Awareness is Revolutionary

Develop inner richness, clarity and the emotional resources to meet the world

A better world starts with us

Buddhist practice invites us to cultivate ourselves: ‘inner’ qualities of self-awareness, clarity, wholeheartedness and ‘outer’ strengths of skilful, responsible action, generosity and a compassionate attitude.

Join others in the heroic task of ‘waking up’ and create a better you, and help make a better world around us.

As part of the worldwide Triratna Buddhist Community, we strive to communicate the timeless wisdom of the Buddha for the modern world. More about Triratna here

What is Buddhism?

What is meditation?

What happens at the Centre?

What is Sangha?

What's on

Events have 4 categories:

INTRO, suitable for newcomers
SANGHA, for those who’ve completed an intro course
MITRAS, which means Friend, you’ll know if you are one!
TFO, means Training For Ordination, ditto above!

..what unites us is more important than what divides us

Sangharakshita

Founder of Triratna

Ratnagita: The Spiritual Warrior

Zoom 28 January,2021 Thursday, 07:00 pm to 09:30 pm

SANGHA: Ratnagita explores what being a spiritual warrior means

Siladevi: Self-Compassion

Zoom (link will be emailed) 04 February,2021 Thursday, 07:00 pm to 09:30 pm

SANGHA: Siladevi lives in Manchester and talks with us about self-compassion - what, why and how!

Get in touch

Blackburn Buddhist Centre
16 Strawberry Bank
Blackburn BB2 6AA

Please support our work

Please consider setting up a regular donation through your bank. By donating the cost of one ‘high street’ cup of coffee per week, we receive £10 a month!

Name of account: Blackburn Triratna Buddhist Centre

Sort-code: 05-02-52

Account number: 22669972

Blackburn Buddhist Centre

Accessibility info

What is Buddhism?

Buddhism is a path of personal development involving profound understanding, boundless positive emotion, expressing itself through compassion and spontaneous activity, known as Awakening or Enlightenment. More about Buddhism here.

The Buddhist path has three strands:

Ethics

We try and live our lives within the ethical guidelines that the Buddha taught:

not harming anything
being generous
living a simple and contented life
speaking truthfully
living mindfully

These guidelines help us to live with a clear mind and develop positive feelings. Acting more skilfully also has a positive impact on those around us.

Meditation

We develop both awareness and positive feelings through our meditation practice. We become more mindful of our actions, thoughts and bodily sensations and can see more clearly their effect on us and others. We also become more positive towards ourselves and those around us.

Wisdom

Through these practices, and through studying Buddhist teachings, ritual, and spiritual friendship, we begin to see life more how it really is — that we and everything around us are in continual process, and there are many factors at play in those processes.

When we see this we learn that grasping after things to stay the same, or be how we want them to be rather than how they are, just causes us and others pain. We learn we can change our relationship to things to help us feel more liberated and compassionate.

Try it out!

For over 2500 years people have found that the practices of Buddhism really do work, leading to better mental states, more insightful perspectives, and more meaningful lives. But just don’t take our word for it — try it for yourself.

What is meditation?

By practising Buddhist meditation we are able to change our minds. Our minds are how we experience the world. Everything which happens to us is filtered and made sense of by the mind. If we change our own minds then the world changes too. By changing ourselves we develop the qualities of awareness, kindness and wisdom.

At the Blackburn Buddhist Centre we teach two meditation practices to newcomers:

Mindfulness of Breathing: this helps us to develop a serene, alert, focussed state of mind, in which we can get beyond the usual chatter in our heads and start to listen to our deeper inspiration and wisdom.

Metta Bhavana: sometimes called development of loving kindness – helps us to develop positivity and warmth, to leave behind harmful emotions, and to connect with other people seeing our common humanity.

The Role of Meditation

In Buddhism, meditation is seen as part of an overall path and approach to life. Meditation develops positive states of mind, but there is not much point in doing this for just a short period each day if we are cultivating negative states the rest of the time. For this reason we prefer to teach meditation along with a range of other practices that help us make positive changes to our mental states. For this reason most of our introductory classes are called an Introduction to Meditation and Buddhism, rather than being just about meditation alone.

What happens at the Centre?

We run about 3 introductory courses each year which cover basic Buddhism and meditation instruction.

After attending one of those you are welcome to join our regular ‘Sangha’ night on Thursdays. Sangha means community and we are a friendly bunch! We enjoy a varied programme which includes meditation, talks, discussion and sometimes ritual and arts events.

As well as this weekly gathering we hold occasional events at weekends, sometimes with visiting teachers, and usually an annual residential retreat at a hired venue.

The Blackburn Buddhist Centre is on 2 floors. Upstairs is our large shrineroom with all the chairs, cushions etc that we need for meditation. Downstairs we have a meeting area, a separate study room with a library, as well as kitchen and 2 toilets.

What is Sangha?

The Buddha taught that ‘friendship is the whole of the spiritual life’. By creating a friendly, active spiritual community and having the support and inspiration of like-minded people, ‘sangha’ becomes part and parcel of spiritual practice. Without this it is difficult to make progress and fulfill our spiritual potential. In a world of increasing cynicism and individualism, many people feel a deep need for spiritual friendships.

Our Sangha is made up of ordained members of the Triratna Buddhist Order (often called ‘Order Members’), Mitras; and friends who have not made any formal commitment but have completed some Buddhism and meditation courses here and feel involved with the Centre’s activities and values.

What is a mitra?

Mitra means ‘friend’ and it connotes a level of involvement or commitment beyond introductory, and declares that one feels oneself to be a Buddhist and are happy to practice within the Triratna Community.

More information on becoming a mitra

cartoon about friends from Calvin and Hobbes

Accessibility

We have a city centre location see location map below. The road has 3 hour parking until from 9am to 6pm but beware – this can be very busy. After 6pm there is roadside parking on Strawberry Bank and plenty on adjacent roads.
There is an approximately 15-minute walk from the train and bus stations in the centre of town.

Strawberry Bank can be accessed by car two ways:
1. via Preston New Road, Shear Bank Road, Clarence St., Wellington St., Strawberry Bank
2. Barbra Castle Way, Shear Brow, St Andrews St., Wellington St., Strawberry Bank

Opening Hours
We have no particular opening times so please contact us before visiting to ensure someone is there to meet you.

There are 3 steps up to the main entrance.
There is plenty of seating on the ground floor, a meeting room downstairs and downstairs toilets. The main meditation room is up one flight of stairs – there are handrails both sides of the stairs. We now have a hearing loop installed for use both up & downstairs.

We can provide handouts to support sessions as large text documents and we have a selection of CDs available to support meditation sessions.

Contact us if you need to discuss accessibility and personal support. We are happy to arrange to meet you outside our centre and we have experience running meditation groups in other venues for groups.