House of silence
The House of Silence in Roseburg near Hamburg is one of the oldest Buddhist meditation centers in Germany. The seminar house, which has been planned as a Buddhist monastery since 1959, was inaugurated in 1962 and is today an openly designed center in which almost 30 mostly one-week seminars, courses or retreats take place each year. The main house, the guest house and the spacious meditation hall are integrated into a garden and lake landscape. The center is supported by the non-profit association Haus der Stille eV .
Practice diversity
Members of the Buddhist Society Hamburg ( Paul Debes , Max Glashoff , Johannes Rüdel and several others) founded the Haus der Stille eV association, bought the property in Roseburg under difficult financial circumstances and renovated it with donations. Seminars were held in the House of Silence as early as 1960 and a number of mostly Thai monks lived there until 1977. Eberhard Kuhnhenn (Kassapa) shaped the house and wrote a chronicle (25 years of the House of Silence 1962 - 1987). The house has an eventful history due to the different personalities and meditation paths that followed one another.
Hans-Ulrich Rieker taught a combination of Indian and Tibetan practices. Bhikkhu Dhammiko taught the Satipatthana method of the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw . Lama Anagarika Govinda and Anila Li Gotami led the retreat. The 16th Karmapa visited the center in 1974. Fritz Hungerleider and Philip Kapleau ensured that Zen practice was included in the hotel's program. Tetsuo Kiichi Nagaya and Gisela Midwer (Gesshin Prabhasadharma) taught Rinzai Zen. Toni Packer , a student of Kapleau and founder of the Springwater Center (near Rochester ), following Jiddu Krishnamurti, achieved a solution from the strict requirements of Zen Buddhism to a practice of being aware of oneself without passing on a formative teacher-student relationship. In this sense, the working group for meditation still offers silent retreats without a teacher. There is a circle of friends around the Bien couple in the style of Paul Debes, who after the retirement of Bhikkhu Vimalo are independently occupied with the teachings of the Buddha and meet twice a year in the center.
Ilse Middendorf introduced breathing therapy . Armin Gottmann and other members of the Arya Maitreya Mandala teach the practice of yoga . Buddhist terms such as metta or karuna are the focus of some courses and today there is a wide range of courses on Vipassana , mindfulness , silence in seminars in silence (such as Wilfried Reuter ), green tara courses for women ( Sylvia Wetzel ), Qigong , Taijiquan (Christa Proksch ) or other meditation paths in the house's program.
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 31 '45.3 " N , 10 ° 37' 50.9" E