Tibetan Lama speaks in Cardiff church

Always the marked man - no concealing his vocation

Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, the Abbot of Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland spoke this evening in Cardiff's city Parish Church of St John the Baptist to a quiet and thoughtful audience of over fifty people about the essence of Buddhist spiritual life.

Yesterday he spoke to three hundred young people in a session at Atlantic College. He told us how eager they were to ask questions, so many searching for a way to live and seeking how to find inner peace. His mainly adult audience tonight had fewer questions to ask. Most were practising Buddhists although half a dozen church members were also present. By comparison to his hungry young audience, this was like preaching to the choir, as they saying goes.

It was the first time in living memory that an invitation had been extended to a non-Christian spiritual teacher to speak in church. A witness to openness to other faiths and also of solidary between people of faith, all confronting the problem of the damage being done by unfettered materialism to people in today's world.

The number of adherents to the practice of Buddhism in different forms is increasing in Britain, particularly amongst those who have tried other kinds of religion and found them wanting. It's not that the external rituals are such a great attraction. It's rather that the determined focus on the inner life, opening the heart and mind to joy, seeking peace and harmony, with the simple practice of meditation and mindful compassionate living at the core of one's existence, speaks directly to the emptiness and hunger of our age.