Vipassi - Crisis or Critical Moment?

This article was first published in the WBO’s ‘Articles Shabda’ in May 2003. It was written shortly after Yashomitra’s ‘letter’ was published, also in Shabda, and contains Vipassi’s reminiscences of his early meetings with Sangharakshita, plus his reflections on those times and on the more general question of sexual ethics, especially between teacher and disciple.

Vipassi is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.

Polonius: My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.
Hamlet: God's bodkin, man, much better. Use every man according to his desert, and who will ’scape whipping?

Writing these reflections, and revising them, sometimes in the light of comments, comments that have reminded me of the need for friends, has been a salutary experience, since the demands of justice apply as much to writing as elsewhere, and I have realised, once again realised, that I am not immune to the rush to impetuous judgment. When we read Yashomitra's words, we no doubt imagine the scene or scenes, but imagination too must be just, just and faithful to the known characters of those involved: imagination here cannot be immediate, but has instead to be reflective, and we have to pass between them, reaction and imagination, in a measured, reflective way, so that we can see how reaction can drive and determine imagination, and imagination therefore mirror reaction-but imaginative attention to the minute particulars can, by contrast, change or qualify the nature of our reactions. I have come to the conclusion that we are dealing here with morally regrettable, but not wicked, conduct, conduct that nevertheless has had painful and harmful consequences, sufficient for anyone to have reason to be angry at the taking of the not given, even if, as it seems to me here, there was culpable unawareness that the taken was not given. On the other hand, though it may not be just to call the conduct wicked, the behaviour we are considering remains inexcusable and must cause us to adjust our perception of those involved. However, the need for that adjustment is in part a product of a collective illusion from which we need to withdraw. And I wonder how much the pain of that adjustment is reflected in the pain and distress that some of us have been feeling.

Many of us are capable of the behaviour that Yashomitra has described, and if, as Hamlet said, we were used according to our deserts-who would 'scape whipping? But these adjustments will be liberating, and will allow us to make progress to the necessary next stage of the Order's development. I cannot see anything new in this.

I came to know the FWBO in the mid-seventies in Norwich when I was thirty. I still remember clearly from those early days the enthusiasm with which the young and wealthy Vajrakumara invited me to come with him to look over Lesingham House in the village of Surlingham, a house he proposed to buy because it seemed an ideal place for a major centre for the movement.

We walked around the grounds and through the house and outbuildings, and it looked impressive, full of potential as a retreat centre. It was a few weeks later that I first met Sangharakshita, and it was there that I met him. He would have been about fifty. I was living in a terraced house in Norwich at the time, and had already met a fair number of Order Members as they passed through and stayed over.

I met Bhante with some considerable trepidation, mostly, I think, because of the awe in which he was regarded by his disciples, an attitude that was overwhelmingly present in everything they said about him, in the way they talked about him to each other in my presence, in the occasional throwaway remarks hinting at personal intimacy. The adulation and projection were massive. People breathed in and spoke Bhante's every word, and spoke no other, they pored over every syllable, every remark, every action. It was difficult not to believe that I was about to meet a living god, and I struggled between my own rational curiosity about what sort of man he really was, and the trepidation produced by the projections of others, mostly young men in their twenties, some of whom seemed to live in an homoerotic world impatient of women. It dawned on me fairly soon that this impatience was actively encouraged by Bhante, and I construed it as a means to keep control of a youthful male vigour he wanted to be dedicated to the setting up of Centres across the country and around the world. My first visit to the Sukhavati 'building-site' showed me that enormous energy in action. But the culture that grew up around this perceived necessity was not a comfortable one for women, perhaps especially older women: the spiritual testosterone could be over-heated and claustrophobic. On the other hand, there was no doubt in my mind that these people were onto something important.

Perhaps it was an unavoidable phase, I thought, and the culture would change over time, it was certainly not going to be a permanent condition of the Order. I recall that I compared the situation in my own mind to that of the American Frontier. After the infrastructure was in place, maybe civilisation would enter in, but there was not much use for that just yet. However, I also recall that when I first reported in to Shabda in early 1989, thirteen years later, I wondered aloud about the concept of a men's wing and a women's wing of the movement: so where was the body? I asked. I'm not persuaded that this was a foolish question.

There was much talk in the old days about women getting in touch with their masculine side and men with their feminine, of withdrawing from projections and traditional roles, all good sense up to a point, but: it avoided, evaded, indeed, the political issue of the real relations between males and females, which can only be transformed by contact, negotiation and hard work, not by separate development and a healthy relation to one's anima or animus, which, of course, is not to say that there is no role for single-sex activities, or communities. I still think that this political issue between men and women needs to be addressed.

But isn't this early complex reality-a sense of something important, the dominance of young men impatient of women and, in the middle, the Janus figure of a powerful guru-somehow at the heart of what confronts us now? We are forced to sift between these complex phenomena to discover what was gold and what was dross, what we should retain and what reject, and we shall surely find that the dross and the gold cannot easily be separated. Indeed this is just what has now been brought home to us in a telling and a timely way as we revisit our collective past.

I was to stay over for a couple of nights and have supper with Bhante the next evening, followed by a chat. I recall Vajrakumara sitting silently listening to our conversation, which was mostly about Kant and Spinoza. He seemed relaxed and happy, and had been kind, and sensitive to my uneasiness. My anxiety at the prospect of meeting Sangharakshita was increased by my first, chance, encounter with him. As Vajrakumara was showing me the new shrine room, then upstairs, Bhante was emerging. Vajrakumara introduced me, and I received a cool, limp handshake and off he went, without a word and without eye contact. Rather than thinking that this was merely rude and off-hand, it rather seemed a kind of teaching, and enhanced my sense of his greatness and the difficulty of my forthcoming encounter. In any event, when I did meet him I found him kind, friendly and interesting, with a sharp and encyclopaedic mind. But one part of me remained astonished at any human characteristics, such as the suggestion that maybe we should have another cup of tea. For years I remained uneasy about these oscillations in my perceptions and those of others, between this man, the imperfect, mortal being, and the projected Bodhisattva figure who walked on water. My greatest discomfort in the Order was always that moment when Bhante walked into a meeting and there was a profound hush followed by the movement of people standing up to pay their respects. And then the enormous and prolonged applause. It did not help that I had been reading Solzhenitsyn. I asked myself whether I had made a mistake. But the rudeness and the kindness, is this not also an image of what we are presently confronted by, the recognition in miniature of the dual nature that afflicts us all? This is what we have to deal with and
move on, in Bhante, and in ourselves.

That he was sexually active was intimated to me before I met him, I think, though it may have been after, I cannot now recall. Many people must be familiar with this procedure, this staging post ('when should I tell him/her about Bhante?'). It was done in my case in the form of a subtle challenge, though it was clearly also a hurdle to be crossed by Order members initiating new people into the movement. Obviously it was okay to feel okay about it and a kind of failure not to. I did feel okay about it, so that was okay, a test had been passed. On the other hand, I was curious that a bhikkhu should not be celibate, or a man of advanced spirituality not naturally chaste, as a Buddha was meant to be (so he's not a Buddha, then, I thought). But I found it easy enough to accept his sexual activity without disapproval at a time when everything was in the melting-pot and we were all involved in what John Stuart Mill called 'experiments in living'. Yashomitra was surely right, though, to view with a sceptical eye those remarks in the well-known interview in Golden Drum about 'experimenting with sex'. It was clearly more than an experiment, more a long-term research project with a team of research assistants. Bhante mangled the language by referring to it all as an 'experiment'. I happen to know that he was not entirely happy with what he had said in the interview, and I regret that I didn't ask him what he had in mind when he expressed his dissatisfaction. It occurs to me now, as I look back, that in a way this was one of his earliest public relations exercises about a sensitive issue, and in effect it was a cautious first admission in public of something that was widely known in private, and was never a secret.

That Bhante was gay and had sexual relationships with some of his companions and other volunteers did not seem problematic to me, and it was, I think, the driving force behind something very positive about the movement that contrasted vividly with the bigotry and discomfort of the Christian Churches: homosexuality was not a moral issue. The moral issues that arose in relation to sexual life were issues about the nature of the relationship between sexual partners and had to do with coercion, power, cruelty, etc. The sexual promiscuity that I discovered within the Order was also okay by me, as was the idea of homosexual experiment, within the limits, though, surely, of prior ethical commitments to others.

But surely, now, we already have to pause to reflect. Yashomitra's article gives us an insight into the darker side of the realities that lay behind these official thoughts, just as Jnanavira's gives us insight into how liberating it could also be, as well as how devastating in a different way. The sexual history of Padmaloka still remains to be written, and I for one am in no position to identify who was where when, and during what period it became notorious as a hotbed of sexual activity and when it cooled down. My own view is that sexual activity should be strictly off the menu during retreats, especially Going for Refuge retreats, and particularly there should be no sexual activity between aspirant order members and those who are involved in the decision process at Padmaloka. I probably don't need to say this, but I say it just in case, even though, as I recall, chastity on retreat was always strongly advised. My real point, obviously, is not about sex but about the power relations that surround it.

But let us get back to the way in which morality enters into our sexual life. Yashomitra's article did not merely provide us with an example of a negative experience of the sexual culture of Padmaloka. He has revealed something worse than that. First, the Order member. That a seventeen-year-old youth should arrive at a Buddhist Retreat Centre and . I pause because the nature of the situation needs to be properly reflected in the description: was he the unwilling victim of a sexual assault by an Order member? . I cannot believe that it was this: unwilling, yes, but an unwillingness he was unable to express . assault implies the use of force to overcome resistance; . was he at the receiving end of a rough, peremptory seduction expectant of quick compliance, accepting of vigorous rejection? That seems the most likely. Come on, it's only fun, relax and enjoy it . an attitude our estimate of whose nature would change with the degree of protest and struggle, including inner protest. But this is a youth of seventeen who has just arrived at a Buddhist Retreat Centre, full of idealism, paralysed by something entirely unexpected, a paralysis and, perhaps, an inner horror, that remained .unnoticed. To that extent it was a coercive act even if the coercion was undiscerned. When Yashomitra tells us that the said Order member, presumably as a result of pressure from Bhante, apologised, he did so, apparently, 'smilingly' and then propositioned him.

This is revealing, and probably the key to all this; it is as though this Order member's cheerful perception of the situation was that the original act had been merely bad manners, and he was apologising because he ought to have asked first. He couldn't quite take it seriously as an issue.

Such an attitude tends to result in formal rather than contrite apologies. They start with an 'if' clause: 'if I have done anything to hurt you, then I apologise most sincerely', where the 'if' clause reveals that the apologiser does not believe the content of the antecedent.

What is revealing here is precisely a failure of empathy and awareness, an absence that causes harm, a failure of that imaginative identification with the other that is supposed to be developed by metta bhavana. Actually I think there is a resident danger associated with this excellent practice, viz. that it may develop in a high degree a kind of impersonal friendliness, often quite strong and satisfying, which can nevertheless form a barrier to human contact and can co-exist with insensitivity to the reality of the other person.

When I am at the receiving end of metta I prefer it to be directed to my own acknowledged self, not to me as a generalised other. In a promiscuous culture of consenting adults, where one knows in advance that prospective partners have already consented by their presence in the club or bar or sauna or steam baths, then maybe it is okay not to have asked first. I am willing to believe that this Order member really didn't have a clue about the coercion implicit in the situation and the real impact on the youth. They did not register, and if they had I can imagine nothing but genuine contrition. But don't for a moment imagine that this is a kind of exculpation. The fault lies first in the unawareness, and then in the unperceived harm. Why might he not have had a clue? Because he projected his own comfort about his own sexuality on to someone else without that imaginative identification or empathy that might have told him that this was wrong, as though since it was 'only sex' for him it must or ought to be 'only sex' for anyone else, or could easily be made so by manly up-front preliminaries; -and wrong not because it offended against the canons of 'conventional morality', but precisely because it caused harm. A culture of casual sex can dull the sense of difference, can dull discernment and cause casualties. This is also relevant to Jnanavira's remarks about his falling in love at Padmaloka, and his later suicidal feelings: in reality sex is rarely 'only sex'.

This is not, to my mind, an issue of sexual orientation or preference; it is an issue about a person's relation to their own emerging sexuality per se and the harm that can be done to that person. Seventeen-year-olds are mostly vulnerable in the areas of their emotional and sexual lives. Some of us have taught them or been their parents. They are more than objects of desire, but have an inner life not necessarily written clearly on their bodies. One needs to be able to make judgments about where people stand in relation to their sexuality and emotional growth. The vigorous exponent of Greek love, the ardent erastes, has to be sensitive to the needs of their eromenos, and one form of this sensitivity involves a self-restraint that comes from informed judgment about what is appropriate to this particular person, and what not. But it is easy not to notice the reality of the human being in front of you if you are
in the grip of a doctrine or a theory or even an ideal that is convenient to the state of desire that also has you in its grip. I know from my own experience how easily one can be deluded into the assumption that others will share one's attitudes, or will soon. In any event, the youth did not consent, and the absence of consent was not noticed, or regarded as negligible and of little consequence.

Eighteen months later or so, it turns out, the young man, now nineteen, and a consenting adult, finds himself assigned to Bhante's room, a room in which there is only a double bed, with Bhante already in it: -found himself cornered by the situation one might want to say. Some people would find Subhuti's word 'uncondonable' a little weak in this context, since they are angry and upset, feeling not only disappointed but also in some way betrayed and deceived.

However, even these reactions need to be subjected to critical review, as part of that withdrawal from a collective illusion I have already mentioned. An illusion, by the way, is a motivated belief. The belief could be true, but the reasons for holding it are to do with psychology rather than rational grounds, we want it to be true but are not entitled to it even if it turns out after all to be true. It is our psychology we have to deal with here.

In my first draft of these reflections I assumed that there must have been collusion on the part of others. On the basis of what people have since said I no longer think this. On weekend retreats and Order events the community had to double up because of the shortage of space, and, it appears, individuals, including Bhante, would express a preference about who they would like to share with them. It seems, then, that Bhante made sexual advances to some of those who were assigned to his room. What is one to think of this? The situation is no different from the case of the Order member. It is a matter of a man's judgment and discernment. Some would surely feel entirely relaxed and unthreatened, maybe say thanks, or thanks but no thanks, and regret the absence of a spare mattress as the floor beckoned. But these would be sexually experienced people, on the whole, capable of making their wishes clear. Different people will offer different reports about what happened in their own case, and it seems clear that some at least felt able to refuse, and that some were willing enough to comply.

But if there was no collusion about providing Bhante with suitable partners, I cannot believe that word did not come out on occasion about his habit of making advances, that there were no knowing looks, eventually, about who was in and who was out. But that there was real distress and unacknowledged coercion-I am sure no one was aware of this, including, I think, Bhante: but again, on his part, this is not an exculpation, it marks a failure of discernment and judgment, not just about the person concerned, but about the structure of the situation. As I said at the beginning of this, Bhante was unfailingly kind and considerate in his dealings, as everyone testifies. So it is hard to imagine him unkind or difficult even if his advances were rejected. My main impression had been that his young partners were all sufficiently adult to say no if they wanted to, and that Bhante was able to live with such rejection/refusal without hard feelings. However, how many young men went along with him because they felt unable to refuse we do not yet know, though even here this would be less damaging to some than to others, and this, I suppose, is the heart of the matter that is troubling so many people. You are, to put it mildly, put on the spot if, in your late teens, you are sent off to share a room with a formidable man in early middle age, one universally regarded with huge respect, who pats the bed to indicate where you are to sleep. I can imagine that Bhante would have expected and accepted either consent or refusal, but could not recognise what we might call false consent, but he had put himself and others, structurally, into a situation where precisely this might arise.

You might say that Yashomitra was in a position to say no. He seems himself to half believe that this is so. But he was probably not psychologically in a position to say no, and so what he does is passively to accept the role assigned to him, a familiar enough unconscious defensive strategy of 'false consent'. Then, later, he is flattered, thinks maybe he will become 'Bhante's companion', and so on and so forth. The real felt rejection/refusal may take years to emerge. In a sense he is 'in bad faith' in that role, in the Sartrean sense of that term, though, unlike Sartre, I would not think it appropriate to blame someone who in such a situation acted inauthentically, precisely because of the paralysing imbalance of the power relation. One of the tests of the coercion or the non-consent is the feeling after the event of being soiled or dirty or used, and again, this has nothing to do with orientation or preference.

Famously, now, Vajrakumara reported such feelings when he reflected on his time with Bhante, even though it is difficult to make a case that he was 'abused'. He had always seemed contented enough. But his case is worth reflecting on too. I suspect that what happened to him was 'engulfment', a passionate identification with the goals and ends of another, older person, that one only very slowly comes to see were never one's own goals or ends. This realisation usually ends in anger and hostility. This too is something I know about all too well. In the enthusiasm of one's own ideals one fails to see that deep down they are not shared or assented to by a younger lover who seems so readily, even eagerly, to accept them. It happens all the time and reveals our moral blindness.

The reason that people believe that Bhante behaved disgracefully with Yashomitra is that it appears that he ignored or did not comprehend the real nature of the situation, the advantage he was taking, the difficulty that some young men would have with what was happening, the syndrome of passive compliance, the difference in age and experience. Was he incurious about their real attitude, was he alert to it? I cannot imagine that he didn't care, but I can imagine that he couldn't see. It was a human failure of judgment that discerned neither coercion nor harm. We do not know how many times this kind of thing occurred, perhaps only once or twice, and the point is not the sex but the structural coercion and the failure to discern the reality of the other. Why am I writing this? In part because I was in private challenged by an Order member who wanted to know what I thought, and also because I saw that people were talking about a crisis. I wanted to be clear in my own mind about what I did think, which clarity often only comes when you start to try to articulate. Am I criticising fellow Order members? Well yes, but not from a position of moral superiority, I assure you, but the criticism is also of the limitations and defects of particular cultural attitudes, and I do so only for the sake of contributing to a discussion of where we now stand, about which my conclusion is simply that we stand more or less where we should be standing at this point in our history, acknowledging human failure in the light of our ideals, ready to take care to avoid these things in the future, ready not to conceal or retreat into hypocrisy, adult in other words, no better than we should be, but striving nonetheless.

In those days Bhante was at the height of his ascendancy, an ascendancy which had, as one of its consequences, an extreme isolation. Maybe, though, his sexual experience had been formed in a culture of sexual freedom which made it all too easy to overlook the absence of consent, too easy to confuse the failure of moral insight with a virtuous contempt of conventional morality.

Isolated and surely also insulated, without the gift to see himself, not just as others might see him, but as they should: could he not see how dubious his conduct would appear? But though there was no collusion or 'procurement' this easy sexual culture was surely transmitted and reinforced elsewhere, and surely fed that less subtly coercive environment of Croydon. Maybe the shock of Croydon was a shock not merely about a misunderstanding of his own teaching, but the shock of self-insight. But because Bhante was the guru it was difficult for many people to see him as a man of flesh and blood and imperfect judgment: everything he did was a skilful means, must be a skilful means. This was a collective illusion from which many of us have still to be weaned. Perhaps Bhante himself was trying to tell us and himself as much when he eventually rejected the title of guru, when he made it clear to those that knew he was sexually active that there was a quantum of craving in the sexual act, and reflected publicly on his sense of personal unworthiness.

The talk is of crisis, but that is surely too strong. The truth is that we are at a critical moment, which is to say, a moment at which the possibility of important change announces itself. What has to be changed is our view of ourselves and our view of Bhante. Bhante is a human being as we are human beings, he is capable, as we are, of moral failure and lack of insight. But on the other hand he is not, surely, to be defined entirely in terms of the troubling truth that has now been uncovered; we have to recall the whole picture, see him in the round, see him, indeed, justly, so that if we are inclined to condemn and reject him, then we should remember his good qualities, and if we are inclined to adulation and too much deference, we should recall what is less wholesome. For years he patiently taught the dharma and we saw more of its embodiment in him than was there, even though much was there, but that was
a matter of our illusion. One test of the truth of the dharma is to be found in the life of its exponent: but there are degrees of perfection, and degrees of imperfection, and we have to judge whether the dharma has saving power by seeing it in its effects, ultimately within ourselves and those we know whom we have seen to change. We have to withdraw our projections yet again, to recognise that the process of following the dharma is in our own hands, as it always was, and that we need friends, need undeluded friendships that help us overcome our delusions and our illusions. The image of perfection beckons, sometimes it is close and sometimes distant, but it will only ever be imperfectly realised in our lives, and we must realise what we can, and move on. Sometimes we superimpose the image of the enlightened one onto those whose realisation of the truth is more advanced than our own, and we should not do so. We are pilgrims, always almost running out of rations in our scrip, all the old triumphalism has to be discarded as unnecessary baggage, we have to learn what we can from whomever we can.

Our fidelity and our loyalty are not to Bhante, but to the truth, and to Bhante's vision to the extent that it seems to us to reflect that truth. 'My country right or wrong' was once thought to reflect an unexamined jingoism until someone suggested that it has the same form as 'my mother drunk or sober'. We owe Bhante a great deal, what we owe him is the mediation of the teachings of Buddhism, what we owe him in particular now is care in his old age, and gratitude or metta, something we may all hope to have despite our faults, because it is not deflected away by the presence of faults, but generously takes the form of compassion, and, since none of us if treated according to our deserts will scape whipping, let us hope that we shall also be the recipients of someone's metta. We go into the world no better than we should be, but we try to change, we are a human institution and our task is to strive to embody, without concealment or hypocrisy, the ideals we all share: so what is different?

My impression is that Bhante was not often challenged and rarely challenged effectively. The force of his personality and the comparative strength of his intellect meant that he rarely encountered peers, and was therefore forced to keep his own counsel when he should have consulted others, or found others to consult. To some extent he lived in his own world, to some extent a world of superior knowledge, and residence in such worlds can corrupt us or make us complacent without our even noticing.

I suppose that one has to say that a similar lonely failure of judgment attended Bhante's decision to return to India as a bhikkhu and in robes. This was a major strategic decision which had as it turns out major consequences which, if we are calculating in a certain way, might need to be balanced against the consequences of returning in lay dress.

Bhante faced a real dilemma here, and many of us were critical, many of us accepting, many of us just wondered, and none of us, clearly, had any role in the decision process. Again he could have sought out peers: these are matters of judgment, moral and political, and the grounds of such judgments are available to more than those of advanced spirituality, they are human issues. But again his ascendancy probably made it hard for him to consult others.

This raises a more general issue for the post-Bhante Order, but it is one that has already been dealt with. The Order cannot in the future be formed by autocratic decision-making, even if this was unavoidable in its creation and its early days. I think this is a point that hardly needs to be made, and it does not need to be made thanks in large part to Bhante's own foresight, and none of the criticisms made above can detract from Bhante's brilliant strategic thinking about the formation and the future of the Order. What we have to do now is acknowledge Bhante's frailties as well as his egregious virtues. We have to accept them without illusion as part of a mature assessment of what we owe him despite his frailties, and we have to see where those frailties have entered his teaching, if indeed they have. Opinions will differ about this, but these opinions need to be aired and resolved.

It may be special pleading on my part as an academic, and it is hardly central to our current concerns, but I think about his sustained and adverse criticism of the universities, and wonder about the alienation of some of those who went into higher and graduate education. Surely some of his concerns were well founded, but what we need is dialogue and critique, not ex cathedra rejection of contemporary thinking. Maybe that dialogue is for the future, as a new generation of Western Buddhists seeks to relate the current state of their western culture to their Buddhism, a process that will have to be taken up again with every revolution of thought, and this will require creative thinking, not fundamentalist opposition frozen in time. Sometimes this will involve the tradition of the university as an essential independent resource: when creative thinking is most needed it is most in need of protection from the inherent conservatism of hierarchies. We shall in the future stand in need of turbulent scholars and thinkers responding to, even helping to form shifts in the Zeitgeist.

But as the Order progresses it must also reflect upon and learn from its own history, and it is not finally constrained or determined or judged by this, but by how it responds to it and transforms itself, by how it seeks to renew itself and address difficulties. Indeed the Order must surely engage in such acts of renewal and reflection at regular intervals, it must constantly scrutinise and re-examine its own premises and the sources of those premises. A tradition develops to the extent only that it changes and overcomes itself. Otherwise it ossifies, becomes a merely traditional repository of someone's teachings. I have been heartened by the extent and scope of the public criticism in the movement of Subhuti's little book on angels. This is not to state a position here, but to point out that it is healthy that there can be vigorous controversy publicly aired, without a breakdown of communication or metta. Let us hope that in the future we shall continue to have vigorous but irenic debate. I also hope that in the future, if a book of that kind has the imprimatur of the Order through Windhorse, that Windhorse will see fit to publish any suitably irenic reply that might be forthcoming. We have not always been fortunate in our self-presentation, and it is an essential part of our public self-reflection that we consider with critical care all aspects of the tradition that has been passed to us by our teacher. Bhante once talked of handing over various responsibilities that previously and perforce he had carried out himself. He had in mind not just his own role as president and preceptor, but also as scholar. I must say that at the time of these announcements I felt some unease because what was never made clear was that there was also an intellectual role that also had to be taken over, and I was reflecting about the extent of the creative intellectual powers of the current College. But an intellectual role, the place of the intellectuals, has also to be considered as we reflect on the future. This is not something negligible. Bhante's conception of the Dharma and the place of the Order is an intellectual as well as a spiritual achievement. But intellectual achievements are also impermanent and need to be superseded when reasons for change become apparent, if indeed they do. There will always be an issue of how to articulate Buddhist teaching. Many will already be acutely aware that those who have become scholars and thinkers within the movement have had a prickly, not to say alienated and semi-detached relation to the Order. But there are two sides to such alienation, and it is one of the many things that must be resolved in the future. I am myself confident about this future, as an Order member, despite my current excessively 'outlying' status. Despite some writings from a less mature period, that many of us have questioned, I find that Subhuti's frankness and openness, his shrewd executive intelligence, his eloquence and his readiness to take on many burdens, inspire me with the hope that the Order will be led well in the future. We are not Perfecti or Illuminati, we need to guard against excessive adulation. We have seen it with Bhante, others report that younger members of the Order have a similar view of senior Order members, projecting their illusions, what they want to be true, not what is. My impression is that the latter have largely resisted the temptation to take advantage of this, flattering though it is: indeed I have been struck by the personal humility of some of them, though that too can become a kind of style. However, we still live too much in an enclosed and somewhat solipsistic world, and this makes it difficult to make comparative judgments of a kind that might throw light on our own conduct. A humbler, less triumphalist future awaits us even now. And I personally venerate my teacher, a great but flawed human being, but all greatness is flawed and a teacher is such only to the extent that they have something to teach. Bhante has had much to teach, and though he was a wounded surgeon he was also a spiritual friend who plied the steel.