About Triratna
In the late sixties, the English Sangha Trust invited Sangharakshita, as the seniormost English Buddhist monk, to return to the UK to help Buddhism develop in the West. The Sangha Trust was based in London and was set up very much in the traditional Buddhist pattern of monk and lay practitioners. Sangharakshita taught in London under their auspices and those of the London Buddhist Society for about two years. However he became more and more convinced that the traditional monk / lay pattern wasn’t likely to flourish in the West. Perhaps particularly not likely to flourish in the midst of London’s Swinging Sixties!
But Sangharakshita wanted to attract this younger generation to Buddhism and eventually he decided that it needed a new approach more suited to contemporary conditions to accomplish that. He realised that a new Buddhist Movement was needed that wasn’t patterned on the model of full-time monks who taught Buddhism and were supported financially by a lay community. And the nuns’ sangha had died out - so how would women practice more intensely? By this time he had returned to India. He took that time to say
Sangharakshita with Dhardo Rinpoche (l)
farewell to his own teachers, particularly Dhardo Rinpoche in Kalimpong. In 1966 he returned to London with no formal sponsors but with a small band of people who had met him at the Sangha Trust and who had appreciated his determination to make the Buddha Dharma relevant to Westerners. They too wanted to explore how Western culture might be brought into the service of the Buddha’s teachings.
Sangharakshita giving a talk on or near the first WBO ordinations
Then in 1967, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) was founded and the first ordinations into the Western Buddhist Order took place a year later.
For some time now the Order has been considering a name change but we’ve found it very difficult to decide on the best alternative! At the beginning of 2010, Sangharakshita sent out a letter to all Order members with the request that we adopt the new name of Triratna Buddhist Order. The obvious name for our wider sangha would then have been Friends of the Triratna Buddhist Order. However an alternative to that emerged from discussions between chairmen and women of our UK and European Centres in January 2010 : Triratna Buddhist Community. Some people immediately liked the new names. Others mourned the old name - especially the loss of the word Western - but were OK to go along with Sangharakshita’s request.
At the end of May, we hosted the FWBO International Festival where a ritual was held to mark the name change.
