Ordained Celtic Buddhist Priests

(Priests of Nature)

eclesphere

Andrew Peers was born to an Irish mother and grew up in Nottingham, England. A punk rocker in his teens, he later spent over 20 years in Trappist monasteries in England, Ireland and the Netherlands. He gained a degree in law and has studied theology and philosophy. He is ex-chair of the MID (Monastic Interreligious Dialogue) for the Dutch-speaking region (including Flanders) and participated in the 10th Spiritual Exchange visit to Japan in 2005. He has more than 25 years of experience in sitting practice in the Hinayana and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, and has for the past 10 years been active in the Dutch sangha of Maha Karuna Chan. In 2011 he left for America and Ireland and recently returned to the Low Countries qualified to give instruction in meditation in a Vajryana lineage as a
Celtic Buddhist priest. He is now living in the large old presbytery in the village of Baak, the Netherlands.Andrew Peers writes articles on spirituality, gives meditation retreats and is finishing his first book.
The Order of the Longing Look has grown out of this path through the three
great vehicles (yanas) of Buddhism, whilst not abandoning the spiritual
roots of the Christian and pre-Christian West.

www.longinglook.org


Celtic Buddhism

Seated at a heavy wooden table in front of the old presbytery window, I can

look out and away from the village onto green fields and stately mature oak

trees. It is autumn and their leaves are turning yellow and orange. This

village in Gelderland lies in an area particularly associated with oaks.

Observing the quiet change in the season and silently tuning in to its

rhythm, is, broadly speaking, what is understood as 'Celtic' in Celtic

Buddhism. It is the felt connection to the natural world as it continually

moves on, a way of simply learning to move with it, even to celebrate it as

the dance of transience in the mandala of nature.

The Celts in their day did not generally live into ripe old age but this

did not make them fatalistic or depressed. Their culture and art testify to

this. They were warriors familiar with the struggle to survive, with the

threat of enemies and war, and their songs and legends have a brassy,

bragging heroic tone of a people proud of their banditry and in love with

their own eloquence. For them, life and death were interwoven, with many

'thin places' between the two. They were spread throughout Western Europe

and lived once here too among the old oaks of Gelderland.

I am reminded of the time when, still a Trappist monk living in Northern

Ireland, I went to the abbey shop one day and was confronted in the

entrance passage by a poster on the wall showing about twenty gargoyle-like

faces. "The River Gods of Ireland" it proclaimed. How on earth, I thought

to myself then, could a poster like that be hanging in the shop of a Roman

Catholic abbey? And who do those faces belong to, where do they live?

The late Chogyam Trungpa, an influential Tibetan Buddhist teacher of

meditation and founder of Celtic Buddhism, saw these local energies and

gods as the western equivalent of the gods of the native Tibetan religion

called Bon. In the rivers and in the air, they are associated with special

places in nature. In Tibet, the more war-like gods go by the name of

dralas. The word 'drala' is connected to ‘deity’ and signifies

simultaneously both a natural force operating in the phenomenal world, and

an aspect of our own pure awareness. Trungpa was deeply saddened by the

loss of the great drala traditions of Europe. In this tradition, the

spiritual path is portrayed as a field of battle where pitfalls are the

kind of threats that the Celtic heroes met in their epic contests: the

poison of arrogance, the trap of doubt, the ambush of hope and the arrow of

uncertainty. Here the enemy is the ego and its projections. The greatest

weapon is openness, it is endless patience that has immediate effects and

victory is the victory over war and aggression. Celtic tribes were warrior

tribes and it is this basic attitude of daring that Celtic Buddhism first

and foremost seeks to rekindle with regard to spiritual development in

modern life today. Life is still short enough, and a pro-active

warrior-like bravery can serve it best.

Working with spiritual realities of another order introduces the shamanic

aspect of Celtic Buddhism. The shaman in the tribes of the Celts was known

as a druid. The name ‘druid' has been translated ‘knower of the oak’ and it

is said that apprenticeship to a druid could take as long as 20 years. A

question that surfaces in my mind on this sunny autumn morning, as I look

out at these impressive oaks, is: what exactly took so long?

Druidism today has often been stereotyped and pigeon-holed, dismissed as

the hobby-like fantasy of eccentrics. But what was passed on orally from

teacher to student at the time of the druids, is a still living spiritual

reality accessible. As a worthy guide, the druid was able to put aside fear

and show his or her being to the student in complete openness. Such a

radical act of bravery contained within it the possibility of inducing a

sudden gap in the student’s usual way of thinking at a place that might be

called the 'thin place' of the mind, where the Spirit suddenly coughs and

interrupts the thinking process. The result is the knowledge of unknowing,

a sublime knowledge that is true knowing. It is the knowledge of life and

death set against the backdrop of an invincible light within, potentially

catalyzing a radical change of mindset, even of vocabulary. This wisdom is

the basis of society and traditions in the East but Buddhist monks were

already visitors to pre-Christian Celtic Europe, just as the druids and

Celtic peoples are known to have journeyed at least as far as Greece.

 Zen Buddhist schools even today use riddles and stories as devices to jar

monks out of their usual dualistic thinking. One such riddle is called 'The

Oak tree in the Garden':

*A monk asked Master Chao Chou, "What is the meaning of the Patriarch's

coming to the West?" Chao Chou replied, "The oak tree in the garden." The

monk later asked the same question again, and Chao Chou replied with the

same answer, adding with force, "Look at it!"*

Celtic Buddhism employs this ancient oral tradition to teach the

specifically *druidic* way of looking and seeing, making it possible to

look past form to reality and to establish a non-dualistic interpretation

of the world. To look in a new way is also to think about the world in a

new way, and about the human being's place in it. But this apparently new

way of seeing is in fact an old forgotten way that was core to the

spirituality of Celtic peoples, and to the wisdom held by the druids.

Whilst they sought to share this with all, to know it personally requires

the discipline of practice and the bravery of a warrior committed to the

spiritual path. It requires the confrontational intimacy inherent in a

correct teacher-student relationship. Seeing the world from a place beyond

the world, beyond transience, all beings are dralas. We can sally forth to

meet them and work with them as ‘enlightened warriors’, or we can choose to

remain ignorant, projecting our own shadow onto everything. But patiently

learning silence and looking deeply into the rhythm of nature, life and

death need not hold us in the grip of fear. In these modern mobile times,

in which the descendants of the Celts have spread far and wide across the

globe, the oak tree remains accessible and unchanging, its roots reaching

down into the soft fertile soil of our collective memory, the non-dualistic

mind. The mind-stream of Chogyam Trungpa still transmits to us from beyond

the grave, and can take us beyond the fear of it.


Andrew  "Bish" Peers