Practising Nonself, Negotiating Belonging: The Limits and Possibilities of Alternative Spirituality in a British Chan Buddhist Community

This paper examines how belonging is produced and limited within a British Chan (Zen) Buddhist community composed primarily of non-ethnic Chinese practitioners, positioning it as a form of alternative spirituality at the margins of institutional religion. While its founder, John Crook (1930–2011), was a lay lineage bearer trained by the Taiwanese monk Master Sheng Yen of the globally institutionalized Dharma Drum Mountain, the community maintains a deliberate distance from that network.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how belonging is enacted through reinvented ritual discipline, teacher–disciple relations, and claims to lineage. Although Chan discourse emphasizes non-attachment and the dissolution of identity, dharma friendship remains central to practice. In everyday life, this produces enduring boundaries between ethnic and convert practitioners, insiders and newcomers, and differing levels of commitment and authority.

I argue that belonging here is an embodied and contested process in which inclusion depends on disciplined practice that does not simultaneously generates exclusion. As an unbounded community, the belonging is shaped by both spiritual ideals and self knowledge out of non-self philosophy.