The morning dew has not yet dried on the grass surrounding your tent when you wake up to the melodies of cowbells and subdued coffee house music from the massive kitchen tent a short distance down the hill. The cows are already having breakfast while the kitchen team is baking thousands of buns and cooking hundreds of liters of porridge. When you unzip your tent you are greeted by blue skies and gorgeous mountain views of an alpine lake glittering in the morning sun. In an ideal world that is! More often than not you have to put on your rain gear before you even make it to the communal showers and gray skies are promising yet another rainy day. Whichever way the wind blows you get going and start a day of practicing together with your fellow course participants, listening to lectures by dharma teachers, helping to run the course, and having food or coffee with friends from around the world that you haven’t met for far too long.
The summer of 2008 was a year to remember. It saw the coming together of the worldwide Diamond Way sangha for the first International Summer Course at the Europe Center to meet their teachers and celebrate the manifestation of Lama Ole and Hannah’s wishes.
It had been Lama Ole and Hannah’s wish for some time to avoid what they called “national churches” in Diamond Way Buddhism. Essentially, they wished that the community of practitioners would be inseparable; not divided by national borders, to avoid confusing cultural behavior with the essential teachings of the Karma Kagyu lineage. Nothing overcomes strong ideas about other cultures better than working side by side to make something truly great happen and then joining each other in meditation with the Lama.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the majority of courses taught by Lama Ole and visited by other teachers of the lineage were national events. Of course, other practitioners from neighboring countries and those on tour with Lama Ole attended, but there were no truly international events. At Lama Ole’s request, the annual Summer Course in Kassel, Germany, started to open up to the world by actively inviting other countries and continents to not only participate in the course, but also to help run it. Year after year the course became more and more international, giving Diamond Way practitioners the chance to not only meet in one place, but also to join in the organization of the course. This gave people the opportunity to learn how to put on such events, which was especially useful for those coming from smaller sanghas who would soon be hosting not only Lama Ole, but also the Gyalwa Karmapa.
At the same time, in the early 2000s, the Diamond Way saw other projects with an international approach gather momentum. The very international sangha in London started looking and fundraising for a bigger center in London and an international crew of friends began to operate Karma Berchen Ling Retreat Center in Greece. In this atmosphere of budding transnational friendship, the worldwide sangha managed to scrape together enough funds to buy the Europe Center. Interestingly the majority of the money came from smaller donations, meaning there was no main sponsor! It began as a place with grassroots support from all over the Diamond Way world.
The work didn’t stop with purchasing the Europe Center! The surrounding land had to be transformed to be able to host thousands of friends from all over the world without changing the landscape, as it is a regionally-protected area of natural beauty. It was a phenomenal undertaking which included the construction of plateaus to house the gompa, kitchen, and cafeteria tents, a water tank to store huge amounts of water, and a sewage system. Not only did we need to create new things, but we also needed to repurpose an old farming barn into something useful. It was an adventurous time with a couple of all-nighters just before the first course to make it all happen.
At the same time as the construction was happening, the first team was being put together, calling on those with the experience of running big courses from around the world, especially Europe (mostly due to logistics). All Diamond Way Buddhist events are run by volunteers and so the people organizing the course often use all their vacation time to make this event happen. Many aspects of the 2008 course could have led to disaster. There was a massive construction site, a new event team who had never worked together, and new relationships had to be formed with the town government, locals, and suppliers. Through these conditions the wish to provide the perfect environment to welcome Lama Ole and the Gyalwa Karmapa prevailed and the course was a great success (like all those since). There is often a furious paddling beneath the surface of a gliding swan, but, in general, those who attend are happy. Of course we’ve had some close calls during some of the courses, be it too little fresh water or too much waste water. There are persistent rumors that the team has even made efforts to improve the weather, but as you may have experienced yourself, most of the years we don’t manage to chase away the rain.
The Summer Course team is a group of around four to five hundred friends from many different countries and cultures who have given their time, energy and joy to make this amazing event happen for the last thirteen years. It may seem a bit over the top to say that we are all friends—however, unlike modern social media friendships, we spend such an intense time together each summer that we truly become friends. Given the nature (and sheer size) of the event, you may not know everyone well but the connection of shared experience is there.
Each member of the Summer Course team gives at least three weeks of their time to ensure the course takes place, though in reality people give much more. Many are on site for six to eight weeks to build up the vast tents, fit them out once they are up, and essentially build the infrastructure of a small town. Others cook, clean, and support those who are building. At the same time, other teams work away to ensure that the course goes off without a hitch (or at least appears to)! But it’s not only the so-called team that makes the course happen; everyone who comes to the course spends some time every day helping in the kitchen, making coffee, or even just cleaning the toilets.
The team has refined running a course that can vary from two thousand five hundred to seven thousand participants down to a fine art, but that’s not to say there aren’t ongoing and new challenges. How the shuttle team gets over five thousand people down a narrow winding mountain road back to their cars (often in the rain) in a few hours is one of the annual miracles. We know it will work but don’t really comprehend how they pull it off, along with how lunch is ready for seven thousand people less than an hour after an event that the kitchen team has attended, and how the toilets are always clean and stocked with toilet paper, when some of the best restaurants don’t manage this in much easier conditions. These and many, many other details, are the daily miracles of the course.
Virtual Summer Course
In 2020 and 2021, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, the usual ‘live’ version of the Summer Course could not take place. Therefore we, as a team, put our heads together and came up with the virtual Summer Course. The thought behind it was essentially no different than usual; to bring as many Diamond Way practitioners from around the world together as possible. However, this time we could not do it in person. We knew that a virtual course was not going to have the same impact, but we were acutely aware of the isolation felt by many, especially in countries with few practitioners and/ or more limited possibilities to meet. Both years, the virtual Summer Course took place over two weekends with teachings from Lama Ole, presentations from the three international Diamond Way projects, and the ever popular presentation evening where Diamond Way centers and projects from around the world can showcase their projects by means of a short video. In the summer of 2021, in places where restrictions had eased and people could come together in their own countries, satellite courses took place at the same time as the virtual Summer Course. People watched the streamed sessions and enjoyed explanations by local traveling teachers and meditations together.
As we write this, we are happy to announce that in 2022, we will be able to return to the traditional and “live” format for the Summer Course at the Europe Center, from August 1 to 14, 2022.
For the many practitioners from fifty-one different countries around the world, the annual Summer Course is so much more than a course. It’s packed to the brim with experience, emotions, long nights, early mornings, new and old friends, sunny days, muddy shoes, and long queues for food of always great quality (we love you kitchen crew!). Above all, it is the place to meet our teacher and to practice the dharma together with our big Diamond Way family from near and far.
For this, we will be forever thankful.
