Why it belongs in ORBIS
Since 1970 Banyen has been Vancouver's harbour for the inner life — dharma, ecology, poetry and healing across one of North America's deepest metaphysical collections.
Banyen opened in December 1970 out of a stock of books that had collected at the Golden Lotus, a restaurant and natural food store on Fourth Avenue at Bayswater that its founders had spent three years living in and running. Kolin Lymworth had visited Shambhala Books in Berkeley the year before and came back meaning to do something comparable in Vancouver. The name comes from the banyan tree under which Krishna is said to have spoken the Bhagavad Gita, and from the Banyan Ashram that Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki founded in Japan; the spelling was changed on the advice of a friend who practised numerology. The first shop opened at 2739 West 4th Avenue in the summer of 1972, an audio wing was added in 1987, and the store now trades at 3608 West 4th at Dunbar. It describes its range as running from acupuncture to Zen, from childbirth and business to the Hermetic mysteries. Lymworth still owned it at the fiftieth anniversary in 2020. A visitor would not find it without being told: it sits at the far western end of a long commercial street, past the beach and well past the Fourth Avenue shopping run, and its subject has no guidebook category to be listed under.