Our Tradition
Our teacher Žarko Andričević’s meeting with Shifu Sheng Yen, and later on Shifu’s visit to Zagreb in 1997, led our community (which was already close to Sino-Japanese Buddhism) onto the path of Chan. He gave it a solid foundation in the authentic tradition of cultivating the mind. Chan is distinguished, as its founder Bodhidharma said, by “a special kind of transmission beyond scriptures and non-reliance on words and speech.” Although it has a strong foothold in the institution of monasticism and the corpus of written teachings, Chan is very much alive. It is not constrained by layers of ingrained habits or the actions of the spiritual path determined by culture. Chan manages to be open at its core and adapt to ever-changing living conditions. And it keeps asking: What is most appropriate for people, here and now?
Our community is a testament to this openness – with great respect, we shape the heritage we have received into a form suitable for integration into everyday life. At meditation retreats and seminars, we teach how mindfulness is cultivated through sitting and moving meditation, as well as how this newly developed p