Sangharakshita Moving Against the Stream
E D I T E D B Y K A LYA N A P R A B H A
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foreword
In Sangharakshita’s memoir, Moving Against the Stream, there is a chapter about the ‘secret life’ based on a traditional Tibetan theory that the record of a life, be it biography, autobiography, or memoir, should cover not just the outer life of events but the inner life and the secret life as well. The idea is that this secret life, though held at bay for most of the time by the demands of the outer life, nevertheless slowly gathers momentum and periodically erupts into consciousness. Elaborating on this, Sangharakshita writes: It was as though I was living, on another level, a secret life that normally had no point of direct contact with my outer or even with my inner life.1
He instances such an eruption late on in the memoir when one day in Kalimpong, in 1967, it suddenly becomes clear to him that what is needed is a new Buddhist movement in the West. It comes like a flash of lightning, suddenly revealing possibilities that had ‘hitherto been shrouded in darkness or perceived only dimly.’2 For me personally, being as it were in the right place at the right time, one significant consequence of that dramatic moment of illumination of his came when I made contact with the new Buddhist movement on the first retreat held by the Friends of the Western Sangha.3 As I listened that week to the teacher’s inspiring words when he was teaching the f o r e w o r d /
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Dharma or guiding us into the realm of meditation, I bathed for days in the bliss of Beginner’s Mind. It all felt refreshingly new, yet at the same time uncannily familiar. Was my own secret life, after lurking so long in the shadow of some dim peripheral consciousness, at last breaking through the carapace of mundane events? As is the case with most memoirs, Sangharakshita’s main focus is on his ‘outer life’, from his arrival in England in the summer of 1964, after twenty years in India, up to the spring of 1969. The short 1970 – A Retrospect which completes this volume of the Complete Works offers a few fascinating glimpses into the second kind of life, his inner life, including a dramatic near-death experience and a venture into the world of psychedelics. Though the historical range is short it covers a period that was significant not only in the life of the author but, through him, in the history of Buddhism in the West. In those early years after his return from India, I wasn’t the only one who felt a palpable air of magic surrounding Sangharakshita, an aura that faded as the movement gradually expanded. He seemed to have come from another world, a bit like Nietzsche’s prophet descending from the mountain top to the market place with the good news. He had returned to the West after living many years in the foothills of the Himalayas, much of the time meditating, studying, and reflecting on the Dharma, and receiving initiations from some great Tibetan lamas. By the time he stepped off the plane at Heathrow, he had accumulated, in traditional Buddhist terms, an impressive stock of merit and wisdom, of which we were to be the early beneficiaries. But the allure didn’t just come from his side. The times were propitious too: the counter-culture of the 1960s. Perhaps one couldn’t go so far as to say with Wordsworth that to be young then ‘was very heaven’,4 but there was for many of us a bracing sense of freedom in the air that came with the softening of the hard edges of a rigid conservatism, and gave rise to new possibilities. No longer ‘square’, we grew our hair! The zeitgeist also suited Sangharakshita’s great spiritual project, the spreading of the Dharma in the West, especially after he had been released, albeit involuntarily, from the restraints of working at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. The following pages are all about Sangharakshita at work and his reflections on the many activities he engages in. There is a pleasing flow to the enterprise; he works hard but it never comes across as graft or draining, which is surprising considering the amount of time he puts xiv / f o r e w o r d
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in. His first attendance at the Buddhist Society’s summer school is fairly representative of the pace and variety of his work. In the course of a week he conducts six meditation sessions, delivers ten lectures, holds a question-and-answer meeting, participates in the school’s concluding brains trust, and records two interviews for the bbc. Between times he also manages to do a lot of reading. He appears to sail through it all, even though, as the subtitle of the memoir indicates (The Birth of a New Buddhist Movement), his work often involved taking his stand against the prevailing trend in contemporary Buddhist circles. He has the courage and energy to move against the stream, the rather sluggish stream of Buddhism in England at the time, a Buddhism not without its merits and traditional core values, but marred by a serious conflict between its two governing bodies, the English Sangha Trust and the Buddhist Society. He is a moderating influence, listening patiently and making friends with people from both sides. At the heart of the conflict – which the English Sangha Trust had invited him, as the seniormost English monk, to try and resolve – lay the traditional split between monastic and lay, a deep-rooted belief that the bhikkhus were the true Buddhists and the laity were there only to support them. At various points in the story we encounter Sangharakshita deliberately distancing himself from monastic formalism. Though still wearing his bhikkhu robes, he lets his hair grow longer than the regulation length, often eats after twelve o’clock, goes to the opera, and during mealtimes at the summer school insists on sitting not with the bhikkhus but with the rest of the retreatants, much to their delight but, no doubt, to the dismay of the establishment. These are not just indicators of his grasp of the vital distinction between rules and principles but of a significant reorientation in his understanding of the true Dharma and the way it should be practised. In an article for the local sangha newsletter he goes so far as to say, to the extent that they, too, have gone for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, the laity are as much Buddhists as are the members of the Monastic Order,5
which must have come across in those days as at least startling if not revolutionary. Such are the initial sounding notes of what would eventually become the dominant theme of his teaching as it developed in f o r e w o r d /
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later years, namely that it is essentially the Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels that makes one a Buddhist, or, to quote what became something of a slogan, especially in the early days of the fwbo, commitment is primary, lifestyle secondary. Ordination within the Western Buddhist Order was to be a unifying, not a divisive, factor. In 1965 Sangharakshita gave a series of lectures at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara on the nature of conversion in Buddhism. There he defines Spiritual Community, the third of the Three Refuges, as essentially communication which, in the context of Going for Refuge, is a vital mutual responsiveness on the basis of a common ideal and a common principle.6 He goes on to say that this kind of communication is not limited to that between teacher and disciple but can also take place between those who are simply friends, or kalyāṇa mitras. Listening recently to recordings of these lectures I was struck again and again by the clarity and energy in his voice and how inspired he is to be passing on his fresh and penetrating insights into the nature of spiritual community. He was ‘possessed by a passion for spreading the Dharma through the medium of the spoken word’.7 His legacy to the Triratna Buddhist Community comes largely in the form of the spoken word and it is hardly surprising that giving talks and lectures is for many members of the Triratna Buddhist Order a major channel for the spreading of the Dharma. Another lecture that proved popular in the early days (he gave it live at that first retreat I attended and it was afterwards published as a booklet) is Mind – Reactive and Creative, an exploration of his teaching on the two basic types of conditionality in Buddhism, the cyclic and the spiral.8 Coming as I did from a strain of religious conditioning that was quite definitely God-based, one in which one’s soul after death would be eternally damned or saved, I remember the truth flooding in on me as I listened to Sangharakshita speaking – that I was now at last free to take control of my own life. The creative mind, he says, loves where there is no reason to love, is happy where there is no reason for happiness, creates where there is no possibility of creativity.9
From the start of his work in England, Sangharakshita was well aware of the need to restate spiritual truths in a language that was meaningful to Western Buddhists. To be a good translator of the Dharma from East to xvi / f o r e w o r d
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West – for that is how he saw himself – Buddhism needed to be adapted to the realities of Western society without compromising the essential principles of the Dharma. In this sense he was an authentic Western Buddhist as distinct from being ‘merely a Westerner who has adopted the Buddhism of Tibet, Japan, Burma or Thailand.’10 It is important, both psychologically and spiritually speaking, that one does not completely renounce one’s cultural roots as many Western Buddhist monks at the time felt it their duty to do, but rather to reclaim, as he puts it, one’s cultural heritage. ‘I wanted’, he said, ‘to immerse myself in Western culture’.11 In the context of meditation practice the equivalent term for ‘immerse’ would be ‘become absorbed’. What often struck me as I read through the memoir was Sangharakshita’s extraordinary ability to become easily and totally absorbed in whatever he was interested or involved in, be it meditating, delivering lectures, reflecting more generally on the Dharma, or reading poetry or listening to music. When a young woman invites him to a performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle, he sits in the train on the way back without uttering a word or glancing even once in her direction. She thinks he is angry with her for inviting him, whereas the truth is that he is still enthralled by the music he has just heard. Living in community with him many years later I experienced at first hand this aspect of Sangharakshita’s make-up. If he happened to be in an intensive writing phase he would come down to lunch still very much in the world he had been steeped in at his desk. It was almost as if he sat alone in the room, totally oblivious of everyone else; till one got used to it this could be quite disconcerting. Yet looking at it from his side, and in view of the intensity of his concentration, the sudden switching between worlds could surely be jarring. He remarks how difficult he could find it at the end of a lecture he has just given to come down from the exalted state of consciousness he has been dwelling in.12 This ability to become totally absorbed was an aspect of his exceptional mindfulness. I experienced many times the strength and continuity of his mindfulness, a quality that led quite naturally to concentration and absorption. ‘The mindful person’, says the Dhammapada, ‘absorbed in superconscious states, gains ample bliss’.13 In a letter he wrote not long after we met he told me he felt ‘most of the time quite ecstatic, with a sense of the heavens opening,’ so that when he spoke of the Spiral Path, I felt it was based on his own experience. In the account of his European travels in the later chapters of Moving Against the Stream we see this talent for absorption combined with an f o r e w o r d /
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impressive knowledge of Western art and culture, and a highly developed aesthetic sensibility. Sangharakshita revels in the wealth of cultural delights on offer. In Florence the architectural details of the numerous Renaissance palaces give him a ‘particularly keen thrill of aesthetic delight’.14 A week or two later, sitting on the upward slope of Apollo’s theatre at Delphi, he recalls how he first read Chapman’s Homer in his youth, ‘in a state bordering on ecstasy’.15 More generally speaking, this faculty for total immersion was key in helping him to achieve in his own inner life a level of integration between the religious and the aesthetic. This would eventually come to flower as one of the distinctive emphases of the Triratna Buddhist Community: the appreciation of beauty in nature and great art as a method of spiritual development.16 The last few chapters of the memoir centre on Sangharakshita’s friendship with Terry Delamare. At the end of the questions and answers that follow his lecture on Buddhism and the Problem of Death, a tall young man who had been sitting in the front row assiduously taking notes approaches to say that he has himself experienced the white light that Sangharakshita has been talking about in connection with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the core of the friendship that quickly develops between them is the kind of mutual responsiveness on the basis of a shared spiritual ideal that earlier in the book Sangharakshita has defined as the essence of Spiritual Community. This friendship, he writes, ‘was to have important consequences for the rest of my life and, through me, for the future of British Buddhism’.17 Terry had a keen intellect and the exchanges between them in their long and intense discussions on matters philosophical and spiritual provided a vital stimulus to the development of Sangharakshita’s thinking. They travel to India together for Sangharakshita’s farewell visit before his moving permanently to the West. But the friendship has a tragic undertone. Terry was severely depressed, a condition which Sangharakshita constantly did his best to alleviate, time and again gently talking his friend out of his darker moods. He once told me that he would spend hour after hour pouring energy into Terry, but to no lasting effect. As Terry’s own diary makes clear, his profound insight when he experienced the White Light had exposed the ‘fiction of time’, coupled with ‘the crippling effects that personality has upon a person’s true self.’18 Seeing another possible way to dispel the dark clouds obscuring the pure light of the mind, Sangharakshita introduces him to the sādhana of Vajrasattva, a Tantric xviii / f o r e w o r d
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method of purification, which they practised together daily for a period. But the gap between insight and personality proved to be too wide for Terry, and the clouds obscuring the Light he had twice experienced eventually led to his tragic death. Moving Against the Stream, together with 1970 – A Retrospect, is the story of a remarkable man who founded a new Buddhist movement and steered it through its formative years, ‘a unique figure’, as one of his early followers puts it ‘in the world of Buddhism – a man of undoubted and distinguished intellectual powers, of supreme efficiency and advanced spiritual awareness’.19 It provides many a foretaste of his fully fledged vision of the Dharma expounded in the many hundreds of thousands of words of the Complete Works. Sitting with Terry at a table in the open-air tea rooms at Kusinara in 1967, he watches a few hippies, ‘long-haired, emaciated, and half naked, and seemingly under the influence of drugs’. He thinks they do not look very happy, and though I could understand their rejection of conventional values, a rejection soon to become widespread among young people in the West, I also saw that because of their inability to replace those values by real ones they had lost their way and were simply drifting.20
Later that same year quite a few hippies started to drift down to his meditation classes in a tiny basement in Monmouth Street in the West End of London, the birthplace of the new movement. There he was able to offer them the highest value imaginable, the gift of the Dharma. Abhaya Brighton January 2019
f o r e w o r d /
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a note from the editor
When first setting out to prepare Sangharakshita’s memoirs for the Complete Works we had it in mind not to intrude on the flow of the text with any but the fewest notes. We received, however, a complaint: where were the explanatory notes that readers had come to expect from the Complete Works? In subsequent memoirs we have tried to make good this omission. There are cross references to earlier memoirs, and other works by Sangharakshita, for readers who want to find out more. There are explanations of cultural references – for Sangharakshita’s readers come from all parts of the globe; and there will be readers in the future who will not be familiar with what today is common knowledge. In the account of the tour of Italy and Greece told in chapters 36–9, Sangharakshita writes: Paintings were often without meaning for [Terry] because he was ignorant of the Bible stories or classical myths and legends on which they were based. Such ignorance was by no means unusual, and in years to come, when ‘progressive’ education policies had done their work, it would be widespread in Britain. Terry at least knew that he was cut off from his cultural heritage, and resented the fact. People in the future would hardly know there was a cultural heritage to be cut off from.
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note from the editor
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Imagining some readers may find themselves in a position similar to Terry’s, when paintings or sculptures are referred to, or mention is made of the great names of Renaissance Italy and Ancient Greece, I have given a few extra points of information hoping they will encourage such readers to enter further into that bright world of cultural heritage, the world of painting and sculpture especially, but also the worlds of religion, history, and philosophy. In compiling references to books read by Sangharakshita I have included a few words about their author, and often an indication of when the book was first published to give readers a sense of the diverse intellectual and literary world that was his. The context for the events related in this volume – mainly Britain of the 1960s and 1970 – is a world that differs fundamentally from the one we are in today – and will be in tomorrow. I have attempted to augment in some endnotes the information in the text that evokes the world in which Sangharakshita set up a new Buddhist movement – a world of anti-psychiatry, Honest to God, the Peanuts Group, and the like. In his work to bring the Dharma to the West, Sangharakshita gave many lectures, frequently mentioned in these pages. From early on they were recorded and can be accessed online at freebuddistaudio.com. Most are transcribed and will be included in Complete Works, especially in volumes 11 and 12. This is the seventh and, due to deteriorating eyesight, last volume of the Complete Works that I will edit. I would like to record my deep appreciation and gratitude to Vidyadevi. For several years we were co-editors, working together to get the project off the ground. She is willing – and able – to take it forward and oversee its completion, a task of Herculean proportions – and surely the merit gained will be likewise. Perhaps only those who have done the work themselves can give full recognition to the task. My thanks to Shantavira, our copyeditor par excellence, who has worked on almost all Sangharakshita’s books since the beginning and whose dedication, patience, and humour have enabled the project to come so far. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude Priyananda, Michelle, and the team at Windhorse Publications without whose care and dedication no publishing could have taken place; and my thanks to the volunteers who helped me personally in preparing the texts for publication. a n o t e f r o m t h e e d i t o r /
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During the course of the last year, on 30 October 2018, Sangharakshita died. He was 93. He had held in his hands eight of the volumes of his Complete Works, and knew a further four were well on their way to publication. May the bounty of his writings help many, many people to a deeper understanding and experience of the Dharma – the end to which his whole life was dedicated. Kalyanaprabha Great Malvern June 2019
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note from the editor
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moving against the stream
a n o t e f r o m t h e e d i t o r   / 
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Sangharakshita’s European Journey AUSTRIA FRANCE
St Gotthard Pass
Lugano Como Milan
Brescia
Vicenza
Verona
Padua
Venice
Ravenna
Florence
ITALY
Rome
Naples Sorrento Capri
o
ALGERIA
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25o
Pompeii Salerno Ravello
5oo miles
TUNISIA
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HUNGARY
RUMANIA
YUGOSLAVIA
BULGARIA
Brindisi
ALBANIA
GREECE Igoumenitsa
Dodona
TURKEY
Arta Naupactus Missolonghi
Delphi Corinth Mycenae
Olympia
Tripoli Mistra
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Eleusis Athens
Cape Sounion Epidaurus Tiryns Argos
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1 a cool reception
Had I been keeping a diary at the time, my entry for the day would probably have read something like this: ‘Wednesday 12 August 1964. Arrived Heathrow 2.00 p.m. local time. Raining. Met by Ananda Bodhi and Mrs Rauf and driven to the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. On the way passed through St John’s Wood. Sun came out. Little front gardens full of flowers.’ Indeed I do not remember much more than that, even though I was returning to England after an absence of twenty years. I have no recollection of the flight from India, nor am I sure whether I boarded the plane at Bombay or Calcutta, though I think it was at Calcutta and I think I was seen off by a small group of friends and well-wishers.21 I do, however, remember that there was a stopover in Paris and that while stretching my legs in the brilliantly lit concourse I saw standing not many yards away two tall, elegant young women in identical sky blue uniforms and identical little sky blue hats. They were air hostesses, and they were engaged in conversation. As I watched, I saw first one man, then another, approach them with what was evidently a polite request for information or direction. To my astonishment, on each occasion the two haughty beauties not only failed to respond to him but carried on with their conversation as if totally unaware of his presence, so that after vainly repeating his question he was obliged to retreat nonplussed by their behaviour. Indian women in similar circumstances would never have behaved like that. What had happened while I was away? Had a c o o l r e c e p t i o n /
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European women become dehumanized? Certainly the two air hostesses, with their angular forms and studied gestures, were more like dummies worked by wires than creatures of flesh and blood. The incident must have made an impression on me, for even now, thirty-three years later, in my mind’s eye I can see the elegant, blue-clad figures standing there talking and see the way in which they treated the travellers who approached them. Perhaps it made such a strong impression on me because it gave me my first experience of Europe for twenty years and was a concrete reminder of the fact that Europe was not Asia and that the England of 1964, besides being very different from India, would be socially and culturally a different place from the England of 1944. At Heathrow the sky was overcast and it was raining slightly. It was also strangely quiet, and there seemed to be hardly anyone about. Having been out of the country for twenty years, I was half expecting that the immigration officer would want to know where I had been all that time, and what I had been doing, but he returned my passport without a word and I was through. I was now officially back in the United Kingdom and I could see, waiting behind the glass doors, the figures of the tall, yellow-robed Western monk and the much shorter, white-haired Western laywoman who had come to meet me. In the car there was no conversation that I can remember, though Ananda Bodhi must have asked me what the flight had been like. In fact I was aware of a feeling of constraint between us. I therefore spent much of the journey looking out of the window. We were now making our way through a part of London that was terra incognita to me (I had never been further north than Regent’s Park), and as at Heathrow a strange quiet prevailed. Very few people were on the streets, and there was little traffic. By the time we reached St John’s Wood (a name that was familiar to me from correspondence with Christmas Humphreys, who lived there) the sun had come out from behind the clouds and was shining on the slate roofs and neat little front gardens with their roses, delphiniums, and antirrhinums. The sight of those colourful little front gardens remains my most vivid memory of the whole journey. I have no recollection of arriving at the Vihara, or of the people who must have come to see me on that and the following day. I do, however, remember having breakfast in the basement next morning with Ananda Bodhi and the three novices. There was a choice 6 / MO V IN G
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of four or five different hot drinks, and at the centre of the table, besides jam, marmalade, and honey, there were various spreads quite new to me. In my own monastery in Kalimpong we drank only tea, and jam had been seen there on only one occasion when, plums being unusually cheap that year, we had made a couple of dozen jars of it. As I was going upstairs to my room after the meal I heard the oldest of the novices ordering supplies on the phone. ‘You’ve only two kinds of salmon?’ he was saying. ‘Then send the more expensive kind.’ Three days later I received an unexpected message from Ananda Bodhi, who was away visiting one of the provincial Buddhist groups. Would I give the Sunday lecture that afternoon, as he would not be back at the Vihara in time to give it himself? It was then nearly four-thirty, and the lecture was due to start at five. Though rather taken aback by the shortness of the notice, I had no objection to giving the lecture. Indeed I was glad to do so, though on second thoughts I decided not to give a lecture but to hold a question-and-answer meeting instead, as this would give me an opportunity of getting to know a cross-section of the Vihara’s supporters and finding out how much – or how little – they knew about Buddhism. There were twelve or fourteen people in the meeting room, of various ages, and since nobody was there to introduce me I had to introduce myself. At first the questions were fairly routine, but then a young man suddenly demanded, ‘Why have you come to England?’ His tone was belligerent, even challenging, as if my presence was unexpected, even unwelcome, and standing in need of explanation. This gave me the opening I needed, and I therefore replied at some length, giving an account of my life and work in India, emphasizing that I appreciated all schools of Buddhism, and making it clear that I had come principally in order to bring British Buddhists together. My frankness seemed to give general satisfaction, and when the meeting ended there was a more relaxed and friendly atmosphere in the room than there had been at the beginning. My work in the West had begun.
a c o o l r e c e p t i o n /
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