Mindfulness & Meditation in South Africa

Experience a world-class escape at the Buddhist Retreat Centre

Fruitful days and the BRC’s big welcoming Buddha.

Story and photos by Wanda Hennig

When you visit Durban, there’s surf, sunshine, scenery, close access to wildlife (game parks with the Big Five), cultural and heritage adventures. Then if you tire of the typical tourist scene, there’s Buddha, dharma and sangha. Prepare to be astonished if you come to South Africa and are open to a unique African enlightenment experience.

The Buddhist Retreat Center (BRC), perched on a ridge at the head of a valley in the Umkomaas river system, which has its source in the Drakensberg Mountains, is a haven of tranquility and beauty where mindfulness and kitchen magic connect in a vast, poverty-stricken, harshly beautiful landscape in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

The stupa is set back from the scenic view of rolling hills that recede like waves.

From the imposing white stupa (symbol of the enlightened mind), you look out over a vista of indigenous valleys, forests and rolling hills that recede like waves to the blue of the horizon. About two hours by road from the Indian Ocean port and resort city of Durban, the BRC has been ranked among the top 10 on a CNN list of world’s best meditation retreats.

Contemplating your navel

Few people would expect to find, in a remote part of Africa, a place where you can sit on a rock in a raked Zen Garden to contemplate your navel or life’s mysteries, then wander through a creative bamboo labyrinth, pondering the twists and turns of existence. You’ll come to feel, perhaps, that traversing the twists and turns, with gratitude and equanimity, are quite simply what the meaning of life is about.

One can wander the labyrinth pondering the twists and turns of existence.

When he built the elegant outdoor “Buddha Boma”, Louis van Loon (1935–2024), the dearly departed Dutch-born founder of the BRC (who was born in Holland and moved to South Africa at age 20), planted eight trees. “All of them significant in Buddhist teaching. The idea is that one will be able to do a kind of Indian Buddhist pilgrimage here in South Africa,” he told me at the time.

You might go for a long and lazy afternoon hike (or an energetic one) along pristine walking paths, through sheltering forest and park-like gardens. These are an Impressionist’s dream when, seasonally, splashed with the biggest and brightest pink and red azalea “trees” you’re likely to have seen, plus patches of orange clivia and luxuriously abundant assorted protea.

The Zen garden, a cool spot — but for those who like it hot, a bowl of red chilies.

Maybe, just for a moment, you will focus on the sights, the sounds — the fresh-and-dry country smells — and notice that, as thoughts disappear, your mind briefly empties and you feel at one with the world. Experience a profound sense of peacefulness and well-being.

Buddhism in South Africa

The BRC is the unofficial headquarters of Buddhism in South Africa. The center hosts teachers and attracts students from various Buddhist schools: Tibetan, with its elaborate and colorful rituals and visualization; the stark simplicity and rigors of Zen; the more gentle and contemplative practice of Theravada, or insight meditation.

Teachers, both local and international, visit to run workshops. Way back, for instance, I attended a 10-day silent “What is this?” retreat, with Steven and Martine Bachelor. Many other teacher names would resonate with serious practitioners.

The BRC also attracts and welcomes a myriad of non-Buddhists to courses that range from writing, cooking and sketching, to t’ai chi ch’uan, chi kung and yoga. Check out the list of upcoming classes.

Ufafa Valley children draw water near the Woza Moya project headquarters.

You might even go volunteer at nearby Woza Moya, a project focused on poverty alleviation, empowerment and HIV-Aids program, which serves as a lifeline for some 8,000 sometimes forgotten Ufafa Valley residents. Woza Moya was collaboratively established in April 2000.

The Cake the Buddha Ate

The BRC has unarguably one of the best vegetarian tables in South Africa. Their three recipe books, Quiet Food, *The Cake the Buddha Ate and Plentiful*, are best-sellers in South Africa. Beautiful, and the inspiration for all the meals.

A cheesecake to thrill the tastebuds.

In the dining room you will see at least one of these books propped open at every meal. It might show, for instance, the picture of a delectable cheese cake and in front of it, the real thing.

Or at lunchtime, a different book might be opened at a page that shows the recipe of a dreamily light shepherd’s pie made with brown lentils, sweetly spicy caramelized baby onions, tenderly crisp roasted veggies and a sprout salad ablaze with orange nasturtiums.

Nasturtiums from the BRC garden transform the salad.

Many of the ingredients will be picked fresh from a bountiful organic veggie garden. What’s not home-grown is brought in from farms in the area.

San Francisco Zen Center inspiration

Just like Green Gulch Farm, the San Francisco Zen Center’s (SFZC) Japanese Soto Zen practice center in Marin County acclaimed for its organic farm and garden, “no anonymous food” is the norm at the BRC.

I mention SFZC, not just because I lived and practiced at their City Centre temple for three-and-a-half years in the Nineties, worked often in the kitchen so see the similarities, but because the BRC’s legendary vegetarian table had its origins in a visit Van Loon paid to SFZC while he was establishing his South African retreat center.

Fabulous Frangipane, a lunchtime pear and almond tart.

At SFZC, the culinary focus is anything but incidental. Tassajara, SFZC’s mountain monastery in the Ventana Wilderness, which in the summertime opens to visitors, is acclaimed for its vegetarian table.

Green Gulch has been known for its farm practices and veggies since long before Slow Food and the trend toward seasonal organic produce. The City Centre, SFZC’s urban temple in the heart of San Francisco — and Green’s restaurant, also in San Francisco — are acclaimed for their culinary excellence.

Dudu Memela steps out of the kitchen with this fresh and fragrant lunchtime salad.

“I felt food should be part of our effort. That there should be attention paid to the food as part of holistic living and taking care of your life,” was Van Loon’s philosophy from the BRC’s earliest days.

“It is appropriate that a Buddhist meditation centre advocate a reflective dimension to eating. That we make our kitchen a space where a treasure of vegetable ingredients is transformed into delicate, tasty fare.

“Then we eat mindfully, sometimes in silence, the better to savour the flavours. So we do more than preparing food and eating it: we celebrate it,” he wrote in his introduction to the BRC’s first cookbook, Quiet Food.

The meditation hall where one sits under thatch and can be still with the valley sounds.

Louis van Loon bought the land in 1970 with the intention of opening a retreat centre. The idea of creating such a place came to him during three days he spent lying, feverish and ill and wondering if he would live, in Sri Lanka, during a seven-month pilgrimage around Asia in the 1960s.

The BRC property, hidden in the mist on a rainy day when he signed the purchase agreement, was pretty decimated back then. Most of the trees where alien wattle. The steep plot ragged, neglected.

The teaching studio when the BRC first opened, now the well-stocked library.

He worked for 10 years with a handful of supporters, at weekends (all had regular jobs), building a lodge with beds for 30 people, a meditation hall, a small teaching studio (now the library) and the kitchen/dining room area. Now there are options, upscale as well as more basic, including three simple but designer-cool luxury chalets, cottages, kutis (simple huts) with a view.

Celebrity Buddhists

The first retreat was held in 1980. It was before the age of celebrity Buddhists. Before meditation became mainstream: seen as an antidote to stress, depression and many other modern-day ills.

The BRC has come into its own as the interest in meditation and “mindfulness practice” has grown worldwide. It has become a place to go, meditate and learn about Buddhism for some — and a great escape for many.

The studio these days, where some classes are held, cosy with a fire on chilly evenings.

In no small part thanks to the drive and enthusiasm of Chrisi van Loon, wife — now widow — of Louis, it has earned custodian status for the habitat it supplies to the endangered blue swallow and it was awarded National Heritage status by former President Nelson Mandela.

Otters and porcupines

Alien trees and plants have been taken out and replaced with indigenous groves and forests. There is a growing resident population of reedbuck and duiker, there are otters and porcupines and 160 bird species have been recorded.

Chalets in the mist, these ones looking over the valley and some of the walking paths.

Off the beaten track

While it might seem way off the beaten track — the road less traveled — the BRC attracts people from far and wide. Currently celebrating 45 years since the first retreat, I have been an intermittent to regular visitor for 40 of those years — a few times, offering my memoir and mindfulness classes there.

To give an idea of the scope of the BRC’s appeal, a woman, on one of my visits, arrived by cab in the early evening having flown from Canada via Germany specifically to spend five days there en route to participating in a volunteer project and going on a safari in Tanzania. Her plan was to unwind, walk, meditate and to experience this place she’d read about online.

One of my favorites, the en-suite double room at the foot of the lodge.

A young German woman and her Australian boyfriend I spoke to during a break from Noble Silence on one visit said they had heard about it from friends. They arrived for a weekend retreat eager to learn more about Buddhism and meditation.

I was amazed on one visit to discover a young man had traveled from remote St Helena island. He was in South Africa for one week, solely to visit the BRC, en route to see his family in Norway.

My good friend, Frances Chisholm, during four years prior to 2016, the US Consul General in Durban, pays an annual summertime visit to Durban and always includes the BRC.

Cool mist and Noble Silence

“I’m drawn to the serenity of the place,” she says. “The cool mist that rolls in, in the evening. The hours of Noble Silence. The simplicity of the accommodation I choose (the lodge). Inevitably I cross paths with someone interesting. Then there’s the selection of courses. I went for ‘birding’ on my last visit. I love to add a day or two after any retreat when I usually have the place nearly to myself. It’s a gem!”

Vervet monkeys watch the kitchen door hoping they’ll be able to monkey in.

Buddhists often call the untrained mind “monkey mind.” It runs all over the place, a fact we often only become aware of when we start to meditate.

Given this, the fact that a troop of vervet monkeys have made their home at the BRC seems appropriate. Spend a weekend there and you can get to develop a relationship with the monkeys running around both inside your head — those interminable thoughts — and the rascally primates with their equally relentless antics causing havoc outside in the gardens.

Link to the Buddhist Retreat Centre here.