An experienced Ignatian director and former president of the Conference of Religious of England and Wales took two months to sit at the feet of a Buddhist community in the Chilterns. She describes it as a walk into the unknown. IT WAS a typical English February night, after days of dampness with clouds of uncertainty in the winter sky and the occasional appearance of a full moon. In the Buddhist monastery it was the Magga Puga, the full-moon festival. We were celebrating one of the founding stories of Buddhism: the gathering of the first bikkus who had come to hear Gotama?s teaching 2,500 years before. We had begun the evening liturgy at 11 p.m. in the great temple, there had been a quiet waiting in the semi-darkness, then the simple three-note Pali chant began. Later we ambulated slowly, conga style, through the lamp-lit spaces of the temple and eventually out into the big field and three times round the shrine there. The moon, whose cycle controls so much of Buddhist life, took a nonchalant look at us now and then. The huge bonfire had been prepared, the white robes of the novices and the saffron robes glowed in the fire light. The still, reflective faces of my friends were illuminated. There was very quiet conversation, affection, mystery and mirth. Then, contrary to the ancient rule of no food after noon, out came a supply of marshmallows to be toasted on sticks. A strange pre-eucharist, I wondered. An expression of a deep human need to remember, to give thanks, to reach atonement. At 3 a.m., we dispersed along the little paths through the monastery.

This Magga Puga night had come towards the end of my retreat; by then I had grown accustomed to the pervading influence of the Three Refuges of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dhamma (his teaching), the Sangha (the community). That morning in the dhamma talk, the Canadian-born abbot had described the work of Buddhism as quietly giving witness to the truth of Buddha by doing mindfully, reflectively, the small and ordinary things of daily life. Without some sort of spiritual living people destroy nature, each other, and themselves, he had said.

I had come to Amaravati nearly two months earlier. The community of about 24 monks and 12 nuns, all young, all shaven-headed, mostly from the Western world via Thailand, were making their annual two-month winter retreat. This mixture of monks and nuns is unusual in a Buddhist monastery, but Amaravati is a place of gentle innovation. For example, as a member of an Ignatian apostolic congregation, and a total newcomer to Buddhism, I was invited to live with the sisters and share fully in the retreat. They welcomed me especially because I was older than they: only one of them had yet reached 40.

Having finished a six-year stint in leadership, I was seeking solitude; I wanted to get away from other people?s expectations. I wanted to shed my cultural religious certainties and walk into the unknown. I did not want to learn about Buddhism with my head but to experience something of it by immersion. I did not realise, then, that immersion would mean eight hours of meditation daily and only one meal, and getting up at about 4.30 a.m. But I knew that I needed the discipline of a structured life for my exploring. Through various helpful friends I was led to the Theravadian or Forest Buddhists and to the largest of their four monasteries in Britain, Amaravati in the Chilterns.

Obviously the place looks different from most retreat houses. At the centre of everything a large, beautiful, brick temple points heavenward from a curving roof. It has a spacious gravel forecourt and there are statues of the Buddha and bells about the place. The saffron-clad abbot greeted me, avoiding my extended hand (a monk may not touch a woman and this one was charmingly amused by my confusion), and handed me over to the sisters among whom I would live on the far side of the monastery. Beyond the temple area the architecture deteriorates rapidly into blocks and rows of Nissen huts extending in all directions. Built for the Canadian army during the war and now renovated somewhat, these form the living quarters of the community, the offices and workshops, the retreatants? dormitories, the many shrines and meditation rooms, the well-stocked ecumenical library.

Many Christians and others come to Amaravati for retreats and courses, staying in the simple accommodation provided for them. During the winter retreat, however, most of this activity stops and only a voluntary team of lay people is there to enable the monastery to function. They participate in the practices as time allows. The rule forbids the fully professed monks and nuns from cooking, growing things, killing, or touching money. When they beg they cannot request anything; they just wait with their bowl. This begging bowl and their long strip of saffron material is all they possess, so they are dependent on others.

As a fully committed retreatant I found this fringe community of helpers very supportive. Together we formed hoi polloi at the end of the dinner queue during the long religious process of inspecting, blessing, gracing and reflecting on our daily meal. Some of them, like me, had a chair to sit on at meditation (after four weeks I could manage the semi-lotus position for stretches of half an hour; at the corpse position I excelled).

You cannot be long at Amaravati without appreciating the radical commitment of its members. Everything in the monastery emanates from the Buddha?s fundamental teaching on the universal human experience of dissatisfaction (anxiety, fear, unhappy experiences, incapacity and the rest), that this suffering exists, has origin, has ending, and that there is a path to its ending. So much of what we call religion is the interpretation of deep experience and ordering of the resulting codes and practices to express it. Out of his original experience of suffering, Buddha taught how to clear the mind, little by little, through detachment from all forms of grasping, aversion and delusion, in order to achieve a state beyond suffering, called enlightenment. All around me were men and women practising this teaching through mindfulness and meditation, by exercises of physical and mental control and harmony, and through constant self-reflection and analysis.

Buddha did not make statements about God, for he witnessed the violent controversy this could cause. So neither God nor grace are named at Amaravati. The path to enlightenment is the hard work of constant mindfulness, and it is walked alone. A monastic community is not there for companionship or friendship, but to teach. This jarred with my own faith and with my understanding of the Church as a community of sinners who know they are loved by God. At Amaravati I often marvelled at the resilience and humour of those around me on this unyielding path.

Unlike members of most religions or Churches, a Buddhist does not belong to any self-defined institution ? Buddhism does not have excluding edges and avoids definitions. Where Christianity so often seeks to answer questions with a tidy definition, a Buddhist teacher will be content with an enigmatic, Who knows? The teaching of Buddha, the dhamma, is the authority and every member of the community brought their own experience to that teaching for analysis and measurement. Before the abbot could give a dhamma talk it had to be requested of him, literally, from the floor ? where his audience was sitting. I wondered how this practice might affect Sunday sermons in church.

Buddhism and Christianity start in different places. Christian energy began and was nurtured in the cultures that emerged from the Middle East, and onward through Greece and Rome. This was the ferment through which reason was harnessed to facts and religion to action and in which an incarnational spirituality could flourish. Buddhism, on the other hand, emerged and spread and took shape in cultures absorbed by detail and infinite refinement, or engrossed in metaphysics. When Arnold Toynbee reflected that the meeting between Buddhism and Christianity will be one of the most important events of the twentieth century, he was describing a complex event.

A Christian will search for revelation and life in everything and will seek to share what he finds. Christianity is intrinsically involved and missionary. Like the cultures that have nurtured it and to which it has given spiritual form, it will struggle to spread and ramify. Buddhism leads inexorably inward to a selfless detachment and, until recently anyway, has not been missionary.

At Amaravati there were proto-Buddhists from many of the Christian Churches or none. Westerners are attracted to Buddhism?s counter-cultural simplicity and peace, to its stringency and challenge. This is very understandable. Consumerism is the ultimate superstition, and a consumerist society will destroy itself, said the abbot one early morning as we sat around him on our safus, sipping runny porridge from our plastic mugs. He added, with a smile: Fashion is the lowest form of ideology . . . you can see, we are not very fashionable here.

In fact, however, Buddhism is in fashion. It offers an obvious alternative to the hedonism and greed of Western society that has so often forgotten the vocabulary of Christianity, let along its message. Much of the teaching of Buddha resonates with the wisdom of the Christian Scriptures, with the wisdom of the Christian saints and mystics, and with the deeds and words of Jesus. Meeting with Buddhism can point us ordinary Christians to the spirituality, the mysticism, the spiritual freedom, of our own incarnational inheritance; it is there waiting for us.

Love, compassion and forgiveness were taught and practised in abundance at Amaravati. God?s love was incarnated as it always is, where human beings live virtuously. We often used one or other of the beautiful Buddhist meditation texts on forgiveness or compassion or loving kindness:

So with a boundless heart should one cherish all beings, Radiating kindness over the entire world . . . .

I shared my hut with a gentle, young Russian doctor. She lived these meditations for me. My diary reads: 15 February: This morning my little Russian was sad; she had heard of the death of her uncle, and asked for prayers. However, this evening she wears her woolly hat at a jaunty angle to cheer us both up, and brings me a terrible brew of lotus-root tea to help improve my ?lotus position? without pain.

At times I felt like an alien in an oriental world, and I was often saddened by the hardness of the life of those around me and at the vacuum into which they looked; but there was much that was familiar and the hard was never harsh. Often I was lonely, lost, hungry, my mind confused and my spirit in darkness, yet my abiding memories are of the stillness of that crowded shrine-room and of returning to my hut in the darkness after the last sitting. The final entry in my diary reads: 1 March: Again I come back from meditating in the shrine-room tonight with a hunger for prayer. Reading from the Word of God in my Daily Missal and finding the presence of Jesus pervading my room. Perhaps a Christian?s prayer is always a listening for the incarnation and a recognising of the kingdom . . . but it is all gift.

A Buddhist retreat may sound esoteric; I began it as a very ordinary person and finished much the same. My first diary entry reads: 2 January: These women are so intelligent, amusing and human. Indeed they were.

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