, I was on a pilgrimage to the main Buddhist holy places of India and Nepal.
It was wonderful, eleven nuns from Samye Ling. There was a gelongma ordination in Bodh Gaya. Lama Yeshe from Samye Ling was invited to bring some nuns for
I had received getsulma ordination, the life long ordination with 36 vows but the gelongma ordination is the highest ordination with the full 340 vows.
Buddhism goes beyond male and female, beyond gender beyond extremes. In Buddha Nature there is no difference between a man and a woman. I have never experienced any sense of discrimination, at Samye Ling monks and nuns are treated the same and given the same opportunities.
The full lineage was actually never brought to Tibet, the full gelongma ordination was never introduced to Tibet. Before that we were unsure but in Bodh Gaya we were told that the lineage of gelongma ordination hadn�t died out in Tibet, it was never introduced there.
Personally I think because it was a very arduous journey between Tibet and India, you could lose your life making it. Maybe the women felt happy with the getsulma ordination that they had.
In Bodh Gaya we received the full gelongma ordination which goes back to the Shakyamuni Buddha.
There were a lot of Theravadan nuns, Korean nuns, Zen, there was also Taiwanese nuns as well as some Tibetan nuns. It was a very wonderful experience. What I found the most beautiful part was taking the Bodhisattva Vows under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya. It was a long ceremony and we were on our knees but the tree was full of birds chittering away really happy the sun was shining and the seeds were falling from the tree during the ceremony. It was such a beautiful occasion and it felt very strong to be taking the vow at the Place of the Buddha�s Enlightenment.
If I am still alive I will be a crooked old nun with a walking stick. What I would like in the future is to do some more solitary meditation retreats. This is a very nice period for me here, a big change after twenty years in Scotland and a long time in retreat, it�s a learning process. Nevertheless, at some stage I would like to return to solitary retreat.
It is inspiring to see a centre starting off, to see new people coming, meeting the Dharma and seeing them grow into it and benefiting from it is very rewarding. Being in a place like London there are so many people who could benefit from it. There could be twenty more centres and it wouldn�t be enough.
Myself I am traditional, I believe in the tradition approach. Personally I feel the Buddha�s teachings are beyond time, beyond culture, beyond limitations.
There would not be enlightened teachers if the teachings were not. I don�t feel there is a need to purposefully alter the teachings for a particular time, or place or culture.
What may happen over time, over centuries is that bit by bit by bit, change may happen by itself. In Tibet part was Buddhism part was the culture, obviously we don�t need to adapt the Tibetan culture what we need is the Buddha�s teachings. Bit by bit things will be sifted away and other things from the west will creep in. by itself it may take on a slightly different form but the essence must remain the same. It is different when change happens over a long period of time than when someone says �we will take this but we won�t take that.� That is a bit tricky.
I think there should be a very clear distinction between someone who is capable of teaching the Dharma because they have knowledge of the Dharma and they have some experience of practice. There is a big difference between those people and people with very high realisation and direct experience of the nature of the mind. They are the ones capable of taking on students.
We have to be very careful not to mix those two up and think because someone is teaching the Dharma that means they are also able to guide students in the same way as a lama or rinpoche.
It is not supposed to be for quite a while that you are able to do that. I don�t think that is really happening in the west at the moment.
Buddhism is still very very new for westerners and I haven�t met all the westerners, but at Samye Ling Akong Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe are very careful about who they make teach.
None of us who teach are called teachers, we are called helpers, and we are not being set up as Teachers. We are just here doing Domestic work, so to speak. We are spiritual friends.
If anything becomes an ego trip it can cause a lot of damage. Unless you have tamed your own ego, and gone beyond pride and desire, and the wish for fame and worry about other people�s opinions about you and all of this. Unless you have gone beyond the eight worldly dharmas then you are not ready to be a teacher. The danger is when someone goes over the top they can cause a lot of damage and division.
It makes me suspicious when people try to �sell� me the Dharma.
It is so important that nobody is made a teacher until they have pure pure motivation. That is Ling doesn�t make �teachers.�
In the west we tend to lose perspective, as western Buddhists we can get caught up in our own little problems and complaints. If you see the hardship people have gone through to leave Tibet to practice Buddhism it changes your perspective.
However, Buddhism is now establishing itself in the west and laying down real roots for the future.

Kagyu Samye Dzong opens Wednesday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm. Courses are given by eminent Tibetan lamas as well as experienced western students.
Telephone 0171 928 5447
ROKPA London carries out soup-runs every Saturday and Sunday, supplying food, clothes and bedding to the homeless in London. Anyone interested in helping should contact ROKPA on 0171 254 5004
Samye Ling Scotland 013873 73232

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