A Buddhist group is trying to turn a boarded up derelict Southampton pub into a meditation centre.

The Plume of Feathers Pub in the St Mary’s area of the city has been boarded up for several months.

The Triratna Buddhist Order’s Southampton group has submitted a planning application to develop the pub in St Mary Street.

Leader Dharma Modna declined to comment on the proposal until the planning application had been heard.

Local councillor Sarah Bogle said: “I think it’s a really novel idea.

“I was surprised, to be honest, when I saw the planning application but also I thought why not?

“It’s …

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The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group has filed an appeal to the county Planning Commission’s April decision to allow a Buddhist monastery in Bonsall to expand into a meditation center.

County spokesman Gig Conaughton said the appeal could be heard by the Board of Supervisors sometime this summer.

The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group opposed the expansion of the Dai Dang Monastery when the project went before the local board, and group members argued that it would be inappropriate for the area at last month’s Planning Commission meeting.

Opponents also included neighbors, a local farmer and the Farm Bureau.

The monastery is at 6326 Camino del …

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Gary Warth, North Country Times: The San Diego County Planning Commission is scheduled on Friday to hear a proposal to add a meditation center to a Buddhist monastery in Bonsall, and a community group plans on fighting the project with a petition signed by about 400 people.

The Vietnamese Buddhist Meditation Congregation has proposed the expansion of the Dai Dang Monastery off of Camino del Rey, and neighbors have said they fear that the quiet monastery where 10 monks live will become a noisy destination when hundreds of people begin visiting for ceremonies.

The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group, an advisory board to the San Diego …

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Deena DiBacco: Wednesday night, Collingswood [New Jersey] Zoning Board members unanimously denied a borough man’s use variance application, aimed at using his detached garage as a gathering place for group meditation.

Applicant Stephen Tumolo, who owns the said property at the unit block of Coulter Ave., holds a master’s degree in Theology and currently teaches religion at Camden Catholic High School.

Tumolo has lived at the 2-and-a-half story Coulter Ave. property for the past two years, which features a detached garage.

Wednesday night, Tumolo testified that 10 months after purchasing his home, he began making improvements to the garage space without building permits.

“A …

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The local Buddhist community has built a new meditation centre in Brno, the Moravian capital and the Czech Republic’s second largest city with a population of 500,000, Marketa Blazejovska, from the community, has told CTK.

The new building worth 24 million crowns, named the Diamond Path House, has replaced the Buddhist community’s old headquarters, situated elsewhere, that had run out of capacity and could not be extended.

A half of the new building’s costs were financed from a grant, and the rest from an interest-free loan from a private foundation.

The debt has been repaid through donations from the centre members and supporters from the…

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Marin County officials continued to wrestle with proposed plans for the Spirit Rock Meditation Center — even though the county staff says doing nothing would be worse for the environment than approving the Buddhist retreat’s newest plan.

County planning commissioners decided Monday they need more time to reflect on a new master plan for the complex and told planning staff to outline specifics of regulations limiting attendance at special events. Another session will be scheduled later.

“I’m wondering if we are moving ahead with this before we have the program written out,” said Commissioner Randy Greenberg of attendance regulations. “We don’t know the magnitude of the issue,” added colleague Wade Holland. …

Here at Wildmind we’ve reported on several Buddhist organizations that have faced strenuous opposition to establishing or expanding Buddhist centers. Usually the objections are supposedly about traffic, noise (meditation being a notoriously noisy activity), and in one case, the perceived nuisance of animal sacrifice.

John Pappas, a blogger at Elephant Journal, has collated a handy list of groups that have faced such planning objections:

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The public comment period on the re-circulated draft environmental Mitigated Negative Declaration for the proposed Buddhist temple in Bonsall [California] closed Feb. 11, and the county’s Department of Planning and Land Use (DPLU) received 151 comment letters and one petition.

DPLU received 45 public comment letters critical of the project, 106 letters supportive of the project, and a supportive petition with 804 signatures. DPLU staff will review and respond to all comments, although the response to any comments not related to California Environmental Quality Act issues will be that the comments are outside the purview of the environmental statement.

DPLU staff does not currently have an estimate …

OLATHE, KANSAS — A Johnson County Buddhist church has outgrown its building, and they have a new place to worship picked out. But so far they have been denied the right to use it, and a metro Buddhist leader says that zoning isn’t the reason why they can’t move in.

The Lao-Buddhist Association is trying to move its Olathe temple to a location along 119th Street in Olathe. But the Johnson County Board of Commissioners has so far denied the group a conditional use permit. Neighbors say that the area the Buddhists have chosen is zoned residential, but Lama Chuck Stanford …

Proponents of a Buddhist meditation center proposed for Bonsall made one final pitch to a community advisory group Tuesday, but the project still seemed a tough sell to the board members.

“You want to work with the community?” Bonsall Community Sponsor Group member Mark Litner said to Frank Hoang, who represents the project. “I’m not feeling the love here of you trying to work with the community whatsoever.”

The meeting Tuesday was the second time in two weeks that the Sponsor Group, an advisory board to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, listened to public comments about a proposed three-building meditation center planned by the Vietnamese …