Thai fidelity in Co Clare

Stanley de Freitas is meditating in the chilly waters of a hillside "sioc" (Irish for watery ditch) that has been refashioned into a lush Thai-style bathing grove and waterfall. Beside him on a drowned rock, a deep green Buddha statue is lit by a rare sprinkle of afternoon sunlight streaming through overhanging birch and fern. A low Pali chant rings out as east Clare meets the Far East.

Sunyata Retreat Centre near Broadford village, around 12 miles from Shannon airport, is built around the two homes of de Freitas and his wife Clare and their friend Peter Carey, all practising Buddhists. Clustered around the de Freitases' hillside farmhouse are a converted cottage and studio that are rented out for self-catering holidays and retreats, a herbal treatment centre, an old pigsty that will be a meditation hall, a Buddhist stupa (monument) and, hidden away in a hillside crevice, the bathing grove.

Renovations to Oxford fellow Peter Carey's cottage a few fields away are almost complete. The dank ditch at the end of his land that now looks like something for Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad from The Wind In the Willows, will some day be a bracing bathing grove like the one Stanley de Freitas dips into every day, except in deep winter.

This weekend Sunyata's visitors include Sister Thanasanti, an American nun from the Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, an elaborate complex with a new Thai-style temple which was blessed on July 4 by Princess Galyani Vadhana, the younger sister of the Thai King. Sister Thanasanti is conducting a oneday meditation retreat. Buddhists Catherine Sutton and Eugene Kelly from Dublin, who plan to open their own retreat centre in Lismore, Co Waterford, in the future, are gathering ideas. Visiting children are exploring the gardens with the young de Freitas children, Rowan and Finbar.

On another recent Sunday, women gathered to hear qualified botanist and medical herbalist Clare explain how to spot and use the herbs growing in local ditches and fields. Vet Erica Borge from Scariff wanted to explore herbal cures for animals after she'd successfully treated pets with Bach's Rescue Remedy. An acupuncturist was considering using herbs in her work. Two women from an Ennis health shop were brushing up on remedies. One participant hoped to get ideas to help fix her skin problem. Along a gravel lane below the centre, the women picked comfrey, plaintain, figwort, elder, nettles, potentilla and St John's Wort, while Clare's dog, Toto, grabbed and chewed a section of sticky willy, otherwise known as goose grass, which is good for the lymphatic system. A selection of plants was later bashed, boiled, put into bottles and taken home.

The ailments Dublin-born Clare treats most often are asthma, eczema and irritable bowel syndrome. Customers also come to the centre to relieve stress or muscle pain with a herbal massage.

Sunyata has grown gradually since the de Freitases arrived from Oxfordshire four years ago, attracted by east Clare's tranquil beauty and its sense of space. Stan, a carpenter and landscape gardener who grew up in Barbados and England, has carried out much of the building and renovations, with the help of Leader grants. Donations from a wealthy Hong Kong philanthropist and from a UK-based minor member of the Thai royal family will help fund the meditation hall and a stone beehive hut for solitary retreat. A wooden sky lodge with space to accommodate a small family is also planned. Holidays and retreats for special groups, such as children with learning difficulties and those recovering from mental illness, are also envisaged for the future at the centre, which is open to people of all traditions or none, and whose Pali name means "the spaciousness behind all form".

The Sunyata three are keen to develop local roots in the mid-west. For south-east Asia scholar Carey, a fellow and tutor in modern history at Oxford's Trinity College, that has meant part-time teaching at the University of Limerick for the past three years. This weekend he is driving to Killaloe to work with a graduate student taking the university's MA in International Relations. Coming from Oxford to teach in Limerick is "refreshing", he says. "There's an interesting mix of students, and they tend to be much more straightforward in relationships, there's no side to them.

"If one could just transfer the Bodleian library over here, this would be paradise," he adds.

Carey has combined decades of scholarly work on Indonesia's former royal court with involvement in some of the thorny social and political problems of modern south-east Asia. Born in Rangoon in 1948 of an English mother and Dublin-born father who'd been sent to Burma to set up a branch of a British steel company, Carey is an old friend of Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has been under virtual house arrest in the Burmese capital for a decade. He was also close to Suu Kyi's husband Michael Aris, who died of cancer in Oxford earlier this year after the Burmese military junta refused permission for a last visit to his wife, whom Aris hadn't seen for years.

Carey has a friend's complex perspective on the dilemmas of the Nobel prize winner who is honoured around the globe for her principled opposition to an extraordinary military junta that continues unchecked in practising slave labour, extra-judicial killings of ethnic minorities and a catalogue of other documented human rights abuses.

"Michael's death was a shock for her. It is very tough. You can be a heroine, and remarkable, but it can have a huge human cost. The family has suffered a great deal. Her sons have suffered as they grew up from the loss of their mother. We must just hope that there can be some space for compromise, that the door for dialogue with the military will be left ajar."

Carey was also a founder in 1989 of the Cambodia Trust, an Oxford-based charity which works for the rehabilitation of amputees and other war wounded in Cambodia, one of the most heavily mined and impoverished countries in the world. Today the trust's Cambodia School for Prosthetics and Orthopaedics is headed in Phnom Penh by Ciaran Harte, who formerly worked with amputee victims of the North's Troubles at St Mary's Hospital in Belfast. Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, is a former patron of the trust, and Trocaire has helped fund the school.

Among the projects Carey will be working on in Co Clare during a year's sabbatical from Oxford, starting in September, is a second book on troubled East Timor, titled Survivors - Experiences of Military Occupation. There will also be the long walks in the hills of east Clare that are the trio's favourite pastime. Stanley de Freitas and Carey's decades-old friendship has been cemented over the years by walks, one of which took 30 days through the English countryside. The idea of moving to Ireland, in fact, began in 1993 on a tramp through parts of Co Cork. "We were bowled over by the sense of space, and Ireland's unique atmosphere. There is an old sense of spirituality here that is special," says Carey. "An Apollo mission reported that Ireland was about the only place that looked really green from space," he adds. "In future, the world is going to need to have parts that are green lungs, and Ireland can be one of those places."

Sunyata can be contacted at tel: 061-367073, email: sunyataireland@hotmail.com

For information on Buddhist centres in Dublin and around the country, contact the Buddhist Centre, tel: 01-4537427, email buddhist@indigo.ie