Beginnings

 In 1964 a former Thai-Cambodian monk, Nai Boonman, settled in London and was invited to teach meditation by the English Saṅgha Trust at the then Hampstead Buddhist Vihāra.

Soon after he was asked to start a meditation class in Cambridge by the University Buddhist Society, which 10 years later led to the formation of the Samatha Trust as a UK registered Charity with Nai Boonman and a group of his first students as founding trustees.

Later in 1974 Nai Boonman returned to Thailand entrusting the development of the burgeoning new tradition to his students, only re-establishing an active involvement 22 years later in 1996 when the Trust’s Meditation Centre in Wales was formally inaugurated.

The immediate background to the formation of this first specifically samatha tradition in England was a wide-ranging and politically inspired suppression, or “reforms”, of centuries-old samatha practices, in particular jhāna meditation, across Thailand and Burma from the mid-1950s and its replacement with “new” Burmese vipassanā that claimed jhāna practices were not necessary to fulfil the Buddhist Path to realisation. Within a matter of a few years the mostly oral tradition of jhāna meditation all but disappeared.