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ABSTRACT
Theravāda Buddhism has travelled. This article gives some history of the practice of samatha breathing mindfulness, in the Theravāda tradition, in the UK. It first gives some background in Britain to the arrival of the meditation in the 1960s, then summarises the life of Nai Boonman Poonyathiro, who introduced this method into the UK, a story that is not generally known. The paper describes some aspects of the development of the Samatha Trust in the UK, attempting to show ways a system that was popular in Thailand when it arrived in a new region has prospered, even while becoming markedly less prominent in its own regions. As I am a practitioner in this tradition, before the conclusion I make some personal comment. To conclude, I speculate about features which appear to characterise Buddhist groups in general in the UK, before considering ways that this specialised tradition has adapted in a new setting.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Pali texts
A = Aṅguttaranikāya
Ja = Jātakatthakavaṇṇanā
M = Majjhimanikāya
Ud = Udāna
Vism = Visuddhimagga (cited according to Ñāṇamoli translation)
Notes
1. Three newcomers were brought to Thailand by Ven. Kapilavaddho to receive monastic and meditative training at Wat Paknam Bhasicharoen, Thonburi, Thailand, on 26 January 1956 (Trafford Citation2017).
2. In this article ‘Northern Buddhist’ refers to culturally related Tibetan Buddhism, and ‘Southern Buddhist’ to Pāli, or Theravāda Buddhism.
3. I am grateful to Dr Pyi Kyaw for information regarding ‘Oxford Sayadaw’ as he is known in Burma.
4. See, for instance, Azzopardi (Citation2010) on modern Sri Lankan communities in the UK, including lay meditation practice.
5. The Parien Pāli course is undertaken by monastics in Thailand, and involves close reading of texts alongside translations into Thai. The full course takes 8 or 9 years, and the fourth level would be at the completion of 4 years.
6. Dr Paul Dennison, Funeral Speech, 28 March 2015, Wolfson College, Oxford.
7. This was one of his principal academic interests too: at Lance’s funeral, Professor Richard Gombrich noted that in Lance’s case the usual superlatives at such occasions were genuinely necessary: he was the world expert outside Asia on Abhidhamma (funeral speech, 28 March 2015, Wolfson College, Oxford). See also his obituaries: Gethin Citation2015, Harvey and Cousins Citation1942[2015] and Shaw and Lance Citation2015.
8. My own recollections of this visit are still startlingly vivid. His evening talk basically put a rocket under us all, as his biography attests. But it was a skill in means: his lambast at our intellectualism, and insistence on the need to get real, was accompanied by a gentle appreciation of what we were doing that is not so evident in the otherwise magnificent biographical account. The next morning, for the morning meal (dāna), he was kind, approving of our work in establishing a centre and tranquilly happy to play the quietly genial monk. An unforgettable man, of many parts.
9. He not only introduced us to a very difficult book of the Abhidhamma, but also, in his free recollection of this and other Abhidhamma texts at will, effortlessly drew on material that seemed to lie in some vast memory system behind his head. It was a tour de force, impressing on us the many qualities that the Burmese method of systematic memorisation still so admirably maintains. Since that introduction, the first of a three-volume translation of Yamaka into English has now been published, by two people who attended those classes, C.M.M. Shaw and L.S. Cousins (Shaw and Cousins Citation2018).
10. It has an associated website: www.samatha-trust-library.org.
11. See ‘Samatha Journal, Samatha Trust’: http://journal.samatha.org/past-issues (site accessed 18 July 2018).
12. See ‘Online Buddhist Meditation, Samatha Trust’: https://www.samatha.org/online-course (site accessed 18 July 2018).
13. Conversation, Dr Paul Dennison, July 2018, Greenstreete, Llangunllo, Powys.
14. Kate Crosby discussed her work in a workshop entitled ‘Buddhism, Meditation and Ageing’ at King’s College, London, 27 October 2017. I am grateful to Dr Pyi Kyaw for comments on Burmese lay groups.
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Sarah Shaw
Sarah Shaw read Greek and English at Manchester University, where she did her doctorate in English literature. Since studying Pali at the University of Oxford she has written many books and articles on Buddhist Studies, in particular on meditation, practice and narrative. She is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is a longstanding practitioner with the Samatha Trust, UK.