Ib Laursen in his home clinic. Atuagagdliutit / Grønlandsposten, 28 January 1999.

1. Greenland residents
2. Visitors
3. Notes

Buddhism is not typically included in lists of the religious groups active in Greenland.¹ Like Islam, Buddhism has been represented on the island only by a small number of individual practitioners, although some of them have held relatively prominent positions in Greenlandic society or have attracted the attention of news media.

Greenland residents

In January 1999, the Atuagagdliutit / Grønlandsposten newspaper reported that a Nuuk resident named Ib Laursen had opened a clairvoyant (or psychic) clinic in his home, which, the paper noted, was ‘something of a rarity, at least in this country’.² Laursen claimed to have been able to see people’s ‘auras’ since his childhood. He had a particularly formative experience in 1987 while aboard a fishing boat near Ilulissat in Disko Bay. As he narrates it:

The engine stopped, and there was nothing else to do but call for help over the radio. While we were waiting for rescue, we drifted around out there at sea, abandoned to the whims of nature and not knowing if we had been heard over the radio. Suddenly I left my body, and I could see over the whole of Disko Bay and our boat drifting around on the water.

Laursen described himself as a ‘philosophical Buddhist’, explaining:

In Buddhism, they have a philosophy about ‘the All’, which is that everything is one big now. There is yesterday and tomorrow, they are illusions, we cannot be in them, we can only be in the now. When I, as a clairvoyant, concentrate and work into the All, I can get a small sense of past, present and future. This connection I get when I sit and talk to these people, where I get access to some of that person’s experiences and possible experiences, it is to draw in these small images and small sensations I get from this All, as I call it, and then piece it together and translate it to my client.

Laursen planned to move his clinic to a dedicated shop in Nuuk when a suitable facility became available.

Allan Chemnitz is another Buddhist Greenlander living in Nuuk. Chemnitz has worked in various IT and consultancy roles, including as a product manager for TELE Greenland (now Tusass), a telecommunications and postage company owned by Greenland’s government. He demonstrated his meditation routines to the Danish Ekstra Bladet newspaper in an interview conducted in 2013, showing off the dedicated meditation room in his Nuuk apartment and arguing that Buddhism is a ‘good fit’ for the spiritual needs of Greenlanders.³ Chemnitz posts intermittent updates to YouTube about his life in Nuuk and his experience as an ordained monk. He is affiliated with the Thai Dhammakaya tradition of Buddhist practice.⁴

Visitors

Greenland has also been visited by Buddhists undertaking religious functions on a number of occasions, attracting the curiosity of the Greenlandic media. For instance, in 2007, Buddhist religious leaders joined Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Shinto, Sikh, and Inuit shamanic representatives for a joint conference on climate change on the island. These leaders held an interfaith prayer session on the Sermeq Kujalleq / Jakobshavn glacier near Ilulissat, which is melting at an alarming rate.⁵

In June 2019, a Chinese-Canadian Buddhist named Rudolph Xiaodong Nie visited Greenland as part of his goal to pray for 2,124 cities around the world. KNR, a Greenlandic news outlet, reported that Nie ‘walked on the road between Nuussuaq [the district, not the village] and Nuuk, kneeling every third step he took and resting his forehead on the asphalt’. He persevered along this route despite the unusually harsh weather for the season. Nie told KNR:

Greenland has given me a wonderful feeling. It is a beautiful place and the people here are very nice. It is a peaceful place. I hope that the Greenlandic people will be happy and improve themselves. I wish Greenland a better future.⁶

Notes

1. F. A. J. Nielsen, ‘Religion and religious communities’, Trap Greenland. https://trap.gl/en/kultur/religion-og-trossamfund/ ↩︎
2. ‘Clairvoyant åbner klinik i Nuuk’, Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten, vol. 139, no. 8, 28 January 1999, p. 7. https://timarit.is/page/3851235 ↩︎
3. B. Kurstein, ‘Buddhisme passer godt til grønlændere’, Ekstra Bladet, 13 May 2013. https://ekstrabladet.dk/plus/article4224716.ece ↩︎
4. A. Chemnitz, ‘Ordination English’, YouTube, 3 January 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA1d9GK0zNs ↩︎
5. ‘Religiøst symposium slutter i dag’, KNR, 12 September 2007. https://knr.gl/da/nyheder/religi%C3%B8st-symposium-slutter-i-dag ; P. Brown, ‘Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes’, The Guardian, 8 September 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/sep/08/climatechange ↩︎
6. M. Lindstrøm and A Christiansen, ‘Buddhist skal bede i 21 år’, KNR, 27 June 2019. https://knr.gl/da/nyheder/buddhist-skal-bede-i-21-%C3%A5r ↩︎