Retreats

Meditation Day Retreat:
Being with Being
The Buddha’s Teaching to Bahiya

Sunday 16 November 10:30am – 4:30pm

2,500 years ago the Buddha gave a pithy teaching to a man called Bahiya who had travelled across India to find him.
The Buddha said to Bahiya, ‘In the seen only the seen; in the heard only the heard; in the cognised only the cognised; in the known only the known.’ 
“That’s how you should train. When you have trained in this way, you won’t be ‘with that’. When you’re not ‘with that’, you won’t be ‘in that’. When you’re not ‘in that’, you won’t be in this world or the world beyond or between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.”
Bahiya, who had practised deeply for many years became Enlightened on the spot.

During this Day Retreat Shakyapada will be exploring Awareness once again and how it relates to the the six senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and thinking. There will be short talks, discussions and a number of guided meditations.

Fully Booked

Adhisthana September 2026

Friday 25 September 2026 – Friday 2 October 2026

Join Shakyapada and Mahasraddha for a great week at Adhisthana as part of the big Summer Sanghas gathering. Adhisthana is our our main retreat centre in Hereford. Find out more at Adhisthana.org

In 1976, Sangharakshita gave a series of public talks, collectively entitled Buddhism for Today and Tomorrow.

Under four headings – A Method of Personal Development, A Vision of Human Existence, A Nucleus of a New Society, and A Blueprint for a New World – he shared his vision of what the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order had to offer.

From the first of these talks, Sangharakshita tells us:

Perhaps it would be best to assume that nobody really knows anything about Buddhism in the West, and that perhaps we do have to make … a completely fresh start, to take, as it were, a completely new look at Buddhism. And this, we may say, is what the FWBO was founded for in 1967, and what it tries to do. It tries to take a completely new look. It tries to make a completely fresh start… It exists, we may say, to cut the Buddha’s teaching down to its absolute essentials and to make those essentials relevant to people’s lives.

This is an opportunity to experience a full retreat together with your friends from the sangha. We will stay together for groups during the retreat but we will also have an opportunity to meet lots of people