About Us
Yana Penchkovskaya
For 15 years I've been teaching qigong and tai chi - Yang and Wu styles. In this tradition, inner work matters more than outer form; body and mind are inseparable. Serious progress is impossible without understanding how consciousness works. After all, tai chi deals with the same themes as Buddhist contemplative methods.
The Pali Canon became a natural continuation of this path - a language to describe my practical experience.
That's why from 2018 I began practicing meditation more and more actively, gradually going deeper into theory. All the way to the Pali Canon as the primary source of Buddhist contemplative practices.
I don't belong to any particular school. I can work with different frameworks of description - but I don't accept any of them as absolute truth. I learn from experienced practitioners and teachers of various traditions, relying on my own experience and primary sources.
The club for me is an aspiration to make the understanding of suttas a personal acquisition for myself and all participants. Not faith, but confident knowing.
Especially since one of the best ways to deeply understand something is to explore and discuss it in a circle of like-minded people.
- I host live sessions and write for the channel. I make a special effort to write about the suttas not only clearly and precisely, but with human warmth
- It matters to me that everyone can relate what they've read to their own experience, ask a "silly" question, and feel heard
- In teaching and in the club, I try to be a guide - creating conditions where you can explore without knowing the answer
I definitely don't claim to be a guru. But I know how to create a space where you can be in the process: not knowing, doubting, tasting, sharing something personal, growing wiser.
Ivan Ermakov
Based in Munich, programme director in IT by trade. Serious about meditation since 2019, school-agnostic, grounded in experience and primary sources.
At some point it became clear: to truly understand the practice, you need to read the source code it grew from. And unexpectedly, reading the Canon "takes a sad world and makes it better".
That's how this club was born - first a desire to do my homework, then to share what I've learned: Telegram channel, live sessions, a website, a newsletter...
We even built a "Which Buddhist school are you?" quiz - because why not%).
- I translate suttas into Russian, navigating between Pali, English, and Russian texts - essentially working with texts that were never meant to be read
- I prepare sutta overviews for live sessions - trying to make a 2,500-year-old text sound like a conversation, not a lecture
- I handle the whole technical side: website, channel, newsletter, research, AI, and just some fun
Not a teacher, not an all-knowing expert. More like a hiking buddy with a compass, never a guru on a mountaintop.
How we work
How we work with the texts. We read each sutta in the Pali original on SuttaCentral, with the English translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Sujato alongside it, plus the Russian translation by SV - made from Bodhi's English and still the only complete Russian rendering of the Majjhima Nikaya. We do not retranslate the Canon: we compare the existing translations with each other and with the Pali, and point out in our notes where they diverge.
What we do not claim. The club has no lineage, and we do not carry any teacher's authority. We give no transmissions and speak for no tradition. This is careful reading and discussion - with sources cited and everyone free to disagree.
Where the material lives. Sutta notes and glossary entries go out on our Telegram channel, session recordings on YouTube. The site holds the glossary, the overview of Buddhist schools and a guide for newcomers.