Dharma Library

Hughie Carroll’s public début as a poet began on social media during the first national lockdown in May 2020. The variety of direct, colloquial, honest, and tender poems were immediately engaging: pared to the core and punchy. I joined with the many who encouraged what rapidly became two books of poetic memoir: Yarn and Sunshine and Shadow. 

The early poems take us to the perilous edges of being…

Covid 19 restrictions have meant that WCF’s normal retreat programme has had to be abandoned. Instead we have developed a format for online day and week retreats, which are proving to be very valuable. 

WCF’s first online retreat – and I loved it! 

I found the whole process of bringing the retreat out into my ‘market place’, into my living room, was really wonderful. And I enjoyed the experience…

Introduction 

The derivation of the word Chan is from Dhyana in Sanskrit and Jhana in Pali. Jhana is translated as meditation, meditative absorption or meditative concentration. Jhana meditation practice features in several Pali suttas, and involves progression through four jhanas. These are increasingly subtle states of concentration, experienced as altered states of consciousness.¹

Buddhism…

I've had a sense that in the past weeks things have emotionally changed. I seem to get fewer silly videos through whatsapp, I receive and send out fewer e-mails and I know I'm reading the news about coronavirus less avidly. People that I talk to on the telephone appear to be just waiting for things to change. Initially there was a great feeling of the need to be creative and flexible with how life…

2020 brought many changes for all of us. We experienced unwelcome curtailments on our freedoms such as lockdown and tiered restrictions on travel and meeting others, and on how we conducted ourselves such as in shopping and mask wearing. We experienced significant changes in working patterns, such as furlough, or loss of employment or transfer to home working, or coping with COVID-safe workplace…

A Book review

Of the art forms that are associated with Zen the writing of haiku is the most accessible. Surely anyone can write a brief three-line verse which pointedly does not rhyme. But it is not as easy as that; it requires a motivation to express what is arising and a self at ease to allow the clarity of that expression. The Redthread Sangha is a group of Zen practitioners who between…

Simon reflects on impermanence and non-self in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I felt a dilemma when our editor Pat Simmons asked me to write an article for this issue of New Chan Forum. Should I write about how our lives and practice are affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic – clearly a major topic – or should I write on a more traditional teaching theme? How could I consider not…

Hughie Carroll presents the story of his pilgrimage to Ladakh in 2005.

Leaving

It is April 2005 when I hand back the keys to the landlord. The nest my wife and I had made was hard to leave. We have a last hug and I say goodbye to this woman who doesn’t want to be my wife any more. Most of my stuff is sold or given away and the tech job is over. I get in the car that my mate is going to drive to…

A few years ago, I was approached by the Headteacher in my school to ask if I would be interested in teaching Mindfulness to our students. I am a science teacher but was already known as a regular meditator and had ‘come out’ as a Buddhist at work by leading a Chapel service about Buddhism, so my Head felt I was best placed to lead this initiative in the school. When I replied that I didn’t really…

This book had been winking at me since the beginning of the year. For several years, Norman Fischer’s writing in Tricycle and elsewhere has been a source of pleasure to me. He writes lucidly and with a poet’s eye and phrase. Eventually, a couple of months after it was published, I gave in, bought this book, devoured it and then just reread it straight away. That’s rare for me. 

Its subtitle,…