About

This site is maintained by a lay practitioner, George Klima (buddhism.canadaetgmail.com), in collaboration with Chris Ng.  During the spring and summer of 2009, Justin Wah Kan and Karma Yönten Gyatso brought their energy, imagination, and skill to the site, which has brought it back to life.  The site has also benefited from the energies of Michael Kerr, Mathieu Ouellet and Patricia Campbell.

K’un Li Shuh, Richard Hayes, and Ajahn Kusalo have been good enough to offer their advice for extended periods.

Goals

We intend that people should easily find the Dharma in Canada, through one of the many Buddhist groups that exist all across Canada.   There are three types of people that we would like the site to be helping:

  1. Those who are new to the Dharma
  2. Practitioners who are looking for another group, whether they’ve moved or simply moved on
  3. Academics who are studying Buddhism

History

This site began as lists that were compiled by Michael Kerr, Chris Ng, and K’un Li Shih in 1992.  In the spring of 1994, George Klima attended a Wesak celebration, picked up the Toronto list from Michael Kerr, and offered to publish it electronically.  In the fall of 1994, Michael’s list was posted as a downloadable ASCII file on a BBS run by Mike Butler out of Ajax, Ontario.   The following spring George Klima created a web page comprised of the list of Toronto groups.  Information about other groups from the rest of Canada were added, starting with the list of K’un Li Shih and then slowly growing.

Web 2.0

This version of the site is hosted within a Wordpress blog infrastructure because we’re hoping to open it up to our users.  Today the site is still young and fragile, which means we have not yet worked out how to open it up without breaking it.  However, we would like you to know that we’re heading in that direction.