immediately after the ebu meeting came the rather grandly titled 'meeting of buddhist teachers in europe'.

this meeting shares a venue and much of its personnel with the ebu meeting, but it is independent of it. where the ebu is more of a practical and organisational meeting, the teacher's meeting is an attempt to bring people together to talk about the teaching and practice of the dharma.

this year's meeting seemed a little ill-starred to begin with. three of the presenters never made it. one theravadin bhikkhuni broke her arm after falling in the grounds of her monastery; one gelugpa lama was called back to his temple, and a lama from the kagyu tradition had his car break down. the rest of us, another fifteen or so participants got ready to discuss sila.

first of all though,  the hosts at sakya tashi ling, on the first evening, and rather at the last minute, had organised a public meeting in barcelona.

it was another example of the extraordinary organisation of sakya tashi ling. with this many buddhist teachers in town, they wanted to make the most of it.  they had arranged for the use of one of the most prestigious venues in barcelona; arranged for the catalan government to pick up the bill, for the meeting to be hosted by the minister for religious affairs, and conducted by a well know journalist from the major newspaper. a couple of hundred people attended the meeting, with twelve of us on the platform answering questions, many of them about the social impact of buddhism, attitudes to other religions and so on (immigration is a live issue in catalonia). it was striking how diverse, and i thought how complementary, the panel's answers were. for example, after i gave a little spiel on how meditation was a way of becoming more fully alive dhammapada shenpen segued into meditation as preparation for death.

last year the meeting looked the practice and teaching of meditation, so this year we decided to look at another aspect of the threefold path, sila. in this kind of cross tradition discussion, even such a basic topic as sila can be seen from unexpected angles.

i'll try to write a little more about the presentations later. but the thing that made most impact on me was <em>another</em> discussion about long retreats. i spoke to rosie hastings about the long retreats that rigpa have begun to run. these have grown very organically, beginning a few years ago with just 7 or 8 people doing a one year retreat. the impact of the retreat on that first group was so obvious that it has snowballed in he last few years, till there are now more than a hundred people doing a three year retreat.

those attending included:

caroline and david brazier from amida trust;

shenpen hookham of the awakened heart sangha;

sister true wonder and three other monastics from plum village;

simon child from the western chan fellowship;

rosie hastings from rigpa;

gakuro kurt kramer, a pure land practitioner from austria;

marcel geiser, haus tao, austria;

lama dondrup, from the hosts, sakya tashi ling;

kanzen, polish buddhist mission;

zarko andricevic, dharmaloka centre, croatia;

lama lhundrup, dagpo kundreul ling;

and me.