6 minute read
Tibet on White Esk
Words by PAUL STAFFORD
Our writer visits the Buddhist monastery of Kagyu Samye Ling, which has been based in Scotland’s southwest since the 1960s
It’s not a sight you’d expect to see in the Scottish Lowlands: cheerful prayer ags apping in the breeze around a gleaming, white-and-gold stupa.
With only small villages for miles around, western Europe’s largest Buddhist temple, Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre, seems like an incongruous addition to this bucolic setting.
“Samye Ling was the rst Tibetan Buddhist centre that was established in Europe,” explains Ani Gelongma Lhamo, a Buddhist nun and native of Scotland, who has lived at the temple since 1989. Dressed in red robes, her head shaved, she speaks with a clear, calm authority that has even led to her addressing Scottish Parliament about the enduring importance of tolerance and compassion.
The monastery, founded in 1967, is of the scale that one would expect in India’s Himalayan north. Here in rural Scotland, instead of uffy yaks and white-capped peaks, the backdrop consists of woolly sheep, rolling elds and dark green wedges of forest. The local community, many of whom aren’t Buddhist, are partly responsible for the pristine gardens that enhance the monastery’s peaceful atmosphere. Although just how Tibetan and Scottish culture became so neatly fused together here is anything but a Zen story.
ABOVE: Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche and Ani Gelongma Lhamo
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Kagyu Samye Ling
RAGGED PATHS TO PERFECTION
When the rst lamas arrived in this backwater area of Scotland in 1967, only one building existed on the site, ironically a hunting lodge called Johnstone House. “That was the ower power time and I believe quite a few celebrities and whatnot came here,” explains Ani Lhamo. Many of the lamas themselves were dealing with private and existential traumas following China’s annexation of the reclusive Himalayan country in 1951. Reaction came in the form of 1959’s Tibetan Uprising, which ultimately led to almost all senior Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa, eeing their ancestral lands along with many thousands of ordinary Tibetans.
Conditions in northern India’s refugee camps posed another threat to life, with smallpox and tuberculosis rife. Soon, with no hope of returning home, sites around the world were sought for new temples, and lamas were being posted to the United States, as well as rural Dumfriesshire.
One of those Tibetans, the current abbot of Kagyu Samye Ling, is Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, who arrived in Scotland in 1969. These days he navigates the Tibetan Centre’s paths on a mobility scooter. Speaking in a calm manner, his voice barely ascends above a whisper; he lost a lung to
tuberculosis in his youth, following a near fatal escape from Tibet that saw 13 people of a party of 300 make it out safely.
Being thrust so violently into the western world, after a youth spent without electricity, roads or radios, led to many temptations; particularly when rubbing shoulders with celebrities, who were attracted to this new Buddhist site in Scotland as much for the publicity as the precepts.
Unsurprisingly, the frivolity of those early years didn’t sit well with some members of the local Eskdalemuir community unaccustomed to visitors from the outside.
“In the beginning, this was a farming area. It was very conservative, so we used to get very bad telephone messages saying ‘what are you doing. You people are devils...don’t come here. This is a Christianity country!’” says Lama Yeshe.
By his own admission, Lama Yeshe was gradually swayed by the hedonistic lifestyles led by the celebrities he was encountering. It was the remorse of seeing a photo of some dead fish – fish he had killed on a trip to Orkney – that led him back to the Buddhist way of living. “Gradually the frivolous part of it or the inappropriate part fell away, and there grew this steady interest and wish to learn from what the Tibetan lamas had to share,” says Ani Lhamo.
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The grounds at Kagyu Samye Ling are open to the public; inside the Buddhist temple, which is also open to the public A PLACE FOR PEACE
Eskdalemuir is the ideal place to tap into peace, nature, and tranquility. When a suitable temple site was being sought in the mid-60s, Eskdalemuir stood out for being in one of the least densely populated parts of southern Scotland, yet still well connected to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
“Gradually local people saw that we didn’t harm their culture, but that we brought more resources and more people here. So, then people started to appreciate us,” says Lama Yeshe. “Buddhism is not a conversionist religion, we accept all faiths. But to all people we only say, ‘be kind, be nice, be compassionate’ and that’s how we managed to survive.”
These days, staples of the Buddhist way of life are increasingly being co-opted into modern living in Scotland, albeit stripped of their religious associations: meditation apps are all the rage, and vegetarianism, veganism and their flexitarian variants are increasingly seen as an essential evolution of how we eat.
“Buddhism has changed the whole world. Now it’s one of the most appreciated religions in the world. It’s because there’s no discrimination in race, religion, gender, no matter old or young,” Lama Yeshe says. And if Kagyu Samye Ling’s grounds are anything to go by, the temple is a model for rewilding, as well.
The grounds – which, along with the temple and a café, are open to the public – are a rural idyll: the air hums with insects, birdsong, and the babbling confluence of rivers nearby, merging occasionally with the rhythmic chants of the monks and nuns. The gardens are sculpted with lily pad-flecked ponds, woodland paths and neatly tended gardens and allotments.
There’s a self-sufficiency and a sense of balance between humans and nature that could serve as a model for sustainability. A local lady tells me that she comes regularly to help with the gardening because it’s so peaceful.
“This is like shelter. This is a refuge for humanity. A refuge also for animals,” says Lama Yeshe. “We need to take good care of the environment. If we have any small [piece of] land, we’ve been planting trees. So, we will do everything to take care of the environment.”
But flashes of that old cultural divide occasionally still reverberate around Kagyu Samye Ling. Most recently, a planning application to open a military weapon firing range nearby caused great concern. “We have a precept to not harm others...so really what we’re saying is ‘if you could please do it somewhere else,’ because we’re not saying, ‘you mustn’t do it because we don’t believe in it’ we’re just saying, ‘please don’t do it here,’” explains Ani Lhamo.
In July 2022 the bid to build the firing range was overturned by the Scottish government. Peace endures at Kagyu Samye Ling, serving as an example of how, when cultures so indomitable as those of Tibet and Scotland combine, something beautiful and unique is born. S
Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre has reopened after the Covid-19 lockdown. The centre’s short-term courses, such as the two-day mindfulness in nature, or the introduction to compassion retreat, are running again and accommodation is available to visitors, regardless of faith. For further reading, Lama Yeshe’s book, From a Mountain in Tibet, offers an honest appraisal of his youth in Tibet and life at Kagyu Samye Ling.
