In the hills above the Spanish town of Velez-Malaga lies a growing, vibrant place called Karma Guen. It is a Buddhist retreat and study center, part of a worldwide network of more than 500 Diamond Way Buddhist centers that all have a common objective: to bring Buddha’s timeless teachings concerning true happiness to inquiring minds in the modern West.
Karma Guen is a retreat place made by and for practitioners, and it is the most international of all the Diamond Way Buddhist retreat centers. It is not an abstract institution, but a friendly place to learn, practice, share experiences and developments, and actively participate in the retreat center’s daily life.
The Foundation
Karma Guen was founded as a Karma Kagyu retreat center on the ruins of an abandoned Andalusian pueblo blanco in 1987. Development was slow and difficult in its early years but accelerated greatly with the construction of a Kalachakra Stupa at the retreat center in 1994. This project was the first outer sign of Karma Guen’s emerging role as an intercultural bridge. Under the detailed guidance and involvement of a great Bhutanese meditation master, Lopön Tsechu Rinpoche, the Kalachakra Stupa was the first of its kind to be built in the Western world. It symbolizes the timeless nature of Buddha’s mind and helps to unlock the buddha potential of all who see it or meditate close to it. It has been an inspiration for thousands of visitors who come from around the world to share in its benefit.
Since the stupa’s construction, growth has been virtually non-stop at Karma Guen and in Spain as a whole. Buddhism is coming to the West, and a true mixing of Western and traditional Buddhist cultures is now developing. An example of this is the fact that Diamond Way meditation groups and centers exist throughout Spain, from Bilbao to Barcelona in the north, to Madrid in the center, and to Granada, Sevilla, Almeria, and Malaga in the south.
At Karma Guen itself, a core team of fifteen people from nine countries helps run the retreat center day to day. Team members come from Spain, Denmark, Tibet, Lithuania, Switzerland, Germany, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada. Balancing daily life and work with volunteering in the retreat center, this team supports all those interested in Diamond Way Buddhism—from the newly interested to experienced, hard-core practitioners from around the world who come to undertake retreats and study breaks.
A Bridge Made of Many Parts
From its simple foundation, Karma Guen has evolved into a multi-faceted place. While first and foremost a retreat center, it consciously develops its role as an intercultural bridge, bringing the best aspects of Kagyu Buddhism that developed in Tibet to intelligent people in the West who hunger for answers to life’s deeper questions.
This bridge is built of many parts. A large course is held annually in May or June with Lama Ole Nydahl, the main teacher who directs Karma Guen and all the Diamond Way Buddhist centers around the world. For this large course, 1,200 to 2,500 Buddhists from every continent come to participate in a practice called Phowa, a specialty of Kagyu Buddhism. In this meditation practice, transmitted to Tibet from India 900 years ago, one learns how to consciously transfer the mind out of the body at the moment of death so that it keeps developing in the best way until the next rebirth. Thousands of Westerners meet this practice for the first time at Karma Guen, and many come back year after year to renew their practice.
There is also an open university study course given by a team of teachers led by Hannah Nydahl (who is married to Lama Ole), Khenpo Karma Ngedon (a Tibetan doctor of Buddhist philosophy who is part of the resident team of Karma Guen), and Manfred Seegers (a German scholar of Buddhism). Students from around the world are given fresh insights into teachings about the nature of mind by studying classical Tibetan and Indian Buddhist philosophy, for example the Namshe Yeshe (Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom) written by H.H. the 3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje.
Karma Guen has hosted many empowerments given by some of the greatest Kagyu masters over the years. H.H. the 17th Karmapa Trinley Thaye Dorje, H.H. Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche, and Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche have all used these opportunities to introduce Westerners to their own inherent buddha potential through the skillful means of empowerment.
Many of these events have been held in the new Thaye Dorje Gompa. This huge project was a wish of the founders of Karma Guen for many years. After considerable effort, it was inaugurated in May 2004. With space for two thousand people, it epitomizes the blending of East and West. Its outer architecture and high-tech support infrastructure are pure twenty-first-century Western Europe. But step inside, and you are transported into another world. The renowned Nepali/Tibetan painter Dawa Lhadipa and his understudies have been working virtually non-stop since 2004 to adorn all the inner walls with paintings in the traditional Karma Gardri style. Nowhere outside Asia has anything ever been done on this scale: In all, some 350 square meters will be painted in the finest detail, bringing a full exposition of this rare and unique style from its home in the Himalayas to Europe, where it can be seen and studied by new generations of enthusiasts. The themes developed in the paintings are traditional Kagyu: One wall depicts the Great Seal (Skt. Mahamudra) lineage, another the full Karmapa lineage, and another the principal Kagyu yidams. Buddha’s complete life story is developed over a series of six other sections elsewhere in the gompa.
Karma Guen is not just about huge courses with thousands of people. Throughout the year, smaller, more intimate courses are also given by visiting and resident Buddhist teachers. Weekend courses are offered most months throughout the year, including teachings given by the great Tibetan master Mipham Rinpoche, who, with his wife Mayumla and their faithful attendant Sonam Palden, lives full-time at the center.
Bridging Past, Present, and Future
Looking into the future, a big part of Karma Guen’s work will involve supporting the International Institute for Tibetan and Asian Studies (ITAS). ITAS is a university program run at Karma Guen in conjunction with the University of Canterbury Christ Church in the United Kingdom that offers a B.A. (and eventually an M.A. as well) to Westerners in Tibetan translation. The aim of ITAS is to produce well-rounded, well-educated scholars who can spread throughout the West, giving ever greater numbers of people the opportunity to meet with an ever-greater number of newly translated teachings from the Kagyu lineage and other works of Buddhadharma. ITAS is firmly established now, and its student numbers are growing rapidly with people coming from as far as Russia and Australia to study.
As a support for ITAS, Karma Guen is building a library with an archival facility that specializes in collecting rare texts from Tibet, Nepal, India, China, and other countries where practice-oriented lineages thrived in the past, thus preserving them for future generations.
In all this activity, a common thread can be seen: Since its founding in 1987, Karma Guen (and indeed all Diamond Way Buddhist centers throughout the world) is focused on bringing the Buddha’s teachings to modern, inquiring people, thereby helping to transfer timeless wisdom about the nature of mind and happiness to a world in great need of both! At Karma Guen, you can truly experience the mixing of the best elements of old Tibetan and modern Western culture…. Come and see for yourself by joining us for our twentieth-anniversary celebration, to be held on the weekend of May 25-28, 2007.
Photo credit: Matt Balara
