Inaugural Burning Refuge Retreat

Igniting New Buddhist Practice for Liberation 

Apply here!

Due by 31 December 2024 at 11:59 PM EST

We are honored to invite you to a bold new Buddhist retreat program, led by the Burning Refuge Collective and hosted at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. We invite all interested in the retreat to also consider attending the 2025 Burning Refuge Conference, taking place March 14 – 16 2025.  

In this co-led community retreat, our central goal is to ignite new inceptions of Buddhist practice and praxis oriented towards social-spiritual liberation. Too often, Buddhist institutions and spaces are systematically structured to exclude Asian diaspora-BIPOC, queer/trans*, and differently bodied peoples. A long colonial history resulting in a neocolonial present has perverted Buddhism to, at times, be an implement of burying and invisibilizing the material and political realities of oppression, marginalization, and annihilation.  

With this retreat, we bring those at the margins of Buddhism to the center. Here we invite these communities and our supportive friends and allies to cultivate spiritual kinship. We remain grounded in honoring both our individual spiritual ancestry and our shared, diasporic tradition of Buddhism.  

While our retreat program is still in development, you can expect to have these kinds of engagements and collaborations at the retreat:  

  1. Facilitation of synthesizing, recording, and processing our individual and community spiritual narratives  

  2. Co-learning of non-coercive spiritual kinship building and community leadership 

  3. Deep contemplative, ritual, and devotional practice rooted in ancestral, Asian diaspora Buddhist tradition 

  4. Opportunities for co-creating a non-hierarchical retreat space 

  5. Radical decentering of white, Euro-american ways of knowing and living Buddhism 

  6. Radical centering of diasporic, BIPOC, queer/trans, and other marginalized communities' ways of knowing, living, and imagining futures through and for Buddhism

  7. and more…

Commitments to Buddhist Wisdom Tradition through Ritual

While this retreat is co-led by all attendees, we root ourselves in the specificity of diaspora Buddhism. To that end, our retreat’s liturgical, ritual, and chanting practices will all be led by Venerable Deung Myoung Sunim, an ordained bhikkhu from the Jogye Order of South Korea. Korean Buddhism is often marginalized in Euroamerican Buddhist spaces, and is a uniquely syncretic ancestral Buddhist tradition to draw upon. While we honor the value of all Buddhist traditions, rather than attempt to bridge many liturgies, we believe that rooting in one specific ritual and liturgical lineage for the duration of this retreat will allow us to have ritual experiences of greater depth and significance. We also hope that this will allow retreatants to return back to their home communities with a practiced ritual skillset they will be able to draw upon. 

We have two dedicated ritual masters who will be guiding us in these capacities. Please stay tuned for more information soon!

Note on Financial Assistance: As of 18 November 2024 we have yet to finalize all scholarship funding. We are an all-volunteer team of graduate students working to raise every dollar of our budget from scratch. Therefore, we are not yet able to guarantee any amount of financial support; however, we are working to conclude this and will keep you updated on the progress. Our goal is to provide as much financial support as is needed by our retreatants. 

For those who are financially privileged, we ask for you to leave financial assistance for those who require it. The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies also offers financial assistance directly to interested retreat attendees: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/financial-assistance/