EUROPEAN KWAN UM SCHOOL OF ZEN TEACHERS MEET IN YORK

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Teachers from the Kwan Um School of Zen Europe meet every year over a long weekend to set policy and discuss various aspects of Zen teaching. The meetings are hosted in turn by KUSZ teachers and sanghas across Europe and this was the first time for York, UK. We met at the end of May, 2024, with 13 teachers attending in person from Germany, Slovenia, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Poland and the UK and those from Israel and the Czech Republic joining on Zoom.

The meeting was held in 14th century Bedern Hall, Bartle Garth, which provided a supportive and inspiring environment for our long and intensive working sessions. After the meeting concluded on Sunday, those teachers who still had some time before heading home via Manchester and Gatwick airports were joined by members of York Zen for special chanting for world peace, our voices soaring and reverberating throughout the ancient hall.

Some teachers from the Kwan Um School of Zen European Teachers Group visiting York for their annual meeting, gathered with some members of the York Zen sangha in Bedern Hall, York.

Members of York Zen sangha chanting with visiting teachers from the Kwan Um School of Zen Europe in Bedern Hall, York.

The Blackbird and Sven

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Watching you work, completely focused, single-minded, bringing all you are to make this one thing alive, creating meaning, beauty and function in one whole piece; generated through instinct, and coming into being as we watch, though still invisible to the wider world. Meticulous, patient, bit-by-bit becoming until there it is, in the light: complete, unique and perfect. (And so it is with each of us: one by one each thing has it, one by one each thing is complete.)

As Sven’s fingers move over the keyboard building this website with colour, fonts and photographs, an about-to-become-a-mother blackbird inspects the corner of a shelf against the white-washed wall of our city yard. She hops and settles, repeats. Is this the right place to build a nest? She moves aside some clematis vine to make a space behind it, flies off, and returns with her mate. He looks too and they agree, and so she weaves a bowl of feather, leaf and twig. When Sven and the blackbird each have finished building, he the website, she the nest, you don’t see either of them anymore, but each is present in their creation.

Thank you, Sven Mahr, for building the website for York Zen Group and taking the brilliant photos. You have completely realized our vision, laying out the warm welcome we want to give to all who already enjoy Zen meditation and all who might like to begin. Sven Mahr is based in Leipzig and can be contacted via his website here.