Buddhafield

It took me many years to get to Buddhafield, the well-known Buddhist festival in Somerset. When I was working, July was always a busy month, but that wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t once attended in the festival’s 23-year-long history. The other reason was internal conflict. Or possibly ‘overthinking’. 

I’ve long been troubled by the way therapeutic derivatives of Buddhism, especially as expressed in popular culture, align with capitalism and individualism. One of the ways they do this is that they hold individuals as responsible for their own mental state regardless of their trauma histories or structural disadvantages. Thus, mental struggle becomes figured as some kind of entirely personal failure; specifically, a failure of ‘self-care.’ The overarching purpose of self-care is to ensure we function efficiently as compliant workers and prolific consumers. In this model, it is always the individual that succeeds or fails. No attention whatever is paid to context, nor to the capitalist framework within which that success or failure is determined. 

Another arena in which Buddhism seems, in popular culture, to be aligned with capitalist wellbeing culture is in the way it’s smooshed-up (technical term!) with yoga ‘lifestyles’. When those lifestyles are all about having high-end gear and a perfect, racialised white, body, they’re really troubling. Yoga’s particular association with Buddhism in the West is itself mostly an artefact of orientalism, anyway. It’s part of the long colonial history of lumping all so-called ‘Eastern’ ideas and practices together as one.  

Most of all, though, the modern wellbeing industry strikes me as a monstrous capitalist exploitation of people suffering, funnily enough, from the effects of capitalism. I knew that Buddhafield - which is, in so many ways, an intense distillation of the modern wellbeing industry - would make me queasy. 

So - that was one reason I didn’t fancy it. 

But there was another. One that came from entirely the opposite direction. The first one was ‘what if I didn’t like it?’ This one was ‘what if I did?’  

As an academic, I was shaped, at least to some extent, by the Critical Religions tradition, which analyses religion not as a set of truth claims, but as an historical, social, political, economic construct that relates to power. This disciplinary orientation had some personal implications for me. It meant that if the line between observing religious phenomena from behind my clipboard and actually being impacted by them became in any way blurred, a siren would go off in my head. That siren went off an awful lot in my career, and even got stuck on at times. Deafening. But that’s a whole other story.

Staying, for now, just with Buddhafield, the idea of going to it had always felt highly charged, something I just could not do. Why? Because, what if there are parts of me that weren’t ‘scholar’? What if there were parts existentially challenged and refreshed by religious participation? Would me going to Buddhafield be like an ostensibly non-religious sociologist going to Spring Harvest with arms aloft? Kind of unimaginable in my corner of Religious Studies. Yes, by all means, go to Spring Harvest with your field-recorder, consent forms and clipboard, but don’t, whatever you do, ‘participate’ or ‘feel anything.’ You’re meant to be the scholar, not the object of study.  

I’ll resist the temptation to get into the extensive theory and method literature and unpack all this at great length. So much could be said about categories, standpoint, disciplines and discourse, not to mention about the relationship between religious/philosophical claims and affect (emotion). And my (over)thinking isn’t wholly rational anyway. I was already wildly compromised - if that’s what we’re calling it - by much more significant field-immersion than would be represented by a short trip to Buddhafield. But for some strange reason, the idea of going there had hardened into a frozen Rubicon I just couldn’t cross. I couldn’t go in case anyone thought I had dropped my clipboard. Or, to be honest, in case I actually did. 

And then, I retired. 

So, this year, I left the clipboard at home. And just took myself. 

This is what it was like. 

It was overwhelming, troubling and wonderful, in pretty much equal measure. 

So. What is Buddhafield? 

Buddhafield is a small, five-day festival in a few large fields in a valley of the glorious Blackdown Hills in Somerset. It’s organised and run by Triratna, one of the dominant Buddhist groups on the contemporary British scene. 

Triratna

Triratna was founded in 1967 in Britain, by a British man. However, its presence in India, especially among Ambedkarite communities, is larger than its presence in Britain. So, calling it ‘British Buddhism’ and leaving it at that is, well, a bit lazy. However, there is definitely something British about it, not only as regards the nationality of its founder and the site of the early phase of its development, but also as regards the British colonial vantage point from which it emerged, not to mention the rich, British, cultural and artistic conversations that have shaped it. 

Before 2010, it was known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. In 2010, it was renamed Triratna, partly because of its significant growth in India at that time, and partly to indicate the centrality of the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) to its teachings.

The community is composed of Order Members, with a mix of lay and celibate callings, who follow a rigorous path to ordination over years, and of Mitras (Friends), who aren’t ordained, but have undergone a formal initiation of affiliation. Then there’s the wider sangha, or community of people who regularly, or occasionally, attend activities in the approximately 30 Triratna Buddhist Centres in the UK - 130 worldwide. 

Triratna has undergone a significant period of corporate introspection as the organisation responded to emerging facts of sexual abuse perpetrated by its founder, Sangharakshita, and others, in the 1970s and 80s. Its history was deeply troubled, and, as has been widely reported, it has grappled with some sickening realities, both individual and systemic. Its response, though slow initially, has improved over time. Structures have changed and attitudes to Sangharakshita, who died in 2018, are more clear-eyed than they once were. Triratna as an organisation continues to attract interest from participants, despite this history beingin the public domain.

This founder, Dennis Lingwood, took the religious name Sangharakshita in 1949. He had served in India, Ceylon (as was) and Singapore, as a member of the British Army. Experience gave him an unusually broad, colonial and post-colonial overview of a variety of Buddhist schools. He selected elements from a range of Buddhist traditions that he considered best expressed the Dharma to modern Westerners, and he translated it all into English for accessibility. He cultivated the Order’s interest in fields of culture that, according to him, resonated with the Dharma and embedded it in a Western cultural worldview. So, Triratna Centres tend to offer a range of activities on top of the usual dharma teachings, pujas and festival observances. These include alternative therapies, yoga classes, psychotherapy groups and therapy-infused teachings, art classes and spoken word opportunities. In this, and other, respects, Triratna differs from other forms of Buddhism practiced in the UK.

Triratna in the UK is predominantly white. It’s composed of a mix of Buddhist-identifying converts, and of what scholar Thomas Tweed termed ‘night-stand Buddhists’ - people who don’t identify as Buddhist, but engage with the tradition intellectually and practically, to different intensities, on very much their own terms. These racial and engagement profiles, among other things, differentiate Triratna from the many heritage Buddhist communities linked to the UK’s generations old Sri Lankan or other South East Asian, or Chinese communities.  It’s also unlike UK-based traditions that import and preserve Asian forms while opening them to converts or those willing to take temporary precepts. One example of these forms is the English Sangha Trust that, as far as is possible, replicates the practices and lifestyle of the Thai Forest Tradition. Another example would be the International Zen Association, that retains Kamakura-period rules regarding zazen, chanting and ceremony. Only in a Triratna centre might one encounter Tibetan deities, along with a centring of Pāḷi-originating teachings, largely expressed through the medium of English, and rūpas specially created with caucasian features. Triratna offers a fascinating form of eclecticism very different to the expression of the tradition found in heritage Buddhism, or in the Buddhism that mediates Asian lineages in the UK context.

Buddhafield

Buddhafield is a separate organisation from Triratna, but its annual festival is an opportunity for Triratna Order Members and Friends to come together for the purposes of nurturing the spiritual life. It’s also an outreach activity, facilitating Triratna’s commitment to sharing the Dharma.The name ‘Buddhafield’ is worthy of comment. The annual festival in England has no relation whatever to the Californian New Religious Movement of the same name, that was the subject of a 2016 documentary called Holy Hell. Despite the confusion it sometimes causes, Triratna have not changed the name of their festival. And for good reason. The notion of a buddhafield, or buddhakṣetra, is a vibrant metaphysical thread that runs through much of the Buddhist thought of the last two millennia, and it belongs to no single group.  

A ‘buddhafield’ - known in East Asian Mahāyāna as a ‘Pure Land’ - is the metaphysical sphere of influence of an Enlightened Being, sometimes viewed as a celestial realm, even as an afterlife, or alternatively as a this-worldly realm in which the characteristics of Awakening, wisdom and compassion, thrive, and in which the Three Fires of greed, hatred and delusion are quenched. 

I have been in a this-worldly buddhafield before. Well, maybe I live in one, in some sense, all the time--that’s a philosophical digression at this point. What I mean is,  I have been to a place on the planet that is described by a religious community as a buddhafield. 

Ushiku Arcadia

When I studied in Japan back in the early nineties, the Buddhist denomination I was living with was creating a huge, landscaped park, 50km outside of Tokyo. This park, known as Ushiku Arcadia, is laid out according to the descriptions of the Pure Land in the sutras, with a 120m tall bronze statue of the Buddha Amida at its centre. The park itself manifests a sacred geography. To use a very clumsy analogy, the park is an attempt to replicate ‘heaven’ on earth. Unlike the biblical account of heaven which is short on detail (though what’s there is pretty breath-taking), the account of the Pure Land in the sūtras is rich and intricate. There are jewels, wish-granting trees, flowers, lakes, rare birds, celestial music, buddhas perpetually emerging from blossoming lotuses, and so on. 

The Ushiku Daibutsu (Great Buddha) - Amida (120m)

The park itself is, in fact, a huge cemetery. The invitation central to its existence is to have your ashes interred directly in the Pure Land in which you will awaken, as a result of the Compassionate Vow of the Buddha to awaken all the beings in the Ten Directions who call upon him. 

Wow.  

As a 21-year-old student of Buddhism, who’d grown up in the Anglican Church with a strong internal barometer for the sacredness of space, I was already sensitised. So, I was blown away by the power and symbolism of this way of thinking about this (objectively pretty ordinary, apart from its centrepiece) landscaped park. I fancied I could feel it in my body when I stepped into the park, into the realm of influence of the Daihi, the Ultimate Compassion, of this extraordinary Buddha who, the sutras tell us, has vowed to save all the beings in the Ten Directions, no matter how terrible their karmic load.  

Ushiku Arcadia - Google Earth

I also had all kinds of idealistic questions about this buddhafield. Why did it cost so much to be interred there compared to elsewhere? Why build such an enormous bronze statue when a smaller one would do? What were the lives like of the labourers in the Taiwanese mines from where all this bronze was extracted? Like, hey, I thought Buddhism was about non-attachment and anti-greed? This seems like the antithesis to that? 

Thirty-five years on, those questions have not entirely diminished, but I’m older, more tired, more realistic about the contingencies and hypocrisies of institutions. The great cathedrals of Europe are no different. This is just religion-in-the-world. 

However, my sensitivity to the symbolism of space remains as acute as it ever was. 

As with other forms of material in sacred contexts — images of Hindu deities or Orthodox icons come to mind --  the idea that they stand-for something, rather than actually are what they represent, is a perspective from a secular standpoint. I try to be careful with my thinking, and not thoughtlessly or self-righteously assume my apparently ‘natural’ secular standpoint is right. 

So, when I went to Buddhafield in July 2025, I was doing more than simply going to a festival. I was, in some important, though not straightforward, sense, going to a buddhakṣetra, a Pure Land, much like I did in Japan in 1990. 

My visit to Triratna’s Buddhafield

The festival of Buddhafield attracts about 3000 attendees. By festival standards, it’s tiny. Its famous Somerset neighbour, Glastonbury, attracts 200,000. But I’m not a seasoned festival-goer, so little Buddhafield felt huge to me.  

After being directed to a spot on the growing edge of an enormous carpark field, I lugged my camping gear, in a light drizzle, to a parallel spot on the growing edge of a vast campsite. I haven’t really camped for decades and don’t know the modern tricks of the trade. Most campers had fancy collapsible trollies for getting their gear to their spot. I was carrying mine in an enormous unwieldy plastic crate. Rookie error. The walk from car-park to campsite-spot was a mile long! I staggered past rows and rows of tents decorated with bunting, as dreadlocked people in brightly-coloured cottons and hemps pottered round their portable stoves, under sensible-looking awnings. I felt like the awkward outsider. Having to put the crate down every so often to rest and waggle my arms around, the whole journey took an excruciatingly long time. I was offered some help here and there, which I glad took. People heading to their own tents who were happy to hold the other side of my crate while they walked. By this mixture of self- and other-power, I eventually reached my spot, palms blistered and shoulders on fire, just as the rain began to take itself more seriously. 

I managed to get my tiny tent up, and was sitting in its doorway, weakly trying to summon up the energy to take my first steps into that ontologically different space of the ‘Buddha-field’ itself, when someone arrived on the vacant plot next to mine. He started removing gear from his rucksack. Examining it, mystified, he scratched his head. Seeing me watching him, he said sheepishly that he’d only bought this tent on the way here and didn’t really know how to pitch it. Did I have any idea? So, I did my best. With lots of teeth-sucking, false-starts and laughter, we managed to get his tent up and walked onto the field together. His name was Chris. He was probably 20, or maybe even 30 years younger than me, also a Buddhafield virgin, and didn’t know anyone else who was coming. (I knew one person, but I also knew we wouldn’t be hanging-out in any big way, as this person would be busy. More on him later). Chris was a freelance environmentalist, commissioned for his expertise by county and town councils. And he was good company.

Chris seemed so relaxed and chatty, I began to wonder if he might be hoping to hang out with me for the rest of the festival, kind of like the first person you meet at university. I felt bad, but I really didn’t want that. There are very few people with whom I want to share important experiences. Mostly, I would rather have them alone. This is because the presence of someone else pulls my attention away from own experience, and its potential for intensity. It’s not that I don’t like people, I really do, but they, rather than the experience, become my focus. I get drawn into their emotional world very easily. Their opinions and worldviews colour my experiences. I find it hard to hang onto myself and not to disintegrate. For this reason, I often prefer going anywhere where I am going to be affectively and meaningfully challenged, (concerts, galleries, seminars, places of worship, etc.) alone. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions to this. Certain people in combination with certain activities. But here, I really struggled to manage the small-talk with Chris. He was chatting away about his work, asking me about the attitudes to, and benefits of, the 20mph speed limit in Wales. It was an interesting conversation to be sure, but it was happening at precisely the moment we were stepping, under a veil of the finest, softest rain, in to a buddhakṣetra. That was a strange form of mental and emotional overload for me. 

Chris, it turned out, was mostly there for the trance music and dancing. I wasn’t there for that at all. In fact, it hadn't really occured to me that would be a thing. So, after chai and a flapjack, learning a little more about each other’s lives, and confirming that yes, really, there was no phone signal whatsoever here, it seemed sensible to go our separate ways. We hugged as if we had long been friends and said cheerio for now. Every time we saw each other again over the subsequent four days, we hugged tightly, as if we knew each other out in the ‘real world’, outside of the buddhakṣetra. 

As Chris headed off purposefully towards one of several huge dance tents, I was finally able to come into the present moment, and to properly arrive in the Buddhafield, in the Pure Land itself. 

A significant feature of the Buddhafield for me was that it was drug and alcohol free. A small sign had marked that fact, just as we walked onto the field.

It felt so good to me to be in a space where I knew I was safe from drunkenness. Being with drunk friends is fine. Actually, it’s often a lot of fun. But how cool to be in a space where people are genuinely being themselves, enjoying themselves, generating community, even accessing altered states, all without drugs or alcohol. This was not like being at a convention for those in recovery (my main experience of socialising in alcohol-free spaces) where to drink or use would be a heinous transgression. This was not a space specially curated for people with ‘issues.’ It was a space for everyone. It wasn’t framing drinking or drug use as fundamentally problematic, but carving out a special space, so that people can experience more authenticity than is possible when alcohol and other drugs are present. It felt so counter-cultural to me, though I appreciate that this might partly be due to my age. Younger people seem to have less investment in alcohol and other drugs than my generation do, so they may not have felt that counter-cultural blast as keenly I did. But wow, I felt it. 

I stood there for a bit, as the soft drizzle began to let up, simply enjoying the, rare for me, sensations of being the same as everyone else there. Sober.  Dusk was beginning to fall and I watched people gathering around the big fires, or queueing at the food vans. Groups of friends glad to be together. I caught moments of people recognising each other, perhaps from home, or from meeting at the festival in previous years. Lots of hugs, delight, and joy. No alcohol. It felt genuinely precious. 

The fifth of the five lay Buddhist precepts is the undertaking to avoid intoxicants that cloud the mind and prevent Awakening. Festival attendees were not required to take any temporary precepts, so in that regard this festival was unlike a Buddhist retreat. However, the spirit of the precept was being enacted in the festival’s ethos. I found this nothing short of magical. 

Emerging from my reverie and deciding that a flapjack was insufficient to keep me going, I joined a very long queue for some food. Eventually, I got a simple but delicious thali of rice, vegetables, dhal and chapati on a metal tray. I sat to eat it on a haybale by one of the fires, saying hi to others who were doing the same. I realised that if I wasn’t going to spend the whole of the festival queuing for food, I would need to be much smarter about eating times. What's more, the food was pricey. There was nothing stopping attendees bringing their own food. I wished that I’d given that some forethought. Just surviving here was going to be expensive.

I looked around at attendees and wondered what their earning profiles were. People’s clothes, in the main, struck a hippy, laid-back, festival note. But they indicated a certain level of wealth. Under their colourful Arc’teryx or Fjällräven breathable, waterproof gear, they wore high quality hemps and linens. Their tattoos were complex, meaningful, aesthetically delightful, and expensive-looking. I tried to stop my mind generating an MA research dissertation title on the class-, earning- and consumer-profiles of UK-based religious festival-goers across different traditions. I wondered how much Primark clobber by comparison would be worn at, say, Greenbelt.

Oh, shut up, brain.   

On the activity menu for me that first evening was an All-Recovery meeting. I’ve attended meetings in several different mutual-aid recovery groups, but this one was unusual because it brought together all modalities at once. It was wonderful to be in a single space with such a diverse crowd. Gamblers, Co-dependents, people with internet-based and sex addictions, friends and family of people with addictions, as well as the more usual drug and alcohol folk. It was also quite something to be with people whose recoveries had been achieved through such a variety of pathways. The sense of solidarity across substance/behaviour was such a positive thing to experience first-hand. The recovery stories followed similar patterns, regardless of modality or of issue. In fact, people’s shares were so recovery-centric that I would forget how they had originally identified. The presenting issue quickly faded into insignificance. A few there spoke about the challenge of being in the communal space of the festival, even one that was drug and alcohol free. They talked about the potentially triggering pull of the Dance Tents and the challenge of the free-love vibe that they’d detected at the festival (news to me), and how they planned to navigate it all. A couple of people who were attending the festival alone had the courage to ask that those present look out for them on the field over the next few days, as they were likely to feel isolated. “Come say hi, if you have time.” The group committed to do so. The meeting concluded, leaving me with a palpable sense of warmth and community. I was later to witness, and also participate a little, in the fulfilment of that promise of the community to look out for its vulnerable, putting me in mind of that beautiful promise of the Civil Rights Movement of ‘Beloved Community.’  

A Tara Shrine

Leaving the meeting glowing like a Ready-Brek kid (for readers old enough to get the reference!), I slowly headed back towards the campsite through the field, passing small shrines fluttering with flags, groups of people gathered round fires telling stories, listening to guitars, sipping steaming mugs of chai. There was some quiet singing here and there. Old protest songs I knew well, so I lingered a bit and spent a few minutes singing along. Moving onwards, I peeped into some of the tents I passed and saw people meditating, stretching, doing pairs massage, or listening intently to some inspiring speaker or other. I enjoyed the quiet of this end of the festival, but I needed to walk right over to the other side to find the start of the long path back to my tent.

At the far end, there was a huge marquee, throbbing with a deep techno sound so loud it seemed to suck the air out of the wet, green valley. Inside, and indeed bursting out the doors, were hundreds of sweaty bodies, writhing around in altered states, selves wholly abandoned to sound. I imagined Chris was in there somewhere, lost in time and space. Although I could feel my heart-rate aligning with the beat, and I understood the desire for that kind of oblivion, I was no more tempted to go in than I had been to join the audience of talks on Emotional Freedom Technique or Permaculture that I had passed earlier. I was overloaded. I had so much to process. I wanted the quiet of the campsite, the feel and smell of the wet grass, and the darkness and space of the night sky. 

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The next morning, after a good sleep (no phone signal, no doom-scrolling, go figure) I was up early to explore properly. 

Surrounded by multiple camping areas - the Buddhafield itself was in fact two huge fields, apportioned into different areas. In the middle of the largest field was a great big double-sided noticeboard that listed all the day’s activities, talks, meditation sessions, ceremonies and pujas. Most of the time it was surrounded by a crowd. But at this point in the early morning mist, there were just a couple of lithe young people in expensive-looking harem pants, yoga mats rolled under their arms, sipping steaming matcha-oat-lattes purchased from one of the just-opened vendors. They were studying the board intently and making their plans for the day.  

Just off from this field was an area called The Affinity Spaces. Intrigued, I took a wander across the little stream that separated it from the main field and up the slight incline, to go and have a look. 

These areas included big bell tents and fire-places for gathering, but also space for people to camp alongside members of their own communities - BIPOC, Queer, Disabled, Men, Women.

I wandered a little on the main paths in some of these areas, feeling curious about the paradox of affirmative inclusion and segregation. I assumed that the binary men’s and women’s spaces enacted the Triratna culture of single-sex communities. Order members and mitras who live in these communities would doubtless want to preserve that spirit of community with their own gender while participating in their big annual gathering. I carefully swerved the private tents, spotting tousled heads emerging, and realising not only were most of these spaces not my spaces, but that my presence was especially intrusive as people were just waking up.  

I turned a corner and found myself unexpectedly in a Recovery area.

Wow.

I could have opted to come and camp with the Recovery Community! Note to self - read blurbs more carefully! In truth, though, I was glad that I hadn’t, because of my need for mental space. But how nice for people in recovery to have their identity affirmed and their community provided.

I could imagine people wondering why a separate space for recovery folk would be needed at a drug and alcohol-free event. But it made complete sense to me. Recovery is about so much more than not drinking or using. It’s a variegated and complex subculture all of its own.  It occurred to me that what myself and colleagues in the Recovery-Friendly University movement have been trying to do for so long, and with great difficulty, namely, to frame recovery as a legitimate intersection of identity, was simply taken for granted here. In organising space in this way, Triratna was asserting (usefully, in my view, though I appreciate it’s controversial), that 'people in recovery' are another category of the non-normative, equivalent, in some important ways, to queer or disabled people.  

As I wandered, I felt affirmed by the conspicuous inclusion, not just of me as a person in recovery, but of all intersections of identity and lifestyle. Even though much of my identity is normative, (white, cishet), I always feel safer in spaces framed as explicitly inclusive. The Right calls it wokery, and sneers at what it thinks is ‘making a fuss.’ I read it as a recognition of the reality that assuring the safety and flourishing of subordinated groups takes significant, conscious, sustained, explicit effort, both in terms of community organising and in terms of individual introspection. The structures of oppression are so deeply embedded, both in social institutions and in ourselves as individuals.

Triratna had called these areas ‘Affinity Spaces’, accenting the positive, implying a coming-together of people with a shared set of aims or characteristics. There was nothing negative about how this was framed. I could imagine right-leaning folk saying that I should have the freedom to walk where I like, like they defend their right to say whatever they like about subordinated groups, because “freedom” is the highest value. Triratna wasn’t saying I couldn’t walk there, but it felt only right to me that these groups protect their spaces from the dominance I represent. As I walked away from these fascinating areas, knowing I probably wouldn’t go back over that little stream unless invited by recovery folk, I felt I’d accidentally wandered in a grove of the Pure Land. I felt glad for the people who were finding each other in those spaces, and for the ‘bonding social capital’ that would be generated there. 

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Back on the main fields, crowds were arriving in greater numbers, food queues were growing, music was beginning to play, activities were getting underway. 

There was a long avenue, lined on both sides with tented shops and stalls, selling hippy clothes, ritual items, thangkas, incense and books. I wandered along it, looking at the goods, fingering the beautiful clothes, dropping them when I saw the price-tags. Checking the map, I saw that all the non-food vendors were operating here. No shops elsewhere. ‘Consumer Avenue’, I thought to myself.

At one spot on Consumer Avenue, there was a contraption that hooked your wrists and ankles and lifted you off the ground. I watched, fascinated, while people were suspended, both face down and face up, moaning with pain and pleasure, while a wiry-looking, loin-clothed sadhu with dreads piled in a top-knot, worked the levers and pulleys to stretch his victims out. It looked wonderful to be honest. I could feel my perpetually-aching vertebrae jumping up and down and screaming “Please! please! please!”  I looked at the sign-up sheet, already nearly full. A glimpse of the price had me replying to my vertebrae, “Not today kids. Perhaps another time, if you're all really, really good.” But not meaning it. 

It was strange this stall was here and not in the extensive village of tiny, low-roofed tents in the middle of one of the fields, in an area called ‘The Healing Garden.’ Maybe it was just too big a structure, or perhaps it was its payment protocol. There, in the Healing Garden you could book yourself in, mostly on a ‘Pay As You Feel’ basis, for any number of alternative therapies, from massage, craniosacral therapy, gong baths and reiki, to tarot readings, homeopathy, hopi ear-candling, rebirthing and ancestral healing. There was a tent for those with wombs, with doors decorated to look like a vulva. It was truly magnificent. I was totally up for pretty much any of the above (even the womb one, since I did have one once!), but I could see on the clipboards outside each tent that the therapists were all already booked up for the whole festival. Seasoned attendees must have signed up for what they wanted immediately upon arrival. As a Buddhafield novice, I had missed the boat.   

A small part of the shrine at the centre of the Healing Garden. I couldn't photograph it in its entirety without intruding on people meditating.

At the centre of this village of healers was a magnificent water-feature shrine, covered in little buddhas and taras, and decorated richly in leaves, flowers, crystals and prayer flags. Every time I passed, I saw young people meditating or stretching by it. On one occasion I saw a slender woman sitting on the lap of a buff-looking man in the lotus position, her legs wound round his pelvis. That looked deliciously healing to me, though of course the tantric practice they were engaged in - yab yum -  is more about Awakening than healing per se. I wondered if I would see any non-normative bodies doing that kind of thing. 

Interestingly, the festival was permissive of nudity, and there were a few completely naked people wandering around. There were some who may have been Indian Naga sādhus, and some white people too. The sādhus were typically solitary and the white people in little groups of three or four. There was a notice on one of the two bridges across a stream that separated the two main fields asking naked people to please use the other bridge, because of the presence of a children’s area immediately on the other side of this one. It seemed a bit tokenistic, as obviously there were children everywhere at the festival. I wondered whether children would be more, or less, likely than adults to find nakedness alarming. Some of the Somatic Work tents had notices on saying ‘please wear clothes in this workshop’. In the festival info, there had been a warning that attendees should expect to come across nakedness, but any experiences of discomfort should be reported to the stewards. 

It was worth reflecting on my own experience of encounter with this kind of otherness. It’s no big deal. Obviously. Nakedness doesn’t hurt anyone, and it doesn’t offend me. I’m not Mary Whitehouse! But there is nonetheless something undeniably affecting when a strongly-maintained social taboo is transgressed. Skinny-dipping with a bunch of close friends is different to seeing naked people amongst crowds of clothed ones. That’s the point, I guess. It makes you think about the hidden norms that hold expectations in place. The experience led me to the strange reverse thought of being glad that nakedness wasn’t a requirement. Afterall, the clothing demands of culture are pretty random. What if the norms flowed the other way? This in turn, made me think of those political movements that seek to require women to remove burqas or even hijabs, and how awfully exposing, violating, that must feel. 

I also found myself reflecting on how the festival allowed the taboo to be transgressed, and yet also tried to manage the potential fall-out of that transgression. And there was another question, too, about how nakedness related to the concept of a Buddhafield. There’s an argument, I guess, that clothing-norms are nothing more than the conditionality of saṃsāra. To mix the religious metaphors (sorry), there is something beautifully pre-Lapsarian about nakedness, perhaps even something divine about it. I would have loved to have talked to a naked person, to get some sense of their motivation, their community and their style of engagement with this particular festival. But the truth is, naked people tend to keep themselves to themselves. And perhaps I was a bit shy! 

As I spent more time on the festival field, I did notice some evidence for activity that might have been what sharers in the All-Recovery meeting had referred to as ‘a free-love vibe.’ This was not among the naked folk, I hasten to add.

I did see a naked group hug, as two couples, obviously friends, encountered each other on the field for the first time, but it was just a hello, and it definitely wasn’t sexy.

However, I would occasionally see couples of all genders and body-types lying on the grass engaged in what the old swimming-pool signs would have pruriently described as (very) heavy petting. On some of the big yoga and somatic-work tents there were signs warning that “Should sexual energy arise in any of the practices, do not follow it.” There was certainly a sense of sexual energy around the place and different views taken on what to do about that.  

Me and my "Festival Crush"

During a Spoken Word event, I fell in with a very chatty and affectionate young thrupple, who asked me who my ‘festival crush’ was. I laughed, and said I didn’t have one. They feigned a mixture of pity and outrage. Why come to a festival like this if not to have that kind of fun? C’mon - you must have seen someone, surely? While realising I was probably nearly old enough to be their grandmother, I felt a bubbling sense of joy in their company. It was generous of them to consider me worth talking to, with their own inclusive brand of teasing and kindness. I appreciated the sense of peace they had with themselves, their own bodies and genders, and their unashamed cherishing of and delight in each other. 

And I also realised that people here really were at very different festivals, to me, and to each other.  

That was to strike me again in a different way as, on one occasion, I walked back to the campsite behind two tall, poised, women in Ugg boots and long camel coats, yoga mats poking out of their smart leather rucksacks. I was close enough behind them to hear their conversation. 

“So, where are you based?” 

“Deloitte. You?”

“EY”. [Ernst & Young - a similar company committed to delivering ‘wealth creation’ for clients].

This was followed by a short discussion about portfolios, that I couldn’t follow.

Then.

“So, how long have you been doing Vinyasa?”

“A few years now. I honestly wouldn’t be able to cope with the work stress without it.”

“Oh, same! I’ve even got the nanny doing it now, though obviously I don’t let her go to the same classes as me. Wouldn’t work scheduling-wise, for one thing. We’re parallel-scheduled within an inch of our lives! [laughter]. Anyway, it definitely makes her better with the children.  "It’s life-changing, isn’t it?”

“It really is. I wish the husband would consider it!”

“Or the fund-manager!” [laughter]. 

**********************

Other areas of note on the field were the social change, land-rights and land-based skills stalls. If I'd had the time, I could have learned nettle-weaving and wood-turning. I'd have loved that. Extinction Rebellion had a significant presence, and there were dozens of small charities explaining their grassroots work at global locations experiencing the sharp end of climate change. Those protesting the proscription of Palestine Action were there, able to make their quiet case unmolested. One of the writing workshops I participated in was led by a Palestinian poet and musician, Joud Nassar, who was keen for everyone to address their creativity to the important task of generating hope. I was moved by her positivity. If she did not lose hope, what right did any of us white progressives, who’ve never seen mass slaughter in our towns and villages, have to let our anger paralyse us, or to fall victim to despair. 

While Buddhafield was underway, the Systems Theorist, Peace Activist and Deep Ecologist, Joanna Macy, was in her last days. In line with a Buddhist tradition, the last days of a Buddhist teacher’s life are rarely shrouded in privacy. The belong to the sangha. Macy’s name was on the lips of many at the festival, not just the people who identified as Buddhist. At one point, I discovered that I’d missed the opportunity to attend a Council for All Beings - the activity in which participants empathetically represent and advocate for elements of the natural world - not just for humans and non-human animals, but for streams and rocks, mountains and plants. I would've liked to have participated and experienced this, having read about the practice in Macy’s writings. But there was just so much on offer at the festival, I found it impossible to remain fully across all the options at all times. 

In fact, for much of the time I was in state of over-stimulation, mesmerised by all the different opportunities for learning and participation. There were quite a few Triratna and other Buddhist speakers whose names I knew, and whose workshops I was keen to attend. I also wanted to attend creative writing workshops and spoken word events. I simply wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to - not by a long way. Since my heart attack - partly to do with medication and partly to do with heart damage - I struggle with fatigue, and pulsatile tinnitus (an overwhelming sense of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears). If emotional, or stressed, I can easily feel that my heart is not coping, and that can be scary. I have been explicitly warned by a cardiologist against strong emotions and both chronic and acute stress, so I’ve had to become much more adept at reading my own psychosomatic interface. At Buddhafield, I occasionally felt mild panic arise, in less intense, yet similar ways to how it used to in academic conferences that were just too much to take in. I sometimes just had to give myself a pass to find a quiet spot in the adjacent woods, away from all the action, stop all the emotional and intellectual stimulation overwhelming me, and just breathe and process, until I could settle. I was so glad I was there alone, so that I could follow the ebbs and flows of my own limited ability to be present. I had to accept I could not do it all. 

Happily, though, I did manage to take the stage in the Word-Up Tent and perform one of my poems. I chose one about my addiction. This resulted, as it sometimes does, in some precious, intimate conversations with people identifying with me in one way or another, and one person asking me about how to seek support.

I also really appreciated getting to lots of Buddhist-style recovery meetings — including Recovery Dharma and the Buddhist 8-Step Recovery meetings. 

Vimalasara

The Eight Step approach was created by two high profile Triratna Order Members, Vimalasara and Paramabandhu.  I had, like many at the festival, hoped that Vimalasara would be here. I suspected Paramabandhu wouldn't be, but Vimalasara was often a Buddhafield headliner. At one point, I asked a recovery group facilitator if Vimalasara were here. He replied with twinkling eyes, “If Vimalasara was here at Buddhafield, we’d know. We’d be able to feel them. So, no. Sorry. They aren’t here.” I smiled inwardly at his sweet devotion. But at the same time, having interviewed Vimalasara for an article I wrote a few years ago, and felt the power of their presence on that occasion, even through Zoom, I knew what he meant. A figurative way of talking about a field of influence, a buddhafield? Or perhaps it was figurative to me, but not to him? In any event, we were communicating and understanding each other. Perhaps the ontology of it all doesn’t matter so much as the experience.  

Anyway. It was shame Vimalasara wasn’t here, but I was still able to go the Eight Step meetings. 

Interestingly, there were people in all of the different recovery meetings who described having come into recovery for the very first time at previous Buddhafields. Before attending, I hadn’t appreciated quite how important the festival of Buddhafield is in the history of Buddhist-style addiction recovery, and in the Recovery Movement more generally, in the UK. It occurred to me that if I’d still been working, I probably would have had to design a research project to undertake the following year. I really hope that someone does that work. However, the feeling of relief I had being able to just experience, be curious, learn, without having to press everything into the service of the all-consuming goals of academia, was huge. This is not to say that academic work isn’t immensely valuable. At its best, it changes the world for the better. My relief was simply a reflection on the difficulty I had all my career with the toxic strands of personal, collective and institutional ambition and survival, and their entanglements with the work itself. 

*****************************

Leaving a recovery meeting one evening, I received a tip-off that ‘the Plum Village folk’ offered a walking meditation at 9pm. Plum Village is a retreat centre in France, home of the Order of Interbeing, founded by the Vietnamese teacher and peace activist, Thich Nhất Hạnh. Thay, as he is affectionately known, died in 2022. I’ve read many of his books. I’ve lectured on him and his significance in contemporary Anglophone Buddhism. Although I’ve not been to Plum Village, I’ve sat with his community in the UK a few times. I’d heard Thay give a dharma teaching in person in London in the early 2000s, and I’d also watched his all day funeral online. I’d found its intimacy deeply affecting. Again, the death of a teacher is not a private affair. It is something in which the sangha fully shares. 

Anyone who has any exposure to mindfulness, even in the most secular of contexts, will have come across Thay’s teachings. I’m always simultaneously intrigued and horrified by their clever branding, their crafted and desirable aesthetic. I struggle to separate them from the frame of capitalist individualism that looks for the quick spiritual fix, that seeks the advancement of the individual over the flourishing of the community.  But this memeified, consumerist, mindfulness culture fails to do justice to Thay’s actual teachings, which are, by any standard, pretty hardcore. Thich Nhất Hạnh was profoundly politically engaged, radical and challenging. Unfortunately, much of the mindfulness culture that he and other key figures have spawned has become passive, individualist, consumerist and apolitical, therefore easy to press into rightist agendas, and, indeed, to mask the kinds of power differentials in which abuse thrives.

Like Christianity, Buddhism faces its own difficulties with the alt-right. Not just in Myanmar. In Anglophone convert circles, too. There is a ‘muscular’ form of Buddhism that foregrounds non-duality, minimises suffering and delegitimates social justice. Thay’s simple sayings are vulnerable to being pressed into the service of anti-diversity, pro-survival-of-the-fittest agenda, an agenda that chimes with a certain post-colonial trope of the Buddhist (and the Buddha) as a striving, disciplined, self-powered, spiritual hero. The ultimate, fully optimised, 'superman'. The so-called ‘tech-bros’ of Silicon Valley are famously drawn to, and simultaneously generating, this--to my mind, troubling--modern expression of the Buddhist way. It’s an expression that, arguably, would not survive a deeper dive into the actual teachings of Thich Nhất Hạnh.

Walking, smiling, drinking tea, are all central mindfulness practices in Thay’s tradition. These disciplines come out of a Mahāyāna structuring of reality that transcends the saṃsāra - nirvāṇa binary. If calling ‘smiling’ a ‘discipline’ seems strange, it’s worth looking into the concept of jinen (自然) (Japanese), (ziran (自然) in Mandarin) the difficult practice of cultivating ‘naturalness’ in a fabricated world of false consciousness that makes naturalness look, at best, like the wrong goal.

Anyway, the opportunity to simply ‘walk’ with Thay’s community was one I was keen to take up. 

Members of the Interbeing Sangha, Buddhists of other traditions, and a gaggle of hangers-on like me, gathered round the fire at the centre of the Dharma-Parlour area, a crescent of tents where most of the explicitly Buddhist activities took place. Led by someone who I thought might well be a Plum Village monastic in festival civvies, we did a short mindfulness practice, so as to arrive together from the various parts of the festival we’d just left, to settle, and to quieten. 

Whenever I sit with experienced meditators, I never fail to feel the collective power and intention of the practice. I felt time slow down, and the familiar, yet somehow always fresh, welling-up of a consciousness of the miracle of heartbeat and breath, gratitude for being alive in this moment.  

Some brief instructions were given. As I listened, my ‘comparing’ and ‘judging’, my ‘discriminative thinking’ as it would be technically known, arose. There are many different traditions of walking meditation. I’m more used to the slow, formal, kinhin, as practised in Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru’s tradition. Here on the Buddhafield, we were invited to keep a ‘normal’ walking pace, no “artificial slowness” (”Harummphh”, said my brain). Furthermore, there was no need to walk in single file. (”What?”). Each foot should ‘kiss’ the earth (”Oh, cheesy”).  All of this was so different to the sombre, ritualised, formality of kinhin, the ancient ceremonial walking practice with which I'm more familiar. No silly, flaky, ‘kissing’ there! But as soon as this judging and bias was seen, it receded. 

The front of the line set off, and everyone found their place in this long, strange, conga. Some picked up a home-made lantern from the shrine to carry, others positioned their arms comfortably across their middle, fingers interlaced or in a dhyana mudra, such as is the monastic style. Although I barely looked at him, I was aware I was walking next to a tall man, instinctively matching his stride and gentle pace. I felt the power of his meditation - his buddhafield, if you like. It felt as though he and the others around me were carrying my tired body along, in an embodied version of the falling away of boundaries between self and other that I more commonly experience emotionally or psychologically.The silent conga wound its way round the largest of the two fields, passing fire places where instruments were being strummed or stories were being told. Past the shops of Consumer Avenue, past food vans, gong baths, and singing workshops. Past tents with large audiences listening to speakers. Past rows of people in the Yoga Tunnel, all synchronised in bhujangasana. Past an insistent rapper in the Word Up tent, renting the air with her fierce, justice-oriented wordplay. Threads of interrupted conversation reached my ears. Interrupted, because often people just stopped mid-flow in respect, or curiosity, to watch us pass. Our silence was palpable, and it had its own field of influence. Its own power. 

This kind of practice creates a pause between stimulus and response. It meant walking past the vendors’ stalls in a new way, without being pulled in every direction by the desire for things, a desire that is really about curating a particular self. This is so much easier to see when you slow down. It meant hearing fragments of conversations without needing them to be finished, without needing to join in, and without judging them as either interesting or stupid. It was an immersion in the meeting point between nature—wet grass, soil, stones, mud, trees, breeze, hills, sky, stars—and human activity: food, shrines, rubbish bins, laughter, litter, shouts, the odour of wet canvas and toilets, the fragrance of incense, bunting flapping, children running, couples cuddling. It was taking in fickleness, impermanence, conditionality, and beauty all at once. 

It was also, as we had been directed, a compassionate awareness of all beings. I thought of Chris, probably still in a dance tent. I thought of the tardigrades in the puddles by the toilets. I thought of the rooks on the campsite field. I thought of my dead ones, my parents, my brother, the children I miscarried, and the dead ones of others in the line, unknown to me. I thought of the troubled world outside of this peaceful Buddhafield. All beings. The magnificent unlikeliness of it all. Sounds and silences reached my ears. The breeze breathed on my cheeks sometimes, sometimes not.

My feet kissed the ground.

Yeah. Alright. 

Homemade lanterns at the shrine to Mañjuśrī, Bodhisattva of Transcendent Wisdom

Dhivan

For me, one of the nicest elements of going to Buddhafield was the opportunity to catch up with Dhivan, a former colleague and dear friend.

Dr Dhivan Thomas Jones is a Triratna Order member, and unlike me, a ‘proper’ scholar of Buddhism who reads Buddhist languages. When Dhivan was appointed, I had my first experience of working day-to-day alongside a researcher, thinker and writer immersed, and highly respected, in the field of Buddhist Studies. I’m rooted in the general field Religious Studies, rather than in Buddhist Studies per se, but I have taught Buddhism and other Asian traditions for most of my career. I’ve almost always been the lone Buddhism lecturer in my department, often even the lone ‘Asian Traditions’ lecturer— left happily to my own devices to structure programmes of study. I’d never needed to work closely with a Buddhism colleague like this before, especially not a far better scholar than I, who also wanted to collaborate, in a genuinely interactive way, with me as an equal partner.

When Dhivan arrived in our department, I was at a very low personal ebb. My little brother had just died from pancreatic cancer. Enmeshed in grief, I was feeling fragile and useless at work. Brittle and on the edge. Behind with everything. In debt to colleagues, unable to 'perform.' On top of all that, and given what he represented, I guess it wasn't surprising that, even though I had 100% supported his appointment -- it was fantastic for the department -- I was personally mightily challenged by Dhivan’s presence,

But his time with us turned out to be among the best intellectual and most meaningful experiences of my life. 

We were fortunate that my PhD on Japanese Mahāyāna gave me an area of specialism within Buddhism that was quite some distance, both geographically and theoretically, from Dhivan’s Indian specialism. My methodological orientation was different too. Those differences helped us to work out how we could divide up the curriculum. Even so, I often found myself teaching large swathes of Asian philosophical tradition that Dhivan would have taught much more expertly. While my subject expertise was, in many areas, inferior to his, I did bring extensive experience in teaching to our partnership. There is no doubt I benefitted more from exposure to Dhivan than he did to me, but I also know he would say that I helped him to make the difficult transition from ‘primarily researcher’ to ‘primarily lecturer.  

The other novel element of our partnership was Dhivan was (is) a practising Buddhist. As I’ve already said, I came out of the broadly phenomenological, Critical Religions stable. Most of ‘us’ are not religious. I used to tell students that when they represent a religious tradition, not only is it essential to be accurate and well informed, but they should also imagine multiple different members of that religion being present to hear how they are being represented. As it was once put by Professor Ninian Smart himself, they should imagine these adherents hiding behind the curtains in the classroom!

In the cultural context in which I’ve always taught, my Theology/Christianity colleagues always had a wide variety of Christian students in their classes. My Islamic Studies colleagues almost always had Muslim students in their classes. But I rarely had a Buddhist student in my class. The religions I taught tended to be further removed from the direct experience of my students than those taught by most of my colleagues. These things make for interestingly different classroom dynamics. It’s easier when the material is new to everybody. If I said something simplistic or partial about Buddhism, chances were no-one would spot it. I was used to being pretty unassailable and feeling extremely comfortable, complacent even, in the classroom.  As you might imagine, I was shaken when Dhivan suggested that he came to all my Asian Philosophies classes and I went to all of his. This was an early signal of just how seriously he took his role, as a teacher and as a collaborative colleague. Although I felt sick, I could do nothing but agree that this would be valuable to us both. So, not only did I find myself having to teach in front of a renowned scholar, I was also teaching about Buddhism in front of a senior, practising, ordained, Buddhist. He wouldn't be hiding behind the curtain of my imagination. He'd actually be there. I had to bring my A game.

Dhivan was always kind, and honest, about my representation of his tradition in our private debriefs after my sessions. I won’t deny that it was hard, but it was SO good for me. I can laugh now at how anal I became about checking diacritical marks in resources before Dhivan saw them, (not that he drew lots of attention to those deficiencies), but the unpalatable truth is, some more anality, or more precisely, care, earlier in my career would not have gone amiss! 

Obviously, I had initially felt vulnerable and defensive when he first took up his post. Let’s be honest, when you face threats of redundancy, you really don't want someone who can do your job better than you joining your team! But I was also wary of the pitfalls of jealousy that, in nearly three decades in an ego-riddled, competitive profession, I have seen cause immense harm to individuals -- not only to the envious and to the envied, but also to those around them. I knew I needed to face this challenge in an open-hearted way. Dhivan, for his part, brought out something better in me. I quickly came to appreciate his qualities, his counsel, his friendship, as much as I appreciated his expertise. I came to love our work together. I hugely appreciated what I learned about texts and early Buddhist and other Indian epistemologies. And I especially loved our shared enjoyment of the remarkable ways students grapple with challenging material. Ultimately, I experienced Dhivan's departure for new research adventures four years later as a significant personal and professional loss.

We had kept in touch and even managed to meet up in the intervening couple of years, but, as you might imagine, I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing him again. Not only that, I was going to be seeing him for the first time in what is, in some ways, his ‘natural habitat’, as a senior Triratna teacher and Order Member. At Buddhafield.  

There was no phone signal on the Buddhafield. Obviously, I’d tried to text him, but no luck. We’d communicated by email before the festival, so I knew he’d be looking out for me. But in the short term, there was nothing I could do but hope I bumped into him, and failing that, to attend his first workshop in the second half of the festival. Thankfully, I did bump into him, as he emerged late one afternoon from someone else’s talk in the Dharma-Parlour area, and we had a couple of lovely evenings together, along with some of his friends and co-religionists. I was able to attend two out of three of his talks. I would have loved to have attended the third, as it was the second half of a pair of workshops on the dharma of craving and the dharma of joy - framing joy, rather than non-attachment, as the path to liberation.

In the first of these workshops I was struck, of course, by the wisdom of Dhivan's message, and by its robust reliance on the primary sources that, as a linguist as well as a philosopher, he knows so intimately. I was also struck, at a more visceral level, by how well I knew him -- his style of teaching, his gentle way of generating engagement, his transparent yet paradoxically distinct presence as mediator between the ancient material and contemporary concerns and experiences. Dhivan, the Buddhist teacher and leader was not qualitatively different from Dr Dhivan Jones, University Lecturer. The atmosphere he generated was rooted his temperament of curiosity combined with disciplined philosophical inquiry. This is perhaps no accident. The early Buddhist texts that Dhivan works so closely with present the Buddhist way as a form of relentless, critical, philosophical inquiry, rejecting all usual forms of authority bar the wholesomeness of the outcomes of teachings. 

What I didn’t expect, and perhaps should have, was just how cherished and admired he was by younger Triratna members. Serious, earnest, young people, intent on developing their own practice. For reasons of my own history, I wanted to say to those young people, “Yes, unlike most teachers, this one IS worthy of your admiration. But keep some back too. Keep some for yourself, and keep hold of yourself and your emotions, always. Be cautious. Notice how this setting is riddled with charisma and power, no matter how assiduously this good teacher eschews them.”

Dhivan (foreground), before his Dharma Talk, being introduced by Seb.

In addition to the workshop, I was able to attend Dhivan’s main Dharma Talk, given to an

audience of several hundred people. I felt instinctively nervous for him, but I needn’t have. The talk was excellent. It was titled Rewilding the Heart. We might assume that this particular environmentally-minded audience would consider rewilding (refraining from intervening in nature) obviously and unequivocally the coolest thing going. Dhivan, however, took a more questioning approach. He focused on the relationship between ideas and methods, arguing that if you are not clear about what you are trying to achieve, things can easily go wrong. You cannot simply stop intervening in nature and expect the outcome to be wholly positive. You need a clear and precise sense of your aims and then to fit your actions (or non-actions) to those aims. You also need to be super-careful not to confuse a method with an outcome. The talk was delivered extemporaneously, fluently, without notes or slides, and was illustrated with rich examples from rewilding projects in the UK and elsewhere that he’d visited. 

His central argument rested on the Buddhist and pan-Asian notion of citta or ‘heart-mind.’ The bifurcation of this whole into separate ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ is a (potentially problematic) Western cultural anomaly. He argued that what’s needed above all else is vision, and that vision depends on imagination. Without imagination we have no vision. This applies not only to rewilding projects, but also to how we imagine society, and to how we envision the unfolding of our own lives. In this sense, the talk was less a celebration of rewilding as a practice, and more a valorisation of imagination itself—of wild imagination.

I felt so lucky that I got to see my friend in his religious setting, functioning as spiritual guide and role-model, rather than as (the more familiar) gatekeeper of academic knowledge and understanding—tutor and assessor.  Those respective environments and their purposes are so different, but what was remarkable to me was that Dhivan himself seemed so effortlessly the same. This is a hallmark of a kind of integrity I really admire.

You get the picture. It was lovely to see him. 

Medicine Buddha

One of the last activities that I was able to get involved in at the festival was a chanting workshop, that morphed into a ceremony. This took place in the largest of the Dharma Parlour marquees. The mantra that the group of a couple of hundred of us were required to learn was in Tibetan. It was a homage to, or a manifestation of, the Medicine Buddha, Bhaiṣajyaguru.

The Medicine Buddha is one of the most important buddhas in the Mahāyāna ‘pantheon’. Western readers who’ve had their image of Buddhism shaped by the post-colonial notion of a single historical human Buddha— ‘The Buddha’— are often surprised to learn about multiple buddhas. Even Theravāda speaks of multiple buddhas, buddhas of different epochs. However, in the multiverse of Mahāyāna, buddhas proliferate. They’re said to be more numerous than the grains of sand in the Ganges. These buddhas are all associated, in richly symbolic ways, with particular features of Awakening, and naturally, some are more famous than others. The Medicine Buddha is, as you might expect, associated with physical healing. But he’s also associated with the purification of (or healing from) negative karma. 

The workshop was led by Triratna order member Mahāsukha, an experienced mantra teacher and ritualist. Mahāsukha wrangled the large crowd with authority, and soon had us broken into four parts. Although I’m really an alto, I was finding the alto part too difficult in the first instance, so I went with the sopranos. That was probably an error, as my voice really did tire and crack during the long continuous chanting. But as I settled in to the practice, that seemed to matter less and less. The magic of community singing, which I have always loved, is that it doesn’t matter much how rubbish you are individually, you are contributing to a beautiful collective sound. Not for the first time at Buddhafield, and much like the Plum Village Walking, I felt ‘held up’, ‘carried’ by the sangha, and able therefore to rest, progressively more deeply, into both the sounds of the mantra, and in the internal states that the practice brought about.

While I don’t have much experience of the visualisation practices so central in the Tibetan traditions, I intuitively ‘got’ the idea that this buddha we were paying homage to, and even, according to the tradition, 'manifesting' in the sound we were making, embodied a principle, a value, a quality. A simple way of putting it would be to say he ‘stood for’ something, but as I indicated earlier, that rendering relies on a sacred-secular binary that I don’t want to assume. Mahāsukha made us laugh by pointing out that the buddharūpa on the shrine at the front was not even Bhaiṣajyaguru. It was Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha. But that didn’t really matter, he said, because buddha is buddha. 

Chanting Bhaiṣajyaguru’s name (Maha Bekandze in Tibetan pronunciation) both expresses gratitude for and manifests the power of healing. It expresses an aspiration to receive and give healing oneself, which are, in Buddhist thought, elements of the aspiration for Awakening itself. As we chanted this ancient mantra, I was repeatedly overcome by the beauty of the sound. The recording I made of a few minutes of it does not do justice to the intensity of the experience, but please do listen to it if you've got this far.

0:00

The chant went on continuously for more than an hour. Once everyone was reasonably confident in their parts, and the chanting was properly underway, the ceremony began. Mahāsukha stopped drumming, stood up, and walked over to the shrine to make his obeisance, leaving us to continue the chant temporarily without his leadership. When he returned, participants, in their own time, rose from their cushions, approached the shrine. In loose groups of about four or five at a time, they knelt and bowed, or fully prostrated, three times, in front of the ‘Medicine Buddha.’ Then they would light a tea-light, offer it up, lay it down, sit to contemplate, then, bow deeply once more and withdraw, leaving a space for the next devotee. As I continued to chant and watch this loosely choreographed, yet thoroughly personal, phenomenon, I wondered if I would ‘go up’. 

As a child, growing up in church, I hated the idea of ‘going up’ to the Communion rail for a blessing. I mostly refused to do it. In fact, when it came to the end of my confirmation classes at aged 16, I told my Mum that I didn’t want to get confirmed. And I didn’t. Even though it was temperamentally extremely hard for me not to behave as expected. 

Like many shy children, I was anxious about being visible through participation. More than that though, I felt conflicted and confused about ‘being allowed’ to participate. Even though the liturgical words I had learned told me this wasn’t the case, I had internalised the idea that a state of purity was required to approach the Communion rail. Those words notwithstanding, my mother had been refused Communion for many years when I was a young child, owing to the fact that she had been divorced. That refusal was eventually revoked in the early 1980s, thanks to a new incumbent in the parish, and by the time I was refusing to follow through on my own confirmation, she was fully communicant again. And infinitely happier.

Looking back, though, I realise that her exclusion from the table of her beloved Heavenly Father had installed a strange legacy for me, her eldest daughter. While I liked some of the rest of church as a child, I had an inexplicable, visceral, hatred for the Eucharist. I never wanted to ‘go up’, never wanted anything to do with whatever sacred interchange I fancied happened at that rail.

It seems patently obvious to me, now, that I had, from a very young age, internalised the trauma of Mum’s shaming.That was never conscious, and to be honest, it is only just now becoming so, as I reflect back on my life in my late 50s. The thought does, however, help to explain my own childhood anxieties, which have always been a little mysterious to me. Any talk about Communion at home when I was young would make me feel miserable and stupid, even to the point of bringing on tears that I couldn’t explain.

Perhaps I was crying tears that rightfully belonged to my mother. 

As I sat chanting on the Buddhafield, pouring all my emotions into the intonations of homage to the Medicine Buddha, to my astonishment, seemingly inexplicable tears began to fall again. It was that familiar, tortured, feeling of wondering if I should ‘Go Up’. Should I use this ritual to embody my own belief in and gratitude for healing, to physically and ritually express the aspiration for healing beyond myself that, god knows, the world desperately needs?

Unlike at church, I felt no social pressure to do so. No one would notice if I did or didn’t. It was a huge crowd. I was pretty sure that even though dozens and dozens appeared to be going up, dozens more were not. But even the idea of moving, of stepping out in that symbolic way, made my heart race, my throat constrict, and tears fall down my face. I felt like a child. 

From my cushion, I watched Dhivan, who'd been sitting with the basses, get up and join the queue, finding his space in the crowd of devotees. He edged forward, graciously allowing others to go in front of him, eventually reaching a spot in front of the shrine. His body naturally fell into the ritual pattern of bowing, candle lighting and offering. I fancied he sat longer than some people, his hands pressed palms together, contemplating the light he’d offered.

I’d have loved to see inside his heart-mind in that intimate moment. 

I let the chanting hold me for a while, as I tried to gently encourage myself out of my regressed state. Deliberately and slowly, I moved my attention to the notion of healing. I started at the obvious level. Here I was, feeling blessedly physically well, despite a heart attack that could have killed me two years earlier, and a related bleed in my stomach just a few months before. But here, now, sitting on my cushion in Somerset, I was fine. Earlier in 2025, I had celebrated my 20 years in recovery from addiction. This meant that my mental health, though tricky at times, had not reached the depths of attempting suicide for more than two whole decades. It also meant I’d made a small contribution to the recoveries of others just by virtue of being a part of a recovery movement. I’ve received infinitely more than I’ve given, but I have given. I could thank the Medicine Buddha for that, for sure. Hey, perhaps here at Buddhafield, Bhaiṣajyaguru is manifesting as the Recovery Buddha!

I also reflected on the deeper levels of the personal and intergenerational trauma that I have been seeking help for in recent years, and the deepened understanding and genuine, though incomplete, healing I’ve experienced in that arena. I thought, too, of relationships that have been damaged, not just by my addiction, but by my selfishness and other flaws and frailties, relationships that I would not be able to describe as healed, despite decades of recovery. I thought of harm perpetrated by me that cannot be undone. I committed myself again to prioritising the introspection required to move forward positively, without defensiveness or self-justification.  

Then in typical Buddhist fashion, I guess, I radiated my attention outwards to wider notions of healing - thinking about this terribly troubled political moment. What would healing of that even look like? We’d definitely need both Joud Nassar’s improbable and extraordinary hope, and Dhivan’s wildly imaginative yet philosophically exacting, vision. I’d loved how Dhivan had spoken about the interface of ‘vision’ and ‘task’. Healing is really about work. It’s about doing things differently. I’d learnt that the hard way in terms of my own health - in a big way in relation to drinking, but I’ve had to learn a similar lesson again more recently in relation to my weak arteries and the limits of my ability to live with stress and the intensity of my own emotions. I know, as well, that I have to heal from trauma if I am not to revisit it on others, or on myself. It’s not always easy to know what that might look like, so I need the vision, but I also need to do the work.

I thought about all the organisations at Buddhafield committed to the healing of climate change, global politics, the ravages of late capitalism and individualism. I thought of the coming together that is so badly needed. In some ways, a better world felt possible on the Buddhafield, but even this environment is shot through with political passivity and self-interest. It would be naïve to think otherwise. And perhaps its worse here, because it’s cloaked in something else. There is no ‘virtue’ inherent in meditation, yoga, prayer, in faith or belief, or even in sobriety. It’s what you do with it. 

Letting go of thoughts, I rested again in the beauty of the chant, homage to the Medicine Buddha, allowing it to both wash over and carry me.

And then, I found myself untangling my legs. And getting awkwardly up from my cushion.

I stood for a moment, wobbling, letting the blood reach my feet, wondering what on earth I was doing.

Yes.

I was ‘Going Up’.

Another devotee, an older woman, gently ushered me forward, ahead of her.

Though she didn’t touch me, I felt as if her gesture of inclusion were the hand of my Mum, lightly on the small of my back, helping me, in spite of everything she had been through herself, to make my offering of light, alongside others, in gratitude, and in the ardent hope for healing. 

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 With thanks to Dave Cheetham of Digitally Focused for help with the sound file.