Taraloka

Kulaprabha writes:

In the 1970s I was a chemistry undergraduate in Edinburgh. When I got fed up reading about chemistry, I’d wander into other sections of the University library, often thinking that it didn’t seem fair that some people could get a degree by reading novels! But I came across Comparative Religion and a shelf of books about Buddhism and started reading them. One was called “The Survey of Buddhism” by an Englishman called Sangharakshita. I was won over. At the venerable age of 18, I’d assumed that religion wouldn’t play any part in my life. Now I was feeling rather put out that my religious studies teachers had told me nothing about Buddhism - which, rather miraculously from my point of view, seemed to be a religion where God didn’t figure.

Jumping seven years on, I was in Paisley library and found a book of personal memoirs, set in India after the end of the Second World War. It was called “The Thousand Petalled Lotus” by the same Englishman although I didn’t twig that at the time. But I loved the book and the uncompromising stance that the author took about following the traditional Buddhist going forth as a homeless wanderer - I loved the bit where he threw his passport into the sea. Though later on, being passportless, that meant he couldn’t travel to Sri Lanka. But although impressed, I thought - well that was possible back then, you can’t do that sort of thing nowadays and certainly not in the West.

Three years on again and I was climbing four flights of stairs up to a top tenement flat in the West end of Glasgow where there was a meditation course being run by some people called the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO). I did the six week course along with about 60 other people - but Glasgow’s Victorian flats are spacious enough to cope the those numbers. OK, well it was a bit squashed. But I was intrigued. How come these Glasgwegian thirty-something guys (with funny names) knew enough about Buddhism to teach it. I signed up for the follow on course. And the next. And at some point I noticed a photo on the mantelshelf that seemed familiar though I couldn’t understand why - it was of a yellow robed Buddhist monk sitting on some cushions reading a book. Then I realised that it was the cover photo of that volume of memoirs. It was a photo of Sangharakshita.

It was then I realised that this monk had left India, started up a new Buddhist movement and Buddhist Order which was now setting up and running Buddhist Centres in cities all over the UK and elsewhere. So, maybe the kind of ‘going forth’ that he had done in India wasn’t very feasible in 70s UK but here was a bunch of people attempting to practice with the same level of intensity and commitment but in a way more suited to Western conditions. I was even more impressed.

Decades after all that, here I am sitting in one of the FWBO’s residential retreat centres telling you about this. I’m even more impressed now with Sangharakshita’s vision and courage in stepping out of the traditional Buddhist monastic setting. And for his being persevering enough to pass on some of his own passion for the Buddha Dharma to a generation of young Westerners who, at the time, were tasting the pleasures of the Swinging Sixties and all that entailed. Some of them, in fact most of them, are still members of the Order Sangharakshita founded. And some of them have taken on the responsibilities of training and ordaining new generations of young and not so young Buddhist practitioners. So that today the Western Buddhist Order comprises over 1500 men and women in dozens of countries around the world.

At 85, Sangharakshita has retired - sort of! He’s still writing, seeing people, travelling to Buddhist Centres, and taking up invitations to various faith meetings. The photo to the left was taken in May this year when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited religious leaders to Lambeth Palace, London, to meet with the Dalai Lama. The one above was taken at Taraloka just days afterwards when Sangharakshita gave a talk on the FWBO International Retreat.

There are four recent talks by Sangharakshita in our ‘Talks’ section. Click on the Talks tab at the top of the page to get to the talks page.

See also

• more about Sangharakshita