le croizet is part of a kagyu community, dhagpo kundreul ling, in the auvergne in central france. there were a couple of reasons i wanted to visit. i had met lama lhundrup, one of the directors of their three year retreat programme here, at the european buddhist union. i liked him, and was impressed by him: he seemed perceptive, constructive and outspoken in the meeting, friendly and approachable, with a sense of serious practice about him. 

dhagpo kundreul ling is the base for a successful three year retreat training. for a few years i've been finding myself interested in the idea of longer retreats, interested in doing one, and interesting in seeing them develop in the fwbo. it seems to me that a lot of the interest in 'other teachers' in the order right now, is an interest in deeper meditation experience. some teachers, particularly shenpen hookham in the uk, have been passing on experience that many order members have found helpful. but i'm also aware that bhante, when asked about this, has been stressing the basic practices he gave us.  when he visited the preceptors college meeting last november. he said:

‘I do not agree with the idea that you need some other practice in addition to what you have got in order to go deeper into meditation and into your spiritual life. I have said in the past that if you take even one verse of the Dhammapada, and if you practice it seriously enough, that will take you the whole way. So I certainly would not agree with someone’s view that, well, ‘I have been practicing mindfulness all these years, mindfulness of breathing, I have been practising metta bhavana, I have even done a bit of zazen, well now I need something more advanced and therefore I have got to look for a teacher who can give me something more advanced’. I think this is quite a wrong attitude. There needs to be much more emphasis on the more substantial and deeper practice of what you already have. Which is quite a lot. I could refer to the five principal meditation practices, including Mindfulness of Breathing and Metta. One could refer to the six-element practice. It’s not very easy to go beyond those practices. If one wants to go beyond one’s existing practice the answer is that one should commit oneself to it more deeply than one has done...’

i guess one way of 'committing to one’s existing practice more deeply' is on longer retreats, focussing more deeply on meditation.  at dhagpo kundreul ling they have around 80 men and women on three year retreat, and years of experience of running them in the traditional way established by gendun rimpoche. so when i was invited to le croizet, i was keen to go. 

they have about 80 men and women in three year retreat right now, and most of them will go on to do a second retreat. it means that anyone in their organisation who is teaching has a minimum of 6 years intensive retreat behind them. most then go on to take a monastic ordination. lhundrup himself spends about 9 months of each year on retreat, and the other 3 months teaching and traveling.

another thing that had me interested was that the three year retreats used gampopa’s  jewel ornament of liberation as a course text. bhante gave a number of seminars on the jewel ornament. lama lhundrup has translated the text into german, and  when i found out that in august he was teaching on the 'wisdom' chapter from the jewel ornament, the most distinctively mahamudra part of the text, and a chapter that bhante has not done, i thought i'd go. i was a bit weary since i hadn't had much time at home since getting back from the usa in mid-july, but it seemed like a good chance to look at the text, to see the place, and to find out a bit more about how they run their retreats.

le croizet is part of a larger mandala of communities and monasteries. it's a lovely little farmhouse, very simply converted for use as a retreat centre. it's used mainly by the network of family people who are part of the dagpo kagyu community, and retreats there are less formal and less structured than those at the main monastery nearby. the retreats are largely self organising. people buy food and form little groups to cook and eat together, i enjoyed the atmosphere very much. people were unfailingly friendly and hospitable. the raucous children and the serious study seemed to co-exist quite easily (the silence did not include the children, and the adults were asked to speak to the children as usual during the silence). i ended up eating with some very nice german students; however the next table, manly middle aged french women, were eating what looked like cordon-blue food compared to our cous-cous and beans on toast, and i looked over so longingly, that i was quite often invited over to eat with them.

a couple of kilometres away is le bost – kundreul ling – and laussedat, the women's monastery. kundreul ling houses the three year retreats for men, and the men's monastic community; laussedat houses the same facilities for women.. 

the retreats

40 men and 40 women practice in converted farmhouses for three years. the conditions for attending the retreat are demanding. usually anyone attending would have been around for a couple of years, and would have spent enough time in the community for people to be confident that they'd benefit from the retreat. those attending are strictly confined for the three years; even if a parent dies, for example, they have agreed not to break the retreat by attending the funeral.

the structure of the retreat is very traditional, including the preliminary practices, yidam practice, and mahamudra practice. participants spend a large part of the day practicing alone in their room, and come together for ritual practice.

i really liked the set up: the three year retreat building is at the edge of the grounds. separate from that, built around three sides of a square, is the monastic community. each monk has their own simple apartment in these terraces, with their own front door, bedroom, kitchen and meditation space. they carry on a routine not unlike the retreat programme, with an emphasis on individual practice, shared ritual practice, and an element of collective housekeeping, admin and teaching work.

at the top end of the square is the temple, and, on the other side of the temple, the public and residential spaces for people attending retreats. for a few miles around the monastery is a network of family houses, including le croizet, with family practitioners who take part regularly in the teaching of the monastery. nearby is a small ‘ermitage’ a space for solitary retreats (left).

it's a very interesting model, a working example of ray’s ‘threefold sangha’: an intense retreat at it's core, an ongoing monastic community carrying on that focused practice, a penumbra of family practitioners, and at the physical and spiritual centre a temple,  the space where the monastics meet and teach the non-monastic practitioners.