COMPLETE WORKS
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Sangharakshita Poems and Short Stories
E D I T E D B Y V I DYA D E V I
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Windhorse Publications 17e Sturton Street Cambridge cb1 2sn uk info@windhorsepublications.com www.windhorsepublications.com Š Sangharakshita, 2018 First published in 2020. The right of Sangharakshita to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover design by Dhammarati Cover image: Front and back flap: The Starry Night, September 1889, Vincent van Gogh, Creative Commons. Typesetting and layout by Tarajyoti Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-911407-46-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-911407-47-8 (paperback)
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editor’s preface
Welcome to this collection of Sangharakshita’s poetry and short stories. Once upon a time, in a talk called ‘My Relation to the Order’, he com pared his poems to a famously neglected fairytale character: At this point I would like to put in a good word for the Cinderella of my writings, that is, my poetry. Not that I expect you all to like my poetry. I am well aware that it can be characterized as traditional, neo-Georgian, and academic – though even as unacademic a person as Allen Ginsberg once assured me that in his view ‘academic’, as applied to poetry, was by no means a term of disparagement. But regardless of how my poetry is to be characterized – even regardless of whether it is really poetry – like all my writings the poems collected in The Enchanted Heart and Conquering New Worlds represent a communication by means of the written word, and particularly a communication to Order members. I would therefore like you to read my poetry, even to read it again and again. In my poetry, too, there is a great deal of me, perhaps more than there is in some of my prose writings, at least in certain respects. When you read my poetry you are not only very much in contact with me but in contact with me in a special kind of way.1
At the time I’m writing this, less than six months after Sangharakshita’s death, Cinderella seems at last to have come to the ball. My sense is that e d i t o r ’ s pr e fa c e /
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his poetry has become more important to many people in the Triratna sangha, perhaps seeking contact with him in the ‘special kind of way’ that his poetry offers, as he suggested in that long-ago talk. It is in this atmosphere that this volume is being prepared for publication. Sangharakshita gave his own modest assessment of his poetry in the preface of the 1978 collection The Enchanted Heart, and again in his Complete Poems which appeared in 1995: I have written poetry since I was eleven or twelve. Throughout my teens and well into my twenties, I wrote an enormous quantity of it, most of which has not survived. The poems appearing in this collection are selected from my published and unpublished output during the years 1941–1994, and represent all I would wish to preserve. Not that they are all necessarily worth preserving as poetry. Many of them, if not the majority, have only a biographical – even a sentimental – interest. They give expression to passing moods and fancies as well as to deeper experiences and insights. They also reflect my response to my surroundings. As such they constitute a sort of spiritual autobiography, sketchy indeed, but perhaps revealing, or at least suggesting, aspects of my life that would not otherwise be known. Some of my friends, I believe, may find an autobiography of this sort of greater interest than a more formal account. They may also enjoy, as poetry, those few poems which may be considered to rank as such. For the sake of these friends – old and new, Eastern and Western – I am bringing out this collection, and to them I affectionately dedicate it.
He wrote many more poems in the years that followed, some of which were published in The Call of the Forest and A Moseley Miscellany, and also included a few early poems not in any previous collection in Early Writings. In this Complete Works edition we have included all of these, and added a few more previously unpublished poems from the period 1944 to 1994 to add to the selection Sangharakshita himself made, on the basis that they too reveal, or at least suggest, aspects of his life that would not otherwise be known. To introduce the poems we have included the perspectives on them of three different readers: Padmavajra, who gives a very personal response; Vishvantara, who (with the help of Subhadramati) offers a reader’s guide; and Vishvapani, who explores xxii / e d i t o r ’ s
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the literary influences on Sangharakshita’s poetry. Many thanks to all of them for providing these three very different ways of approaching the poems. The introductory essays are followed by some of Sangharakshita’s own reflections on his poems. Quite late on in his years of public speaking he discovered that reflecting on his own poems produced new insights; this led to the talks ‘Standing on Holy Ground’ and ‘Footprints of Delight’, both included here in edited form. And at the very end of his life, he recorded a series of intimate conversations with Saddhanandi, chair of Adhisthana,2 about ten of his poems; the edited transcripts of those conversations are also included here. Then, at last, we come to the poems themselves, presented in chronological order, and with an index of subjects and themes as well as indexes of first lines and titles; and finally there’s a sequence of short stories. Sangharakshita’s occasional experiments with this form spanned the years from the early 1950s to the early 1990s, and also, in their own way, say things that could not have been put any other way. Vidyadevi Herefordshire 2019
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instead of a foreword by Padmavajra
Padmaloka 25 March 2019 Dear Bhante, It might seem strange that I am writing to you, given that back in November I participated in your funeral rites. It might seem strange as well to the other people who are reading this. I am writing to you because I am in some difficulty. Some months ago, Vidyadevi asked me if I would write a foreword to your Complete Poems and Short Stories. I have found it hard to write, making a number of false starts. Something is not right and I cannot connect with what I am writing. The writing is stilted – a poor attempt at formality which I do not find convincing. So instead, here I am, composing a letter to you about trying to write a foreword to your Complete Poems. I think if I write to you, you may in some way be able to help me. Addressing you somehow makes the writing easier, and I think I know why that might be. The truth is that reading your poetry is something very personal for me. When I read your poems I feel closer to you. I am not interested in whether your poetry is good or bad, or about the many styles in which you have written, and I know nothing about metre or rhyme schemes. I read your poetry because it tells me more about you. My first real encounter with your poetry was in Pune, India, where xxiv / i n st e a d
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I was living and doing what I could to help Lokamitra to establish the Order there. Indeed, I was there when you returned to give those wonderfully stirring lectures and conduct the first ordinations in India. At some point during my stay, in 1978, there arrived the first edition of your collected poems, entitled The Enchanted Heart – Poems 1946– 1976. It was a cyclostyled book in A4 format with a simple but beautiful cover painted by Aloka. Ashvajit had lovingly typed and duplicated the 168 pages. The first printing ran to two hundred copies. I have one of them now on my desk and it brings back memories of reading and rereading your poems during those days in India. My memories tell me that much of my reading of The Enchanted Heart took place at night, either in my tiny bedroom in our small bungalow in Pune, or on retreat in some distant ‘Inspection Bungalow’ in the Maharashtra countryside. I would lie under my mosquito net reading your poems, wondering what had moved you to write them, what had enchanted your heart so. Sometimes that was obvious to me because many of the poems described sights that I was seeing myself. I too had experienced the monsoon rain. I too had seen, almost daily, those melancholy buffaloes: With long-lashed eyes, and massive horns Low-curving from each patient head, They shuffle sadly up the road, Dusty, and lowing to be fed.
Reading lines like that helped me move closer to what I was seeing. It evoked a greater sympathy for a world that I was struggling to comprehend, because – as you well know – I was overwhelmed with difficulties during my first months in India. There were also poems about people you had seen and met there. One in particular brought me closer to the people I was getting to know, the devoted Buddhist followers of Baba Saheb Ambedkar. The word pictures of ‘The Bodhisattva’s Reply’ have stayed with me since the day I first read them, describing those Whose lives spring up between Custom and circumstance i n st e a d o f a f o r e w o r d /
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As weeds between wet stones, Whose lives corruptly flower Warped from the beautiful, …
I’m haunted by your description of those lives: that woman; this boy; the dull-eyed men; those dim shadows, forced to perform degrading acts and do terrible things; those wasted lives tossed into the gutter and trampled on. And the constant question to the anonymous bodhisattva: What will you say to them?
I wondered if you were addressing that question not just to the bodhisattva, but to yourself, in your hermitage in Kalimpong, and hearing an answer: that you should not say anything but just give yourself to them fully and completely. Other poems of the late 1940s and early 1950s had me wondering about the inner experience that prompted them. I love ‘Advent’, which I keep returning to, describing, surely, a woman alone in a house, cleaning and preparing and waiting with intense, eventually hopeless, longing for the Stranger. At last: As the clock struck twelve I heard nothing But felt He had come and stayed Waiting outside. And I listened – And I was afraid.
Years later, I wondered if this poem was in the tradition of viraha-bhakti, the anguished longing devotion which is so much a feature of Indian religious traditions. And there are others among your ‘Indian’ poems that seem to evoke the same mood of intense longing and devotion. I was so glad that there was ‘Bhante the bhakta’, for obvious reasons, given my own temperament, although ‘Advent’ does contain a warning for me. I might long intensely for the divine, but when it comes?… Another very early poem, ‘The Unseen Flower’, seemed to express, in plain and simple language, a clear and decisive insight into the very nature of things, describing the completely unselfconscious nature of Compassion, springing
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Up in the emptiness which is when you yourself are not there So that you do not know anything about it.
And then describing the scent of a mysterious unseen flower blooming in the Heart of the Void.
But of all the poems that I read in India, the one that I kept returning to was the long poem written between 1950 and 1953 entitled ‘The Veil of Stars’. In its 119 stanzas, to my intense delight I discovered Bhante the lover, as the poem traces the arc of love from its mysterious, amazed awakening to its glorious, visionary fulfilment. The coming of love is mysterious as the flight of a bird from unknown lands, Its going mysterious as the unseen tumult of the wind blowing we know not whither.
I can still feel the thrill and enchantment of reading that first stanza all those years ago, and the feelings became stronger as you charted the journey: Desire for anyone flowers into love for someone And at last bears fruit as compassion for everyone.
You took your reader on that journey not through concepts and analysis, but through vivid images of the world around you: the mountains and valleys around Kalimpong; cherry blossoms and bamboos; sunsets and full moons; glow-worms and stars. Reading and re-reading ‘The Veil of Stars’ (as well as other poems written in the same period) I had a sense of the intensity of your life and spiritual practice at this time. Was it, Bhante, like living in a great furnace in which all your life and studies were being smelted, or an alchemist’s alembic in which your raw encounter with overwhelming beauty and love was at last transformed into the vision of the Beloved in all beings and in all things? And who was that Beloved – someone you knew, or the Bodhisattva? And at the last, after the great transformation, does that distinction even apply?
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I know that even from the inmost depths of heaven I shall see your face shining out upon me above the utmost beauty of the stars. The secret of love is love.
Many years after I first read ‘The Veil of Stars’ I asked you what, or indeed who, had inspired the poem. Your reply was, at the time, a disappointment. Instead of saying anything about the circumstances, you talked about its style, saying that, inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’, you had found yourself writing down short poems which turned into a kind of story. You said nothing about who was involved, or the intensity of lived experiences. Later, I realized that all the intensity was expressed in the poetry itself and could not be said in any other way. I seem to recall you even telling me that on one occasion. The Enchanted Heart did not only contain poems written in India; there were also poems written as you began your encounter with the Britain of the nineteen sixties and seventies. I loved the new voice of those poems, sometimes a very plain, almost documentary voice, nowhere more poignantly than in your poems about Terry Delamare. In the poem to Chögyam Trungpa, that plain voice described a movement to a new kind of communication: The time has come For us to hang up the gorgeous costumes in the greenroom cupboard To leave the brilliantly lit stage The applause And to go home Through deserted streets To a quiet room Up three flights of stairs And to someone perhaps With whom we can be Ourselves
I also loved the ecstatic voice that entered your poetry at this time. You seem a man possessed, as if the Dharma has brought you to an energy xxviii / i n st e a d
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that unites heaven and earth: earth-myth, local myth marrying cosmic transcendent vision. It is nowhere more vibrant than in ‘On Glastonbury Tor’, a true account of a pilgrimage you made there with a group of friends in 1969. How the opening lines drew me in! – Dragons were slain here Ages ago. Dragons’ blood Soaked into the earth, stained White chalk miles deep.
The poem evoked the ‘unlidded cauldron, the Tor’ still boiling over. You heard voices from the past, saw the visions of ‘Arthur Merlin, Cup Lance’ in the white mist. ‘Heard the Merlinvoice through the strong young body’. You challenged us (yourself too?) to ‘accept incomprehension, accept defeat, face descent into Hell without hope of resurrection on the third day’. And you longed to lie down in the dark, in the depths of the sea with your love, to ‘drift like red weed in green water’. And at the last? Language stretched to its limit, the Tor ‘swimming in space, cosmic dimensionless.’… In your poetry I have discovered not only Bhante the devotee and Bhante the lover, but also Bhante the ecstatic. And there are so many more Bhantes to find in your poetry, too many to list in this letter. Perhaps you may even be disappointed that I’m leaving out some of the many other expressions of your heart? Perhaps the voices that I love are ones you left behind long ago. I remember asking you once to read some extracts from ‘The Veil of Stars’, but you declined, telling me: ‘I don’t have those feelings any more, and I am not an actor.’ Over the years more of your poetry has appeared in Complete Poems and The Call of the Forest, and you’ve written more since then, all of which will appear in the volume for which this is not quite a foreword. There are poems for your dear and close friends, and one to your teacher Chattrul Sangye Dorje. Once I wrote to you to say that I was reciting your short invocation to Padmasambhava, and you replied: ‘What you said about my poem ‘Padmasambava’ made me turn to it after many years. In fact I asked Mahamati to read it to me, and afterwards I repeated it to myself a number of times. It struck me that the poem was like a little sadhana. I wonder what you will make of this thought.’ i n st e a d o f a f o r e w o r d /
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There is so much more to say about your poetry, but I fear that this letter is just getting longer and longer and I am no nearer to writing the foreword that I promised to write. I haven’t even begun to think about what I might say about the short stories. I certainly recall reading ‘The Artist’s Dream’ a number of times, the story of the old painter in Renaissance Italy painting a fresco of a dream of heaven, who attracts a community of young men to help with the work, only for the work to become disrupted by the usual worldly desires and attachments, which cause the unnamed artist so many problems. And yet he continues with the work, so determined is he to realize his dream-vision in painting. Many leave and he is left with only a few devoted young men to assist him. All he wants to do is to put everything in place so that his assistants can carry on with the great work: to fully realize his great dream vision of heaven. You wrote that story in 1972, and here we are many years later, absorbing your death and doing what we can to realize your vision in this difficult world. I wonder how we will fare. I miss you, Bhante. Some people say your presence is stronger than ever. I know what they mean, but all the same I miss you. I miss just knowing that you were in your rooms at Adhisthana and that I could go and see you. I have even felt some anguish at this, have wept hot tears. I think of those lines of yours that tell how the heart feels: I do not care at all About writing any more poems. Enough if I can say How the heart bleeds and bleeds.
And I think back to that cold November day when you finally left us. Did you know that you left us with poetry? After your brightly coloured coffin was lowered into the earth, I read aloud your poem ‘The Six Elements Speak’, in which each element says its goodbye to us. I knew that I had to read with ‘flavourless speech’. Later people told me that it was as if you were saying goodbye: Earth dissolves into Water, Water dissolves into Fire, Fire dissolves into Air,
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Air dissolves into Space, Space dissolves into Consciousness, Consciousness dissolves into – ? hum. ¯
You left us in the vast mystery. But before I fall entranced into the vastness, I really must get down to writing that foreword. Or perhaps, after all, I have already written it, in the only way I could. Much love, Padmavajra
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