Akasarajafirst published in 'Articles Shabda', May 2004
This account has been written as a response to the on-going discussions in the Order surrounding Windhorse. I have seen how easy it is to have strong opinions about such an institution, and it sometimes seems that the strength of the views held can be in inverse proportion to the amount of personal experience of the institution itself! I have considerable personal experience of "the Windhorse way" and hope to provide a reasonably balanced account of that experience. I have returned to this article several months after writing and have been tempted to edit it more rigorously, but have decided by and large to let it stand because it still fairly well conveys the flavour of my experience, even if parts of it are speculative or informed by emotional responses rather than detailed investigation of facts. I hope my friends at Windhorse will forgive any statements or inferences that are not in accordance with their experience.
Windhorse remains a very central FWBO institution. Its development mirrors that of the FWBO as a whole, which makes consideration of its history especially relevant as we try to understand where we have come from in the light of where we are now. Windhorse is controversial because it still derives its ethos from ideas and emphases of Urgyen Sangharakshita which have themselves increasingly been called into question in recent times: the New Society ; semi-monasticism; the heroic ideal; the elevation of single-sex "spiritual friendships" above family life. In addition, Windhorse has in recent times come in for criticism for reasons which are not directly attributable to Sangharakshita, although the criticisms may be understood in the light of his teachings on spiritual hierarchy: poor team management with people finding themselves in unsuitable posts by dint of "spiritual status"; a rigidly top-down approach to decision-making with limited transparency; an inflexible and unimaginative approach to the needs of individuals when those needs have financial implications for the business, to name a few. It has been said to be an organisation in which "yes-men" succeed to positions of authority, and mavericks are ostracised; where criticisms of management are stifled, and an atmosphere of superficially positive group behaviour is encouraged. It is perceived as a dinosaur, a backwater of old FWBO cultish practices. This article is an attempt by one whose life has been intimately bound up with Windhorse for over seven years to give a personal perspective on these criticisms and perceptions; one who himself has long had an ambiguous response to "the Windhorse way", and who, whilst continuing to work in the business, now stands to some extent outside its core institutions. It is an episodic, rather than an exhaustive, commentary on my time at Windhorse, because my memory of my history is characterised by episodes that stand out for various reasons and, I hope, illustrate the points I am trying to make.
I first came to Windhorse in the summer of 1996, fresh from a successful two-year stint in Germany as a teacher of English. I already knew the FWBO, having come across it in Cambridge in 1993 prior to leaving for Essen and continued to deepen my engagement during my time in Germany. Those three years had been a formative time for me, and I was returning to the UK having requested ordination into the WBO at the end of the previous year. The FWBO' s approach to friendship had above all helped to open my eyes to what was possible, and I found the prospect of trying out Windhorse an intriguing one, although I had very little idea of what that would entail. I didn't even know what Windhorse sold until after helping to unload my first container - did those boxes contain microwave ovens or TV sets? Beyond Mahasukha I had no idea who ran the place; it may have been weeks or even months before I caught sight of Vajraketu for the first time. Nonetheless, I loved what we were doing: the sheer physical challenge of unloading a 40 foot container of heavy boxes in high summer without any of the newfangled conveyor belts or other labour-saving gadgets they now have, the camaraderie in the team, the healthy vegan lunches. I tolerated the rituals; although they never particularly spoke to me, I could see how important they were to the mythic identity of the warehouse. I enjoyed with astonishment the spontaneous wrestling matches between senior and responsible Order members.
I particularly relished something which has been a vital part of my Windhorse life ever since: carving out a niche for myself with the freedom to do things the way that I wanted. This freedom to do my own thing has characterised pretty much my whole time at Windhorse, which is one area in which my experience radically diverges from the perception of the place as rigidly hierarchical. Mahasukha, who was a wonderful team leader, encouraged me in this. He also had the ability to exhort and inspire and was the first person to open my eyes to the important place of aesthetics in the warehouse. "You can read them" I blustered in defence of my product code labels. "Well, yes, you can read them" he conceded, " but they look dreadful." He was right, and I was grateful.
I was also grateful to Satyaloka, at that time the director in charge of personnel. We lived in the same community, and I was taken with this well-built and good-looking man. I was grateful as a result of two encounters that we had. In the first encounter, he took me into his office and more-or-less told me to stop smoking if I wanted to carry on working for Windhorse. I did want to, so I stopped. This might look like an example of outrageous control freakery; maybe it was, but it had the desired outcome, and I didn't mind in the slightest. The second encounter was after a series of instances of poor communication in which I managed to upset various people through appearing at best condescending and at worst downright sarcastic, all without meaning it or even being aware. Satyaloka took me for a drive and gave it to me directly, but with what I considered to be great kindness. It is horrible to receive criticism, especially of something of which you are unaware, but I felt no need to be defensive and allowed myself to learn a very valuable lesson about something I was doing that was hurting others. Without this knowledge I couldn't have changed. I respected Satyaloka for his ability to be direct without being hurtful, at least in my case.
I loved everything about the place for those first few months. I enjoyed the regularity of the lifestyle with its bells and gongs. I enjoyed not having to worry about food or bills. I enjoyed the presence of Satyaloka and Lalitavajra in the community. I had my own room - relatively uncommon in those days - so wasn't exposed to the discomfort of sharing a room that wasn't designed to be shared with a complete stranger, which was how it worked at that time. The community was bursting at the seams - there were 13 of us in a house that comfortably accommodates no more than 10 - and was fed from a tiny and dirty kitchen that had previously been first the office of Dharmachakra Tapes and then that of the Chairman of the Buddhist centre. Even then it seemed odd that sharing was the assumed norm for the men, whereas most of the women wouldn't have dreamed of it. The filling of community places was done by diktat, and the community changed frequently, which meant that establishing a settled line up in which people could get to know one another properly over a long period of time was impossible. I think no. 19 Newmarket Road had about 30 inhabitants during the time I lived there. I always thought that there was a basic incommensurability between the realities of the business and the aims of community: such a high turnover of people seemed to make it very difficult for a Windhorse community to be a place where deep friendships could be formed. Time and the beginnings of a change in the Windhorse community culture have to some extent changed my mind about this; at any rate I have succeeded in forming and cultivating friendships which had their origin in that community.
Neither no.19 nor no.17 had their own shrine rooms; we used to traipse off down the road to the old Buddhist centre at no. 25 for the 7.15 sit. I remember frequently going over barefoot into the sun rising along Newmarket Road. Always present was a strange shaven-headed character who always appeared to be doing a headcount before the start of the meditation; I used to wonder whether he might be a kind of community policeman taking the register to ensure attendance. I did hear of community members being leaned on to attend morning meditation, as that was what communities did together, which struck me as distinctly off, but it never once happened to me. Ironically enough, the shaven-headed character, Suvannavira, who later became one of my dearest friends, became himself embroiled in a lengthy running battle with members of his community at no. 17 about his own non-attendance at the morning meditation as well as at supper. What people did in communities was quite tightly controlled in those days, a common feature of Windhorse culture in a range of areas, which has possibly led to the accusation of cultishness, but, as I have said, it never really happened to me.
As time went on, some strange and slightly incongruous aspects of the Windhorse culture started to impinge upon me. One of these had to do with the relations between the sexes, or, more accurately, the lack of relations between them. At this time the infamous "no sex in the mandala" rule/principle/idea was adhered to (one senior WT manager was once jokingly heard to say that "we don't have rules, only principles which must be obeyed"!), at least with regard to heterosexual relationships. Homosexual relationships, however, were being carried on, and I heard personally of homosexual encounters occurring in the community I was living in, as well as in others. One of the relationships was between a senior Windhorse Order member and a young and rather mentally disturbed mitra; this has always struck me as a gross dereliction of the duties of kalyana mitrata, but I am not familiar with the particulars, so I merely mention it. It seems that homosexual relationships, no doubt unofficially, were exempt from the rule. This was presumably because relationships between men were deemed to be less subject to neurotic attachment than those between men and women. Anyway, one of the women mitras got wind of what was going on from one of the male mitras - himself subject to a lot of criticism from Order members in the management for spending time with her, apparently because this was upsetting some of the other mitras - and the matter was subsequently referred to the mens' chapters by one of the seniormost Dharmacharinis. This did not seem to lead to much in the way of discussion, at least not such that was fed back to her.
As far as heterosexual relationships were concerned, men and women who struck up friendships often came to be leaned upon quite heavily by the management. Even where no sexual activity was taking place the mere prospect that it might was enough for strong signals to be sent to the people concerned, even for promises to be demanded that no relationship would be started as long as both parties were still at Windhorse. However, glaring incongruities made the whole "principle” difficult to swallow, such as the uncomfortable fact that Vajraketu - the managing director! - and Padmasuri were in sexual relationship throughout the whole period. The official line was that previously existent relationships were exempt from the rule - of course one can sympathise with this, but it could not help but make the whole principle more difficult to take seriously. Anyway, the whole edifice came crashing down, partly under the weight of its internal contradictions and partly because you can't prevent adults in a spiritual community from doing things they want to do, especially if you yourself are doing them! Subsequent experience shows that the arising of sexual relationships within Windhorse has not led to the collapse of civilisation as we know it; people conduct their affairs discreetly and handle their break-ups with dignity. My only brush with the old regime came when the mitra convenor at WT came up and told me that people were being "upset" by my new relationship with a woman mitra, now Utpalavajri. I was annoyed at what I saw as management dirty work being done by someone whom I hardly knew, and stormed up to see Vajraketu. It transpired that he merely wanted those in the company who were in relationships to be discreet - we had been observed slipping off for tea break trysts - and readily conceded that he would be skating on very thin ice of he were to demand that we stop seeing each other! This had been miscommunicated to me by the mitra convenor.
Aside from sexual relationships, normal human relations between the sexes were, to say the least, underdeveloped. Women would have the experience of being cut dead in the corridors of the warehouse; one of the attractive young woman mitras was taken aside by one of the Dharmacaris and asked to reel in her sexual energies and watch how she dressed, as it was apparently affecting some of the other men. The women didn't have the luxury of their own dining room and had to take their lunches back up to the tea room, where they had to eat with their plates on their knees due to the absence of tables; later they got their own dining room with tablecloths and vases of flowers, and we now share a dining room in which men and women sometimes even share tables! As the meals are held in silence it seems unlikely for passionate alliances to be formed in this context.
The whole culture didn't conduce to the development of sensible adult relationships between the sexes. The separation of the sexes was quite possibly harmful in some circumstances because it wasn't complete; the occasions when women and men came together could easily lead to the kind of displays of strutting and chest-beating that Subhuti has referred to in the past. This I remember well from my own experience. Being partially separated yet still around each other could lead to extreme projection and a failure to treat women with awareness of their humanity. One poor French girl who came to the accounts team had several propositions from men she didn't know, none of whom had stopped to consider whether she might already have a boyfriend or even be a lesbian! "The men are so weird!” she was once heard to exclaim. Once I was in a relationship I felt very easy with the women, having as it were a contact on the inside. I wouldn't really know to comment on the way the sexes now generally relate, by my sense is that an easier and more natural communication is now much more widespread than it was at the time.
But I have jumped ahead in my narrative in my pursuit of this theme. I'd like to return now to another aspect of the culture which I experienced much more positively: the much maligned heroic ideal. When I was approached towards the end of 1996 with the view to becoming a Windhorse van salesman, my response was to feel rather honoured. There was a perception at the time that the salesmen were the elite force: those who operated "out there" on their own, driving all hours through all weathers in the tireless pursuit of sales. They were removed from the comparative safety of the Cambridge warehouse, left to organise their own lives and to get on with their own practice in what could be quite hostile conditions. This idea, as will be no surprise, attracted me strongly, and it was as a Windhorse salesman that I experienced all this to be true and found my first love in the business. I am again a van salesman, about to start monthly trips to Scotland, and I still powerfully experience the pull of the open road. Once you have been a van man it becomes very difficult to settle into any other more regulated sphere of work, well, that is how it was for me. I found in van work a natural avenue for expression of a heroic ideal that seemed to push the boundaries in the pursuit of a higher aim, and enjoyed an experience of team work beyond anything else in the business. We laughed a lot, recounted stories of the week in a speedy fashion at Pizza Express on the Friday, enjoyed the badinage of the office, the brotherhood of loading days. Some of the landscapes were staggeringly beautiful, some of the customers became friends. I remember standing in the lounge of one of my favourite customers near Worcester, listening to a bright eleven year old playing the piano, thinking to myself, how has this arisen? It was magical. We felt special: it's interesting to see how new van men start to swagger after a few trips out. We had total responsibility for our designated areas. We worked hard: 12 or 14 hour days were not, indeed, are not uncommon. It is this sense of the heroic that I tend to miss these days; it's become increasingly difficult to find new salesmen from the warehouse. This may well be because the warehouse teams have succeeded admirably in their endeavour to make work there so rich and attractive that people are reluctant to leave; indeed I feel this to be at least partly the case and rejoice in their efforts. Perhaps the heroism finds a quieter expression amongst the boxes. I imagine that the men in the warehouse value their friendships and dislike the idea of being separated from their friends; despite the criticisms voiced earlier, Windhorse has always been strong when it comes to fostering close friendships between men. Nonetheless, I also wonder whether people know what they are missing; if you are inclined to solitude and self-sufficiency as I am, then I can imagine no better life anywhere within the institutions of the FWBO. It has its attendant risks: I once fell briefly but calamitously in love with a married customer when a long and comfortable visit to her shop turned to the cold shudders of incipient desire and a brief embrace and kiss in the back of the shop. Minutes later her husband turned up. My world fell apart and I felt the twin tortures of guilt and unobtainable happiness. Manjusiddha, then team leader, helped me through this with a kindly smile and a broad shoulder, for which I was very grateful.
Despite the fact that van work was by far my favourite occupation, it seemed that my chances of ordination were being hindered because I was not making myself known to the Order members in the situation. One could with some justification argue that it was their business to reach out to me - indeed Saddharaja apologised to me after my ordination because he felt I'd been somewhat let down - but I have considerable sympathy with the position of responsibility of senior Windhorse Order members to so many mitras. I also was starting to feel a bit disconnected from the mandala. I therefore decided to join the other half of the sales team: that half based at the office and responsible for large non-van customers and trade shows. I lasted three days, and those three days were hell. I've never really worked out why; it was certainly nothing to do with the people, or even the depressingly complex and Byzantine Top Shop despatch procedure that Anomaketu tried to explain to me on my first day. Vilasavajra, one of the most consistently positive and kindest men I have ever met (a member of the Windhorse management forum), tried to understand and to help me, but there was nothing for it but retreat into the familiar comforts of the warehouse, where I joined the Evolution Supply team.
I quickly started to see that things were not well in the EST. Communication between the warehouse and the shops appeared to be poor and often based on mistrust, and the ethos of service that is so essential to the success of a wholesale business was very underdeveloped. It seemed to me that the needs of the shops weren't taken especially seriously, and the convenience of the EST took too high a priority. Some of us set out to reform this, and we gradually introduced a culture of service into our relationship with the shops, which did not go unnoticed. It seems appropriate here to point out one of the key changes of recent months: the change in business nomenclature from "Windhorse Trading" to "Windhorse:Evolution". This may seem pure semantics, but it reflects a re-evaluation of the nature of the relationship between the "centre" and the shops: an orientation towards partnership, which was what we were striving for in the EST back in 1999. This is still being developed today.
I enjoyed my work in the warehouse. However, I felt I'd run out of projects, and it still seemed that I wasn't getting close enough to the senior Order members in the business, so I made the decision to transfer to the office to work with Vajraketu and Keturaja, partly having in mind the need to cover for Manjusura during his ordination course. This happened in early 2000. I shall skim over much of this time, but a few observations are relevant. One observation: neither Keturaja or Vajraketu ever seemed to attend Right Livelihood meetings. Viewed in a particular light this is entirely understandable - both men are key players with a great weight of responsibility, and Keturaja must at that time have been starting to contemplate the Great Warehouse Move - but it still struck me as odd that two of the directors of the business were not participating in the exploration of the themes of Right Livelihood because they were too busy. It was more disinterested curiosity on my part - I have personally almost never found Right Livelihood meetings interesting or useful - but one of the implications of this peculiar fact has been, and remains, very relevant to the Windhorse set up: too few individuals have too much to do, and those individuals have been poor at delegating. Even if work is delegated, it is not fully delegated, so individuals do not feel empowered. Additionally, those who are deemed to be experienced tend to have so much to do that they don't have time to pass on what jobs they could pass on, with the result that they have to keep doing them. This seems particularly pronounced in the women's teams, and it cannot be coincidence that a number of good women have left in the last couple of years with symptoms of burnout, two of them having left the FWBO altogether. To have to shout louder and louder to get the fact across to people that you can't cope whilst being told that you can must be incredibly frustrating. Again, I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I do have very reliable testimony that this has been the case. Stress-related illness has been commonplace in the women's teams, and I don't believe it is only experienced there. People complaining of not being heard seems to be symptomatic of poor human resources management. This is barely surprising, as none of the individuals involved in management have any formal management training; in addition I believe that the confusion between spiritual and temporal hierarchy has in some cases left us with a situation in which individuals who are not suited to personnel management find themselves in positions of team leadership. Happily, though, we have moved on from the misguided view that being an Order member automatically qualifies one to run a team!
My time with the so-called "Wombles" (they pick up the messes that others leave behind) was a mixed bag. Highlights included working with Karunaghosha - I have fond memories of driving up to the landfill site with him to dispose of old office furniture - occasional stints of secretarial work for Vajraketu, and learning how to edit a magazine. Unhappily though, the work I ended up doing was by and large not the work I had signed up for; I had envisaged working as Vajraketu's PA, but finished up instead with several odd jobs, such as vehicles manager (that poisoned chalice), one-off editor of Kantaka, the Windhorse:Evolution in-house magazine, waste disposal man as above, and warehouse reorganiser. This was okay, but the lack of clarity around my job and my lack of effective communication with Keturaja bothered me. Blame can be laid at both our doors - I thought he was too busy to liaise, and he thought the same of me! - but it does further highlight the poor personnel management mentioned above. Eventually it was Ratnadaka who suggested that I might be a square peg in a round hole, and I realised at that point that I should move on. By then I had received my invitation to Guhyaloka, so March 2001 seemed a fitting juncture for my departure.
Around this time I was fully involved in the Cambridge Buddhist Centre drama group. Visada had provided the main impetus back in '99 or '98 to get us organised to put on some Shakespeare in our lovely new theatre, and we had cut our teeth on Twelfth Night, or, at least, scenes therefrom with a linking narrative by Suvarnagarbha. Doing Shakespeare had been considered out of our reach, but we defied expectations by producing something watchable. We followed it up with a full-length production of Measure for Measure, also directed by Visada, and then, shortly before my ordination retreat, a version of Macbeth directed by myself. I have seldom become as passionately involved in anything, including explicit Dharma practice. At the time I was also involved with the Cambridge Experimental Theatre, a group run by Richard Spaul, whose work centres around improvisation with and without text. His skill opened vistas of possibility that had hitherto seemed unimaginable; I had no idea that I was capable of such emotional range. A lot of the work was quite sensual, even sexual, and I became aware of the power of drama to free up even quite dangerous energies. The same was true of our own work. During Twelfth Night I fell in love and began the relationship mentioned before that endures to this day; during Measure for Measure various people got into, and came out of, relationships, including our director, whose off-stage life was threatening to engulf the whole project. My part in the play was the Lord Angelo, hard-line deputy to the duke of Vienna, who is charged with the task of reversing the moral decline of the city, but who falls in lust with a beautiful nun who comes to him to intercede for her brother, committed for fornication by the same deputy. In one scene I was to assault her sexually (the actress fortunately happened to be my girlfriend); an effective piece of theatre but a very challenging thing to have to do. I needed to access very strong dark emotions to carry it off, and these dark, powerful forces carried over into my normal life; I remember going back to my community room after a performance, seeing my room-mate sleeping peacefully, and feeling that the orderly, angelic Buddhist life was simply insupportable at this point. I wanted to set fire to the house, go and dance with the dark spirits, go and proposition Visada's girlfriend, who I thought might not any longer be his girlfriend. Utpalavajri and I had split up earlier that evening (we split up a lot in those days), so it was obviously alright...no, it wasn't but I was going to do it anyway. I lurked outside the theatre, was spotted by Simone, and asked her out for a coffee (although I doubt if an invitation for coffee could have been more erotically charged than that). She quite rightly said no, pointing out that she was waiting for Visada. She was upset, I was upset, Utpalavajri was upset when I told her what I'd done. It was a mess. But it was a creative mess; at least, it had emerged from a creative event. We collectively introduced an important new element into Cambridge Buddhist life, which enriched it considerably. The main point of this is that the very nature of theatre of this kind requires the injection of a certain degree of chaos - a deviation from the Apollonian norms of Bhante's FWBO as represented by my room-mate's sleeping head caught in a shaft of gentle moonlight. Exploration of emotional depths is a growth experience which is inherently risky. However, alarm bells had been ringing at Windhorse, and we were told that support would be withdrawn from future projects unless a person external to the situation were brought in as cast Kalyana Mitra, so that the events surrounding Measure would not be repeated. This was irrespective of the fact that several of the cast were non-Windhorse Buddhists from the Cambridge mandala, and that the project was a CBC one rather than a Windhorse one: a distinction that was lost. Desperately keen to go ahead with Macbeth, I went along with this to the point of approaching a couple of people but decided after a while that the cast could do its own policing. I therefore simply let the matter drop, and everything was fine - we put on a good play in harmony with each other, and I felt very satisfied to have done so. I went off to Guhyaloka in good spirits and got ordained that summer.
So what was going on here? I think a mix of things. One level there was of course a concern for our well-being, there being hardly any areas of creativity with such potential for suffering as theatre. The fallout was plain, and people were concerned. On another level I think another Windhorse tendency was being manifested here: the fear of allowing responsible adults to make mistakes. We were a group of adults, some Windhorse, some not, who wanted to create something new in the mandala. It was not a Windhorse project. It had its dangers, and some of us were burnt by the experience. But our lives were greatly enriched by close and prolonged contact with Shakespeare's genius. The nature of life is that you make mistakes and, hopefully, learn by them, which we did, but it seems to me now that we were not trusted to make those mistakes. Perhaps there was a fear that we would somehow rock the boat. I feel that this reluctance to allow people to screw up has manifest itself in other areas too: that people have until recently not had any choice about how they live while at Windhorse strikes me as having had something of this flavour to it, and the infamous "no sex in the mandala" rule of course. Perhaps the thinking is that people are not mature enough to be left to their own devices. At any rate, it felt like control, and I regret having gone along with it to the extent that I did. I don't know what would have happened if I had simply refused; I hope we would have gone ahead anyway as a free collection of individuals. It has more recently occurred to me that the management team at Windhorse are orderly and Apollonian types, so it is not surprising that order should be valued (of course there are things about their lives I do not know - I hope they will forgive me for giving voice to an impression!) and chaos mistrusted; also, of course, for a business to be successful there needs to be order. But I feel strongly that the long arm of Windhorse overreached itself on this occasion, and that a more appropriate vehicle for "guarding the mandala" (such being the motivation subsequently explained to me by one of the directors) would surely have been the council of the Cambridge Buddhist Centre.
I shall finish the narrative at this point, as I feel this article to be quite long enough. I do however want to acknowledge the far-reaching changes in style and substance that have more recently been set in train, although there is still much to do. Management has become more inclusive and more transparent as the realisation has dawned that Windhorse:evolution is not the small circle of friends it used to be. Fora have now been created for everybody concerned to voice their feelings and concerns. The lifestyle question has been addressed and a relaxation of control has resulted. I now live by myself - indeed was given encouragement to do so - and work part-time, and I hope that my contribution is valued. The committed continue to give their lives to this important on-going project, and I hope they will accept my criticisms in the spirit in which they are meant, challenging them where appropriate. I continue to work for Windhorse because I love and respect those who have given their lives to it - special mention of Vajraketu here, who is a shining example of a practitioner of the Four Right Efforts! - because I value our institutions all the more dearly as more and more people in the Order and community (thanks Danavira) turn their backs on them, and because Windhorse, for all its faults, is a manifestation of good in the world
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