Caroline Brazier (Prasada)

A short biography of Rev. Prasada Caroline Brazier

Prasada Caroline Brazier is the wife of Dharmavidya, often at his side, and also a Dharma teacher in her own right, who travels, lectures and teaches internationally. She has been a pioneer in the presentation of Buddhist Psychology and directs the training programmes offered by the Amida Trust which include a full professional training for psychotherapists and counsellors taught from a Buddhist Psychology perspective. In addition to Pureland Buddhism, she has also been a member of the Tiep Hien Order of Vietnamese Buddhism. She is a talented writer with a gentle evocative style. She has a great love of the natural world and, just like many of the great Chinese and Japanese poets of the Pureland tradition, in her vision spirituality and nature interfuse in a seamless web of beauty and mystious profundity.

Prasada has a longstanding involvement in both education and working with community groups. Always interested in a diversity of subjects, her love of nature and the arts led her to take A levels in Ancient Greek, Art and Biology and then a degree in Archaeology and Ancient History. Leaving university, she was inspired by holiday work with children on a play scheme in Inner London and trained as a primary school teacher. This process left her with a love of education which has continued to inspire her work in many fields. Her teaching career was curtailed when she had children of her own, and by the time she was ready to seek employment once more, she had become involved in a number of community groups, was a member of her local Community Health Council, and sat on various local committees. In particular, she was developing courses for women in fields related to health and personal development.

Through this varied introduction, Prasada rediscovered an aptitude for more therapeutic work and trained as a counsellor and therapeutic groupworker in the 1980s (she had already been active on the student emergency nightline some years earlier). During the period up to the formation of Amida Trust in 1996, she worked in community education projects, a women's health group and as a community health development worker for Gateshead Healthcare Trust, as well as starting to develop a private psychotherapy practice. She also began to work for the Northern Initiative on Women and Eating for whom she ran groups and did one to one counselling over more than ten years. Since qualifying as a counsellor, Prasada has received an M.Phil degree in counselling from Keele University, is BACP acccredited and holds professional qualifications in counselling, groupwork and supervision. She began to teach on the Amida Psychotherapy Training Programme in 1991 alongside Dharmavidya and became its co-ordinator in 1996. In 1998 she was instrumental in starting the Amida Distance Learning Programme in Buddhist Psychology, which was inspired by the teaching of Dharmavidya (David Brazier) and in 2003 she published the core theory from this programme in her book, Buddhist Psychology. In 2007 she published The Other Buddhism which extends the focus of her previous work to Pureland Buddhism, offering insight into both its spiritual meaning and its human implications. This book explores in particular the relationship between people and their contexts; our dependence on what is other, be it material, human or spiritual, for all our needs and existence.

Prasada is an ordained Buddhist priest in the Amida Order. She travels internationally and regularly teaches on both psychological and religious topics. Within the Order, she plays an important role in the training of chaplains and ministers, and helps with supervision and training within the various engaged Buddhist projects that Amida Trust has given birth to. She is active in inter-Buddhist relations. She was chair of Network of Buddhist Organisation UK from 2002-2006 and remains active on their committee. She regularly attends European Buddhist Union and European Buddhist Teachers meetings and in currently involved in a group that is setting up processes for approving Buddhist hospital chaplains.

Prasada was born as Caroline Bates, the daughter of a Methodist Christian minister. She comes from a family of missionaries, politicians and artists. She has three adult children, Catherine, Jennifer and Timothy, who all live and work in the North East of England.She is sensitive to multi-faith relations and inter-cultural issues and a passionate speaker on the need for a renewal of faith that transcends sectarian division and unites people of goodwill in working together in the cause of a better world.