FWBO Discussion - library of articles

Comments

2010-09-12T03:59:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, this blog has been attracting a great deal of junk comments (I don't mean hostile ones, just plain junk!) So I've removed the comment function for the time being. That is a shame considering that this blog is called 'FWBO Discussion, and I hope to find another way of dealing with the problem before too long.

Meanwhile, there's more of my writing - and the opportunity to comment at www.wiseattention.org

Vishvapani

A reflection on the controversy around Sangharakshita my teacher

2010-08-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

A reflection on the controversy around Sangharakshita my teacher

I write this article as an individual member if the Western Buddhist Order for the benefit of those who wish to engage with Sangharakshita’s teachings, but who are unsure as to his authority as an interpreter of the Dharma. It contains my personal reflections, and is not an official FWBO document.

Adiccabandhu
September 2006 Blackburn UK

1. A Brief Biography of Sangharakshita- taken from the FWBO web page

Sangharakshita is the founder if the Western Buddhist Order, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayak Gana, (TBMSG) as the movement is called in India.

He was born Dennis Lingwood in South London, in 1925, and had a Church of England upbringing. But from an early age he developed an interest in the cultures and philosophies of the East. Aged 16, after reading the Diamond Sutra, he had a distinct realisation that he was a Buddhist. He became involved in London’s germinal Buddhist world in wartime Britain, and started to explore the Dharma through study and practice.

He was conscripted in the Second World War and posted to Sri Lanka as a signals operator, and after the war he stayed on in India. For two years he lived as a wandering mendicant, and later he was ordained as a Theravadin Buddhist monk and named Sangharakshita (‘protected by the spiritual community’). Sangharakshita lived for 14 years in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong, where he encountered venerable Tibetan Buddhist teachers — so he had the opportunity to study intensively under leading teachers from all major Buddhist traditions.

After 20 years in India, Sangharakshita returned to the UK to teach the Dharma. In 1967 he set up the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order — a new Buddhist movement for the modern West.

All the while he taught and wrote extensively. He is now the author of over 50 books. Most of these are expositions of the Buddhist tradition, but he has also published a large amount of poetry and four volumes of memoirs, as well as works on aspects of western culture and the arts from a Buddhist perspective.

Sangharakshita played a key part in the revival of Buddhism in India, particularly through his work with the followers of Dr Ambedkar (formerly known as Untouchables). Around one third of the Order is in India, where the movement is called Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayak Gana, or TBMSG. Throughout his life Sangharakshita has been concerned with issues of social reform.

Now in his 80s, Sangharakshita has handed over his responsibilities for the FWBO to a group of senior members of the Order. From his base in Birmingham, he is now focusing on personal contact with disciples, and on his writing.

What is Sangharakshita’s approach to the Dharma?

Sangharakshita’s aim as a Dharma teacher has been to be a translator between East and West, between the traditional world and the modern, between timeless principles and practices relevant to those living in a western world.

He has always emphasised the decisive significance of commitment in the spiritual life, the value of spiritual friendship and community, the link between religion and the arts, and the need for a ‘new society’ that supports spiritual values. In founding the WBO and the FWBO, he established a sangha built around this approach.

What authority has Sangharakshita to set up a new Buddhist movement?

Some schools of Buddhism, Tibetan and Zen, for example rely strongly on their established lineage as a source of authority. The Theravada have the authority of the monastic code (the Vinaya), linking the present monastic forms to those of the past. Each school has its own canon of sacred texts along with their commentaries.

The FWBO is based on a radical critique of these forms of authority. Sangharakshita did not seek authority from a lineage, or from a form of Buddhism already established in Asia. He has not been authorised by anyone, and is not answerable to any external ecclesiastical authority. He created the FWBO and the WBO as a new order, not as a reform, or development of any previous order or school of Buddhism. For these reasons, many Buddhists of other traditions do not regard the FWBO as an authentic Buddhist school.

Buddhists from outside the FWBO are often wary of some of Sangharakshita’s apparently more personal interpretations of the Dharma. However, it would be a shame if this wariness were allowed to obscure the value of Sangharakshita’s teachings could have for all Buddhists, and especially for Buddhists in the west.

Some of his interpretations of the Dharma are radical. They are radical in that they derive from the very roots of Buddhism, and they attempt to express its basic message in a way which is relevant to us in the west today.

What about Sangharakshita’s sexual behaviour?

For twenty years Sangharakshita lived the celibate life of a Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition. When he disrobed in 1960, Sangharakshita started to experiment with sexuality and remained sexually active for the following 10- 15 years. At that time, he was engaged in setting up a new Buddhist movement the FWBO (Friends of the Western Buddhist order) and the WBO - the ordained members. Sangharakshita’s sexual partners were men friends and acquaintances in the FWBO.

Although Sangharakshita made no secret of his sexual behaviour at the time, neither was it widely known throughout the movement the extent to which he was sexually active. In effect, while some knew, many did not.

In 1986 an issue of ‘The Golden Drum (an FWBO magazine) carried an interview with Sangharakshita in which he spoke about his sexual ‘experimentation’. On reading the article, most people in the FWBO took the experimentation to have been limited to a few people, of short duration, and without negative consequences. Peoples’ confidence in their founder was not fundamentally shaken by the knowledge that he had been sexually active.

That is, until three major communications - the Guardian article of 1997, the FWBO files and a letter written by an order member (Yashomitra) to the order journal, Shabda in 2003.

1. The FWBO Files. Sometime in 1997, a campaign was launched to discredit the FWBO. This campaign is maintained largely through the upkeep of a file carrying criticisms of Sangharakshita and the FWBO. The authors are anonymous, and remain determined to attack the movement. The FWBO files are still going strong to this day.

2. The Guardian article. In October 1997 an article was published in the Guardian newspaper, written by Madeleine Bunting. Entitled ‘The Dark Side of Enlightenment’, the article revealed the extent of the sexual activities of Sangharakshita and his disciples, and was critical of the attitudes to women and families within the FWBO culture. This article was a bombshell to many within the order and movement.

3. Yashomitra’s letter. Most order members were even further shocked by the revelations in Yashomitra’s letter. In March 2003, he wrote about his sexual relationship with Sangharakshita, in 1980 when he was aged 19. On looking back, he felt that he had been ‘misused’ because he held Sangharakshita in such high regard as his spiritual teacher. Although the young disciple had other sexual partners at the time, he regarded Sangharakshita as his friend and teacher. So, he believed that sex was expressive of that friendship. When the sexual relationship ended, he was left confused and upset. Although Sangharakshita continued to be friendly towards him, the young man felt that he was not regarded as a friend.

What is the controversy about Sangharakshita’s sexual behaviour?

I believe there are four key issues.

1. . Sangharakshita’s sexual partners were young disciples who regarded their Dharma teacher very highly. This guru-disciple relationship clouds the issue of consent. How easy is it for a young disciple to refuse a sexual advance from his teacher? This was bound to lead to problems. Yashomitra’s letter spelled this out clearly.

It is worth noting that several order members assert that their sexual relationship with Sangharakshita was good for them, and they have no regrets.

2. Sangharakshita’s example of ‘experimentation’ with sex in single-sex friendships contributed to a culture where abuse did take place by some order members. Yashomitra’s letter is explicit about one such incident. The case of Croydon Buddhist Centre stands out as an example of coercive and abusive behaviour under the regime of a young chairman who was resistant to all outside criticism.

Some people are still recovering from the damage done in those years.

3. As Sangharakshita wore his monastic robes on his visits to the order and movement in India, Indian order members and mitras naturally assumed him to be celibate. Sangharakshita was sexually active at the time. Sangharakshita asserts that he wore robes in India (and the golden anagarika kesa in the west) to signify that he was the founder of the order, not that he was celibate. The order in India was unaware of Sangharakshita’s sexual history, or of his reasons for wearing the robes. Given the attitude to homosexuality in such a traditional culture, it was a huge shock to the movement in India to discover the truth .

4. A culture critical of the family and the heterosexual couple began to evolve. The heterosexual couple was seen as antithetical to the vision of New Society, at the centre of which were single sex men’s and women’s communities. There are many examples of FWBO followers leaving their partners and children in order to live in communities, or of trying to raise their children in single sex communities. This culture evolved in a movement which had only limited contact with the rest of the Buddhist world, so that people were unclear as to what ideas were the Dharma, and what was questionable FWBO thinking. Many people both within the movement and those who have left, still feel pain from those ‘experimental’ years.

What is Sangharakshita’s response?

Sangharakshita asserts that all sex is unskilful, as it is an expression of greed for sense pleasure. To that extent, he says, he has been unskilful, but no further. He has always insisted that he understood his sexual relationships were consensual, and that people could, and often did refuse. He believes he has done nothing for which he should apologise.

What has been the effect on the Order?

At the time of Yashomitra’s letter and the subsequent period of shock and turmoil in the order and movement, Sangharakshita was ill. Those close to him advised postponing letting him know about these events until he had recovered.

As Sangharakshita slowly recovered from his illness and started to re-engage with the movement, those disciples closest to him relayed the recent events. There was a general hope and expectation among more senior order members, and in the order and FWBO worldwide, that Sangharakshita would speak publicly on the matter. Many felt that if Sangharakshita publicly acknowledged the upset that many people were feeling and expressed regret at the suffering that had resulted from his sexual activity. Sangharakshita knew of these expectations but chose not to respond. He continued to believe that anything he said would be misinterpreted and, because he had not done anything for which he should apologise, it might make matters worse.

Order members in general accept Sangharakshita’s main teachings. Sangharakshita’s more seminal books which are expositions on Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings are still highly regarded, while some are now seen to belong to a different era.

In general, order members remain loyal disciples, feel deep respect and gratitude to him. They continue to appreciate the order and movement he has founded. But many also are more aware of his faults and are still recovering from the discoveries of recent years.

Did the order or movement make any public response?

There have been two public responses that I know of. In 1997 the FWBO Communications Office wrote a response to the criticisms levelled against Sangharakshita and the movement. Although the response was written with the best of intentions, its credibility was seriously undermined by the decision not to be fully frank about the extent of Sangharakshita’s sexual activity. It was feared that as homosexuality was taboo in India, Sangharakshita’s followers would be subject to physical attack. As a consequence, the ‘response’ was severely criticised both within the order and in the wider world.

In November 2004 Subhuti, delivered two high profile talks to the order. He was chair of the preceptor’s college at Madhyamaloka at the time, and felt that the order and movement was beginning to lose its momentum with this unresolved breach with Sangharakshita. He wanted to help heal that breach. He believed that healing that breach meant addressing Sangharakshita’s sexual history. Subhuti was openly critical in these talks ;

“I have come to think that there are severe problems with Sangharakshita’s sexual activity in the past...in a sense he did not know what he was doing altogether and… some big mistakes were made…Wearing robes is just not on.. As a spiritual teacher you carry weight that does not allow you to simply be one human being with another human being. That sexual activity was bound to have problems”.

Subhuti went on to say that acknowledging these problems, could help one could arrive at a true appreciation of Sangharakshita’s qualities as the founder of the movement and as a teacher.

Subhuti’s second talk was a call to action re-invigorate the order included a programme of clarification of values and institutions which he offered to lead.

Although the initial response in the order was good, dissenting voices began to be heard. Some felt that they did not want Subhuti to speak about Sangharakshita on their behalf. Several senior order members felt that Subhuti’s leadership was not what the order needed at this time. More time was needed to absorb events and for order members to work out their relation to their founder .

Neither of the above attempts to speak publicly on behalf of the order and movement worked.

As confidence is returning to the order and movement, one thing is clear: there is no one who is authorised to speak on behalf of the order. Meanwhile the order is still in dialogue with itself about its relation to Sangharakshita’s sexual activities and their consequences. Opinion is still divided as to the most appropriate way forward.

What is your response, Adiccabandhu?

When the Guardian article came out I was deeply distressed. At the time I was living separately from my wife Padmasri helping to lead a men’s community of about a dozen people. I was also working for free for Clearvision, a right livelihood business. The article turned my world upside down. I personally knew that the FWBO files were highly unreliable slurs and venomous spin, as they brazenly misrepresented the work we were doing at Clearvision and in the world of Religious Education. When I had completed my commitments to Clearvision, I left the business and returned to teaching. Padmasri and I decided to live together again. I decided to withdrew from all order and FWBO activities for an indefinite period.

My burning question was; ‘Am I a disciple of Sangharakshita?’ I would decide whether to leave the order or not.

After a period of about a year, I realised that the order was where I wanted to pursue my spiritual life. I felt that I could trust my friends in the order completely, that here were people who strived to be in truthful and mettaful communication. This was where I could find a Dharma practice that had meaning for me. I love this order and hope it flourishes.

My relationship to my teacher is mixed. From the beginning I never liked the awe in which he was held. Neither have I been attracted to him as a person. Some of his teaching I have never agreed with, and I have told him so.

I feel deep regret at some decisions I have as a father, as I allowed my thinking to be influenced by the prevailing FWBO culture.

I think he let himself and the order down by his lack of awareness of the potential consequences of his actions. I feel great pain that he has not engaged in open dialogue about these consequences. But I do not want any part in any public disapproval of my teacher and still have not given up hope that he may yet speak. It has been painful for me to dwell so much in this article on my teacher’s faults, but is only through this process that I can help myself and others to appreciate his greatness.

In the end, I owe Sangharakshita my teacher immeasurable gratitude for founding such an order and movement. I believe that his radical translation of the Dharma has helped me transform my life, and on that basis I give him authority to be my teacher, and I recommend his teachings to you.

Adiccabandhu
Blackburn
September 2006

Some past problems with the F/WBO, their legacy and the need for change

2007-09-05T02:28:00.000-07:00

Satyaloka

First published in Articles Shabda, August 2003

Those who cannot remember their past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
- Thomas Carlyle

In a recent Shabda report Advayacitta expressed consternation at the differences in the two accounts given, at different times, by Yashomitra. Do we really think that memory is a mere recalling of pristine facts, rather than an active process of imaginative construction and doesn't our current experience always colour our interpretation of our past? This process is one that I have been struggling with, in reflecting on my twenty-three year history within the FWBO- a process that predated recent events but has certainly been stimulated and intensified by them. What follows does not attempt to be balanced. It speaks more to faults than to that which can be celebrated. There is, of course, much that I value and admire in Sangharakshita and the Order but I wanted to make my points clearly and not risk loosing them by adding too many caveats. The picture is much more complex and nuanced than I have managed to capture. Nor is what follows a tightly argued piece, such as Vipassi's wonderful contribution. It's more a collection of separate threads or thoughts about certain areas, a number of which overlap. I look at:

* The difficulty of getting some objectivity on our situation
* Our relation to the wider culture and other Buddhists
* Power and influence within the FWBO
* The issue of conformity and its relationship to language
* Jungian psychological models
* Reflections arising from the contrast between the UK and US FWBO

It's a particular version of my involvement from 1981 onwards as seen from my current perspective. That involvement has always been a full one, involving Manchester, Padmaloka and Windhorse. From Padmaloka until I left for the US I lived fully within the structures of the FWBO: the so called 'three C's model'. I lived and worked with other Order members. I attended Order weekend and Conventions regularly, as well as study and meditation and Order retreats. I was an energetic and faithful Order member. Because of the way that the Order is structured this account draws on my experience within the men's wing of the Order. I have no real idea how different, if at all, it would look form the 'other side. I could give many different versions of my time in the Order, all of them 'true'; this is one such account. I ask you to be willing to see that I care enough to offer this up as part of the ongoing enquiry.

'Shoes outside the door'

A year or two ago I read the galley proofs of 'shoes outside the door' an account of the rise and fall of Richard Baker at the SF Zen Center and found it fascinating. 'Shoes outside the door' tells a very different story to our own. It ends differently to our own. The cultural context is different, the specifics of the organizational dynamic are different, and yet I think that through the lens it provides, we can see ourselves more clearly. I am not going to attempt to summarize the story. The points of difference and similarity are revealed as one reads and the perspective on our own movement emerges as a kind of gestalt in the midst of this. It's a fascinating read, well written, with elements of real tragedy. Best read in conjunction with 'Crooked Cucumber' the delightful account by David Chadwick of Suzuki Roshi and his founding of the San Francisco Zen center, a story that again parallels Bhante's and our own in many ways and also provides instructive contrasts.

One thing it did was enable me to stand outside the fwbo for a moment and see it more as an objective phenomenon, not an easy thing for someone whom has been so intimately involved with it for so many years. It helped me contextualize the Order as a religio-sociological phenomenon within a broader socio-historical context, having a particular history, 'culture' and trajectory. I think that the Guardian article, even unbalanced as it was, provided such a moment of self-consciousness for many of us all those years ago. Our collective karma ripened and we were granted the wish to see ourselves as others see us and it was a shock, it burst the bubble of our collective delusion. I think that is partly why it occasioned so much psychic pain and why we were so keen to 'put it behind us'. But it turns out we were only stuffing our questions and doubts back down because they made us uncomfortable, afraid. At the time I thought my discomfort was due to having what I loved and revered, Bhante and the FWBO, dragged unfairly through the mud and the extra dimension of embarrassment of my friends and family witness that, but wasn't it also having the unsay able out there and said?

I am saying that at this point it's vital that we find ways to see our situation objectively, to step out side the largely solipsistic world of the Order and the FWBO. I think that those working within the structures of the FWBO for a large a part of their adult lives will naturally have trouble doing so. Perhaps what I am saying is that the movement needs therapy! There needs to be what James Hillman, the archetypal Psychologist, calls a 'therapy of ideas' because some of the ideas that we have been running on are not healthy, they are themselves sick and thus have made us sick. I am not sure how we would go about this beyond saying that we need fresh perspectives, clear critiques. I think that the encouragement for all people within the order to tell their story is an important piece, especially those voices that are not coming from the mainstream, the marginalized voices that carry important information and perspectives that have not been given their place. I think that maybe we need help from outside our own 'club'. We have to drop our defensiveness about the Order, defensiveness against criticism from within and without. I feel that if we fail to do this we will not address deeply enough the situation we have got ourselves into. We will not deal with it adequately and so the healing that is so necessary will be incomplete and we will not learn lessons for the future. The Order and the FWBO will be so much less than it could be. The Gestalt dictum that 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' is not true in all situations, often it's less.

Cultural critiques and other Buddhists

The FWBO was always most off- track when 'we', largely echoing Bhante's opinions, pontificated about socio-cultural issues, the state of the wider culture. It's understandable, within the language of the 'New Society' and the 'old' that there would be such a critique. But the very isolation from the wider culture, of those most within the FWBO structures who were involved in the dissemination of ideas, the creation of its culture, contributed at best to a rather naive and over generalized critique, at worst to a laughable parody. Anyone who has lived in the UK during the 80's and 90's of the FWBO will know the sort of thing that I am referring to though they may disagree with my interpretation. Such critiques were part of the Order and FWBO culture of the time. They were the stock in trade of a few speakers who were very regular speaker at the 'Men's Events' at Padmaloka which were the main Order mitra events on the men's side. They were pedalled in talks to the Order at Order weekends etc.

Bhante did strike out from the middle class world of British Buddhism; he was a radical and needed the courage of his convictions to stand-alone. But that conviction could be rather overbearing to be around and tended to stifle debate. Our response to that level of conviction was perhaps the source of the triumphalism that we were so rightly accused of by other Buddhists. This isolation from other Buddhists was actively cultivated by Bhante and seen as necessary to the growth of this fledgling WBO plant and perhaps it was. But somewhere along the way, this hardened into a dogma, no 'shopping around' at the mitra level and certainly no other teachers at the Order level. The WBO/FWBO became effectively isolated from other Buddhist groups. We lost the sense that without cross-pollination plants can't reproduce, they loose their ability to adapt and effectively become sterile. Drawing a term from the realm of agriculture and ecological one could say that metaphorically we ended up with a monoculture and they are vulnerable to disease and infestation. The solution is to re introduce diversity.

Let's not close the canon of WBO practices and ideas. Bhante made an excellent synthesis but it shouldn't ossify into a one off thing. Its very common in the US for teachers to draw from the different traditions as Bhante did all those years ago. A teacher like Roshi Joan Halifax for instance will draw mainly on her Zen tradition but also, depending on the retreat, include Tibetan practices like tonglen, vipassana and mindfulness practices. This is the reality of Buddhism in the US and this is the trend in the larger Western Buddhist world. Yes we need depth of practice and integrity of a tradition but also openness to new possibilities. I know that various Order members have explored vipassana or Dzog Chen for themselves but there still seems so much caution around this issue. I have personally found tonglen practice a great adjunct to metta bhavana. Can we please stop repeating Bhante's caveats about vipassana based on his experience of teaching in the UK 40 years ago ! Things have moved on! I have attended vipassana retreats in the IMS tradition, which were excellent. The dharma teaching matched any I have experienced in the FWBO it was very recognizably broad 'basic Buddhism'. The program was intense but balanced and effective. In fact I felt that our retreats could benefit from the more rigorous meditation and silence practices and have introduced this in a sesshin style to the Sanghas approval and pleasure.

In the field of Dharma Bhante was on target. However, here too, challenges to his views were not that welcome. Those in the UK who ventured outside the fold of the FWBO into the fields of Buddhist academia, found themselves isolated and without a meaningful role in the WBO. Through exposure to original materials and differing strands of thought to Sangharakshita's they came to their own views about certain dharmic issues. They were thinking outside the FWBO box. The universities and academia in general, and perversely Buddhist academia in particular, were pariahs.

For many years we were isolated within the Buddhist world, criticizing other groups through the pages of our magazines. Remember we actually had a section in 'Golden Drum' where we pretty regularly took apart other Buddhist groups, criticizing them for this or that failing. I am not saying that there was no validity in any such criticisms but that they were contaminated by our triumphalism. It was interesting that this critical approach was never turned on ourselves. When the idea of a more balanced approach, one that included some acknowledgement of our own faults, was voiced, Bhante very stridently took a different stance. 'There is too much cynicism and negativity in the culture; the fwbo is such a bright star within an otherwise dark world that we need to praise it and rejoice in it'. One result of Bhante's involvement with editorial policy was that the writing in our magazines was programmed and bland, because so much messy real life experience was being edited out. The personal can approach the universal only when it honestly touches the pulse of a life. Golden Drum and its predecessor rarely reached beyond the parochial concerns of the institutions of the fwbo and the writing often had a smug, self-congratulatory flavour.

Like many others I questioned out loud the value and wisdom of such an approach. I remember the subject as dinner table conversation at Padmaloka with Bhante presiding. The rationale for this approach was that by acting in this way we would certainly put some people off but we would attract more people than we put off or at least would attract those who were robust, which was whom we wanted to attract. One should not waste time helping the weak. Nowadays it's the strong who need help (Peace is a Fire). If one was uncomfortable with this approach then it said something about one's discomfort with speaking out for what one believed in, one's unwillingness to stand up for the movement and its beliefs.

When Order members did start to venture out into the wider Buddhist world, those who had to do the connecting and befriending, some of whom had been exponents of this position, began to change their tune as they saw how unproductive it was to dialogue and exploration. Vocal and sustained criticism is not a good basis for beginning a friendship! Looking back there was a very powerful need for the FWBO and behind that really, for Bhante to be 'right'. We had the answers and it was only a matter of time before other Buddhists would see the light and learn the real approach to the Dharma from us. It's perhaps easy to recognize and understand this phenomenon from the realm of personal life-the overly shrill assertion that attempts to mask one's own uncertainty about oneself or ones capability in a given situation. We were the fledgling tradition trying to establish itself, the 'new Buddhists on the block'. We acted as if we hadn't been socialized very well and didn't know how to find our place in the wider community, how to both stand our own ground yet also recognize the autonomy of others and the possibility that we might have something to learn from them.

I am speaking historically, as with most of this article, and I recognize the good work that Vishvapani has done with making Dharma Life more accessible and relevant to a wider Buddhist audience. I also note that through the work of the communications office and the likes of Kulananda and now Dhammarati who are active on the wider Buddhist circuit that we are taking our place in the western Buddhist community.

Its not about sex, its about Power

I agree with others that the issue we face is not about the sexual exploits of our founder but about the issues of power, authority and authenticity within the WBO. I am not even referring to the power element inherent in Bhante's (teacher-pupil) and other Order member's (order member- mitra) sexual activity. The issue is more why was Bhante not challenged about his behaviour more? Why, when he was challenged and was unwilling to explain himself, was he able to get away with this? The answer is that he was a person with a lot of personal power. It's very hard to stand up against Bhante. But apart from that huge measure of certainty and self- confidence he also held a particular power by virtue of his position as founder, teacher, older male etc

The founder's personality and style inevitably effects what he creates and Bhante himself is cognizant of this in 'My relation to the Order'. We inherited Bhante's radical iconoclastic stance but also some elements of his personality that could be called controlling and autocratic. Both strands played themselves out within the order and movement. The paternalistic and prescriptive culture of the WBO and FWBO are the real problems, not that people messed up in the field of sexual ethics. The way influence worked within the WBO is a very complex and nuanced issue. We had the teaching of spiritual hierarchy and we had Bhante as the exponent. The teaching of spiritual hierarchy is a very tricky; one of those dharmic ideas that when grasped wrongly will turn and bite you. Hierarchy inevitably got mixed up with organizational position and indeed a case was made for their identification along the lines of organizational 'responsibility as a path of development'. Those in organizational positions of responsibility must be there because of their greater level of development. Really it was kind of difficult to see who was spiritually more mature than anyone else in the 80's within the WBO so this fluid concept got rather fixed. As an order member at least you knew you were effectively going for refuge and therefore more along the path than someone who wasn't ordained yet, right? I think that the order member to mitra/ friend relationship in this fixed form became rather unhealthy at times. I am sorry to admit that I have been a party to that style of relating and the consequent inappropriate and unhelpful behaviour on many occasions in my Order career. I have also witnessed both innocuous and downright unpleasant instances of such behaviour as I am sure have you. Order members wielding their little portion of power. Of course there were exceptions, people who naturally refused to operate in that way and good for them. I was not one of them.

For too many years the movement was virtually a closed system, impervious to criticism from within and without. Bizarre views could be maintained within the subculture of the WBO and FWBO because of the lack of genuine exchange of ideas with the wider culture, Buddhist and beyond. Indeed the very setting up of us versus or at least vis-à-vis others Buddhist, non-Buddhist, spiritual, non-spiritual, ' real Buddhists', 'confused Buddhists' played into this. This is the way cults function and I think that one could argue that within our 'movement' there existed some of the elements that constitute a cult. The normalization of bizarre views is one such component, and certain homogeneity or conformity of views is another.

As many have pointed out there was a particular dynamic inherent in Bhante founding the movement as a mature and very capable middle aged man surrounded by un- tried and un- tested young men and women. Don't those very early films of the Order show Bhante the Guru? And while he rejected the term, wasn't his influence profound and far reaching? This degree of influence was both for the good, but also it was very unhelpful. This played itself out in so many ways; the innocent and misplaced aping of Bhante's personal aesthetics- lists that emerged on the first Tuscany Ordination retreats about what works of literature were really worth reading through Bhante's idiosyncratic views on modern art and music. Remember those many books that came to prominence within the Order, and I do not mean the likes of Reginald Ray's 'Buddhist Saints' which I remember Bhante also commended to the Order. Bhante would come across something through his extensive reading and then put the word out about a certain book and we would find a book like 'Ball breaking' getting serious attention, finding its way into our bookshops. Center bookstore buyers were usually compliant to these suggestions. Books were taken up from the wider culture that echoed Bhante's positions and their very marginalisation within the wider culture was almost seen as a kind of proof of their radical vision and veracity. The crude, pugnacious 'Ball breaking' made strange bed- fellows with the leaden prose of 'the closing of the American mind'; what linked them was that they were offered as correctives to various aspects of the all powerful and insidious 'pseudo- liberalism'. I readily confess that I ran with the pack and stocked my bookshelves with these offerings.

I am not 'blaming' individuals for the above, but I am saying that all of us, as a collection of individuals, are responsible. We created the culture of the WBO or actively or tacitly supported it. I am also saying that we need to be on guard for the abuses of language and power, both within ourselves, and the organizations that we create. Individuality is one of the most powerful checks to this. People knowing who they are and standing their ground, speaking their truth. We need fundamental changes in the culture and perhaps the structures of the WBO. The sense I have of the Preceptors College, admittedly from a distance, is of a body of people only gradually coming to the realization that what they were doing wasn't working and wasn't going to work and needed to change. I have the sense that, while realizing there was a real issue as to how the Order would accept them in place of Bhante, they tried to fill a Bhante shaped hole and carry on in much the same way. I get the sense that it is Subhuti who has been the creative force recognizing that this would not work and that change was necessary. The College can't lead the movement. The regionalization idea is a move in the right direction but there probably needs to be a much more radical 'devolution' than that of the structures of the F/WBO. However it's notoriously difficult to bring about cultural change alongside structural change within institutions and organizations. People within them resist change. This is a truism of the business world where such change is at a premium and is actively promoted, implemented and chronicled. I think that we are no different, simply because we are Buddhist and therefore supposedly ok with the idea of impermanence and change. We need to examine our assumptions and patterns of behaviour and think about making some big changes in how we conceive of the Order and WBO. I think that this is the real challenge of the WBO and I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that we will do it. In fact I think it's more likely that we won't!

Language and conformity

I am not sure that I have the language tools to say what I want to say in this section, but I will give it a try.

The use of language within a group is an interesting phenomenon. If you visit any group you notice immediately the style of language, the topics, ways of talking and jargon that defines that group's outlook. The WBO and FWBO is no exception. Buddhism, of course, through its history has had a very subtle awareness of the limits of language, its uses and abuses and Bhante has that kind of awareness of language. It's interesting to me that we had the language of 'the individual and the group' so well articulated for us with its distinction of 'spiritual community' versus 'the group' and the categories of 'individualist' and 'conformist as enemies of 'true individuality' etc. The usefulness of such categories is that they enable you to make distinctions. This is surely one of Bhante's strengths in articulating the Dharma. Yet somehow we didn't apply the terms to discriminate accurately. They were often bandied about pejoratively and the emphasis was placed largely on the dangers of individualism and individualists. The term 'individualist' was used as a cudgel to dismiss an argument or a person. I don't remember much being said within the Order about the ever-present dangers of conformity, except when it was criticism directed at external institutions or an historical analysis of Asian Buddhist culture.

This is very understandable. In the desire to create institutions and engage in collective endeavour co -operation is highly valued. Many people, in their exploration of the early fwbo culture and gender split, have pointed to Bhante's ability to channel the energy of the movement's young men into building, both literally and metaphorically, the institutions of the movement. I located myself very much within this main strand of fwbo praxis. It's obvious to me now that I have conformist tendencies. I like and function well within an ordered and structured situation that has a clear hierarchy. I felt very at home within the FWBO with its systems and structures. I was dismissive of those who struggled with the forms, what's the problem, why the whining? I felt very certain about what I was doing, what 'we' were doing and those who were uncomfortable with that were in the wrong rather than perhaps having a different perspective to offer. I feel that there was a lot of marginalisation that went on within the fwbo culture and language played a powerful role in that. By the very creation and use of a well-defined set of terms, certain discourse was possible and certain other approaches could not be heard because they fell outside the style of discourse. Much of the FWBO discourse was polemical. Certain points of view were not valued and appreciated, certain views were. This is of course inevitable in a group, its how a group maintains itself, but weren't we the spiritual community? We acknowledged that we fell short of that ideal at times but I don't think that we paid enough attention to the power of conformity, the need to belong. Didn't we confuse the fact that we could talk about these issues with the application of them? If you have lived within the fwbo since your twenties its quite a difficult thing to contemplate stepping outside its comfortable structures and be out in the cold world on your own. I think the fear of not belonging has played and still plays a conscious or unconscious role at times in peoples unwillingness to seek change in the structures and culture of the FWBO and thus a willingness to go along with the status quo.

I am using the world 'culture' rather loosely. I acknowledge that the FWBO was a complex phenomenon but I reject as naive the notion that there was no specific culture with 'in' and 'out' 'main stream' and 'marginalized' within it. One could also usefully talk in terms of 'sub- cultures' within the broader fwbo culture. I heard second hand that Danavira had used the term 'canteen culture' to try and talk about the way that a sub culture was a reality within the wider fwbo culture. I think it's taken from the world of the police force where the institutional racism that exists within the force, while not being openly acknowledged in official communiqués, finds open expression within the informal world of the canteen. I think that a number of such sub cultures existed within the Order with regard to misogynist views about women and the spiritual efficacy of homosexuality for instance. These views had a whole language system that supported them and I think here Bhante's use of language was rather heavily polemical and value laden. Of course there were different tables within the canteen and no doubt different types of conversations were happening at different tables.

Of wounding and the shadow: maybe it is about sex after all!

One strand of the shadow idea is that the bigger (psychically) the person is, the bigger the shadow. A big personality, who stands in the light of the sun, can see with and display the clarity of that Apollonian light/quality. But since they stand in the light they inevitably cast a shadow and that falls on those close around. In Jungian terms the shadow is that element of themselves that they are unaware of, that they do not wish to acknowledge. One might usefully ask what is that for Bhante?

Well one element of that seems to lie in the area of sex. A man who has a natural appetite for sex with the same gender is commonly considered a gay man (the sophistication of Jnanavira's level of analysis of sexual orientation and identity aside). Bhante has never acknowledged that he is gay to my knowledge. Certainly never publicly nor in any order contexts of which I have heard. Rather, I have heard many weird rationales that are supposed to explain how he isn't really gay, quoting Plato etc. The simple fact is that Bhante was in the closet and he was and is a closet gay and that, as we surely know has particular consequences the secretiveness, denial and silence that go with the territory. Yes it was an 'open secret' but isn't that such a revealing term? Wasn't it strange to have everyone else on an ordination retreat practicing celibacy and one's teacher talking of the benefits of celibacy when one knew he shared his bed with his young companion, as on the Tuscany Ordination retreats. So if this is shadow for him and those around aren't really seeing it and acknowledging it doesn't it become a 'collective shadow' of the Order? I am perhaps going beyond the bounds of the way this term is usually employed in Jungian circles in invoking a collective shadow.

Of course having Bhante's shadow revealed is very challenging, not just to those who thought him to be without one. When extreme emotions like rage and blame come up, as they have in the pages of Shabda, we have to ask what is going on? Could it be that looking at someone else's shadow begins to turn us in the direction of our own? A move against doing so is to stay with the emotions of anger, betrayal and then find a scapegoat in the effort to keep that mucky stuff at a safe distance from association with us. Another defensive move is good old denial, to say, well there isn't really a shadow there at all and the more insidious version of that, well of course he isn't perfect, I never thought so and anybody who did was just being naive etc . I have noticed this move in some reports and I think its an attempt to block further examination and get back to 'business as usual' with no need for self-examination.

This denial of the fact that there is something wrong and that people are saying so rather loudly reminded me of our 'non-elected' President Bush's statements about the biggest co-coordinated anti-war demonstrations that world has ever seen. In one speech he argued that the fact that people are able to protest proves that the American system of democracy works. In the next sentence he said, of course I don't listen to those people . This was said without irony. I think that we have some work to do looking at our individual and collective shadow and I think that this is really serious work that we have to do or we will continue to display signs of disintegration as a collective, continue to be unconscious of important aspects of our collective life. The psychological language of 'wounding' is another way to get at some of the same territory though I know it will make some people cringe. This language of wounding that is present in some strands of modern Psychology has its roots in the archetypes of the old religions, such as Greek mythology. Chiron is the wounded healer in the Greek tradition and Asklepios his pupil is the source of the alternative healing tradition to Hippocratic medicine.

The basic idea is that we all have psychological wounds that we receive in our early life. This wounding mars us but it can also become a place from which our talent in the world emerges, our capacity for healing of others. If the nature of the wound goes unrecognized and steps aren't taken to heal its at this very same point that the parent will wound his children. This is one way of explaining patterns of alcoholism etc. that get passed down generations within families. If we say speculatively that an aspect of Bhante's wounding has been in his sexuality if it has not been healed we could look for a wounding in that same area in his offspring. Biologically we are not Bhante's children but psycho-spiritually speaking perhaps we are. In various talks on anniversaries marking the founding of the Order he spoke of the Order coming into its majority etc- metaphor of course but with a certain psychological truth to it. That wounding is surely clear in the history of sex and gender relations within the Order and its current legacy.

The way that relationships, sexual or otherwise, between genders were treated in the fwbo was pretty screwed up. There wasn't an acknowledgement of the real possibility of a sexual relationship as a healthy, positive thing. The notion that any meaningful friendship (read spiritual friendship) was possible between the sexes was held up to ridicule. Maybe, if you were a very senior and responsible Order member who had lived in single sex situations for many years, you might just be in a position to work along side like - minded member of the other gender, provided you didn't have too much contact or some scenario like that! Heterosexual relationships were continually critiqued yet most of us were in them! 'That's why they needed critiquing' the die-hards will no doubt say but it led to bizarre situations; meetings with ones lover often had to be conducted in rather sordid circumstances borrowing a place in order to be together, since both parties were living in closed single sex communities; Shabda reports that alluded tangentially to the presence of another person on a recent holiday. One had to know the code. In the arena of same sex relationships there was little acknowledgement that there was a comparable degree of emotional attachment involved. Since most of us were in sexual relationships of one sort or another why instead didn't we have teachings on how to be in them in a healthy way, if neurosis was the fear: Teachings like 'Your relationship should be at the edge of your Mandala' and 'Spend as little time as possible with your partner' etc. weren't all that helpful.

I think that we are going to have to make a radical shift in our attitude to gender in the FWBO and bring the genders more back into a dance together again. We have to clean out so many of the old entrenched ideas about the other gender within our order that I wonder if people are going to be up for a change to a more flexible, humane approach. Such a change has to come from both those at 'the top' but also from the main body of the Order. It involves risk but also opportunity. Perhaps from this wounding could emerge a powerful healing?

I am offering this psychological view as I have so far seen surprisingly little analysis of our situation in these terms. I acknowledge that I am not very learned in this area and I hope someone with professional experience in the Jungian psychological approach will write in this vein. We need different models and tools of analysis, different styles of discourse in order to try and objectify to ourselves what happened and what we need to do now to move forwards So in this vein of psychological musing I wonder likewise whether the championing of the Apollonian (and Bhante is surely Apollonian in his approach) and the distrust of the language of 'depth' 'shadow' 'wounding' and the depth psychological perspective in general was not an unconscious defense against our own shadow side, the repressed aspect of the fwbo. This is obviously speculative but is suggestive of our current situation. We are definitely experiencing the 'return of the repressed'.

I know the argument goes that this type of discourse is not the authentic language of the Dharma but this doesn't really hold water as neither is a lot of the language which is part of the fwbo accepted canon. The pronounced anti psychology stance of the FWBO will lead to our marginalisation in communicating the dharma. Psychology is one of the dominant strands of modern thought and shaking a stick at it isn't going to make it go away. I would like to encourage all those who have felt their voice to be marginalized within the discourse of the fwbo to speak their minds over the coming months. I would especially like to hear from Order members who have been involved for many years and have raised families as a couple.

A growing sense of freedom

The WBO &FWBO is obviously experienced as a strongly conditioning environment. At times this is experienced as oppressive especially it seems at certain periods of growth and transition hence the regular phenomenon of order members who were experiencing some crisis of involvement/ meaning/ leaving the situation they were in and heading off to other parts of the movement that were seen as more liberal or had pockets within them that were like that. At varying times Bristol, Brighton and the perennial hinterland of E London have served this function for people. I now understand the phenomenon as I have taken the same steps, at first only vaguely consciously. I know that I feel so much freer out here in the US to explore and experiment how we do this Buddhism stuff and certainly at the moment can't see myself being able to live in the UK and participate in the UK FWBO. I know that the constraints are within myself, but that's not the whole story is it? Considering as a Buddhist movement we are all about personal change it seems that at times we don't really understand the process of personal growth that well. Within the WBO and FWBO we need to cultivate a much more open attitude to what spiritual life is, what it looks like and how we communicate its vital essence. Great spiritual movements, innovations within an old tradition are said to take a generation or two before they decline into formalism and dogma. We have managed to do it even within the life of our founder! My own experience of moving and living in the US has been incredibly instructive for me and has to some extent provided a painful liberation from my enmeshment within the fwbo. I want to share a little of that personal experience in the hope that it touches on wider themes that those personal to me.

When I moved to San Francisco USA in 1998 I was shocked by what I perceived as the degree of alienation from the UK fwbo that I experienced in the Order members there both British and American. I found the expression of this in the critical stance that was expressed about many aspects of the Order and fwbo disturbing, painful and undermining. The alienation felt by US Order members in SF was no doubt a complex phenomenon but stemmed in some large part from their feelings about 'WM&A' and how their concerns about this were brushed aside. It does require quite an act of imagination to identify with the order as a whole and the US OM's knew relatively few of those reporting in shabda or the concrete specific world they described of communities and Right Livelihoods and Order weekends. Shabda is very UK-centric, not surprisingly, but rather unconsciously so. As to the UK OM's and their alienation from the fwbo as well, that was rather long-standing and no doubt exacerbated by the distance and the phenomena I am attempting to describe.

After living and breathing the diversity of SF I began to see the fwbo from a different perspective. Its self-inflation was cut down to size by being surrounded by other Buddhist groups that had a much higher profile within the culture. I found the natural iconoclasm of Paramananda both maddening and fascinating at the same time. The same was true of the fiery and funny Suvannaprabha (Lisa at the time) who had the sometimes-thankless task of 'de-conditioning' me as 'fwbo cult member'. The American Order members such as Viradhamma were eloquent in their disagreement with certain FWBO doctrines whilst being very inspired about teaching people the dharma. I found this very confusing.

I remember championing the showing of the newsreels. They used to come to the center and languish upstairs in the guys flat. I felt that we needed to start introducing these at Sangha nights to let people know that they were part of something bigger, to counter the isolationism and parochialism of the SF Sangha. However after a while watching newsreel upon newsreel filled with images of buildings being converted to house new centers and interviews with earnest OM's who had founded this new center etc. I began to find them vaguely disturbing. The fwbo in the UK began to resemble the white picket fence world of David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet'. You were left with the sense that this was such a bland, happy presentation that something else was lurking in the background, a vague smell that wouldn't go away, a muffled cry in the distance, but no, surely not? There was the white picket fence after all-This is an American cultural reference- goes with 'home made apple pie' etc

My time in SF was very painful psychologically. I experienced intense isolation, and a disorienting loss of faith and direction. The fwbo to which I had committed myself so whole-heartedly now didn't fit and even felt limiting and constricting. Who was I, if wasn't a 'full on' Order member? What was my vision for my life? The issue of autonomy and authenticity became paramount. Vipassi mentions the psychological phenomenon of 'engulfment', which sounds a little like what I am trying to get at. In the end I didn't feel that I had the resources in SF to deal with this breakdown of meaning. I didn't have the level of friendship to sustain me despite the presence of a very loving Lisa in my life at that time. Although it was painful I knew that I didn't want to return to the UK. At a gut level I knew that this process required the protection of psychological distance that was provided by the physical distance involved. I knew that I was only part way cooked and I had better not get out of the oven prematurely.

So I went to check out Missoula. When I got there I knew that Missoula was the right move pretty much straight away. I loved the natural environment and the scale and friendliness of the Missoula community. I felt very vulnerable and battered when I arrived and was warmly welcomed which meant a lot to me. I moved into the men's community and started to work at Tipu's. This felt very comfortable at on one level. I was back in recognizable fwbo territory but I also felt a level of disquiet. Hadn't I moved to the US in part for a different experience of myself within the FWBO and wasn't I now re creating the same conditions that I had left behind at WT. Still it was great to belong again and feel useful and for a little while I did and was.

The UK problem

I have come to think that the fwbo in the US has a problem and that is the UK fwbo! Well to be more fair it's the lack of reflective self-consciousness of the UK fwbo. This is not new. I remember hearing in the 80's that some people at Aryaloka felt that the institutional expression of the single sex principle might not work in the US. This was scoffed at and seen as a product of the immaturity of the Sangha here. Those from the UK knew best. Well the news is they (and I include myself) don't! They haven't a clue as to how the culture here works and how the fwbo, if it is to survive here, will re- create itself. I have found that in moving here I have had to engage in a double process of acculturation, one to the broader US culture and the other to the US fwbo culture. The latter has presented the biggest challenges and so the greatest benefits. The spiritual experience that those from the UK have by virtue of practicing longer only translates in any useful way to the degree that it can be separated from the specific conditions in which it arose. The ability to drop ones agenda and assumptions and look at the situation that faces you afresh is a real test of what is real spiritual discernment and what is habit, dogma and assumption.

I find that those coming from the UK with the 'spiritual experience' seem to live in such a solipsistic fwbo world that they sometimes can't make the leap into the actual experience of the new situation with which they are faced. The reference point of such visitors is always the FWBO institutions in the UK and to what degree the US situation is successful in re- creating them or not. One example that I am familiar with first hand is the extremely unhelpful expectations that rode on Tipu's as the great hope of Right Livelihood in the US. The situation was not seen clearly in its own US context. It was constantly being 'propped up' by visiting OM's as it lurched from crisis to crisis. The expectations on this business helped in part, because of the added pressures that accompanied them, to bring about its very failure as a Buddhist business. It was set up to fail.

This all leaves me in a bizarre position with regard to the ordination process here. I am happily teaching at the center and encouraging people to get involved with the FWBO but I feel ambivalent about the Ordination level of things. I was heartened at the last US Order convention last year by the new tone that was communicated by Sona and others from Madhyamaloka about deepening and broadening the order. It made me feel that I could find my place within the order once again rather than consider resigning I think this and the discussions of regionalism is a move in the right direction. The US Order needs to step up to the plate and the Public preceptors need to let them get on with it. The development of the WBO in the US cannot be led from the Preceptors College in the UK. At present we have the untenable system of UK order members coming out and trying to get to know postulants here well enough to become their personal preceptors: Untenable because it's way too clumsy and slow. The US needs US private and public preceptors and I think that there are American Order members who are up to being private preceptors and no doubt one or two ready to be public preceptors. Lets not wait too long again; you know how that went last time! As I write this fireworks celebrating the 4th of July are going off in the night sky.

I have a lot of hope for the situation here in N America. Last year's Order Convention confirmed for me that the Order in N. America has its own distinctive 'personality' and a maturity. It knows, or will discover for itself, how best to spread the dharma in the US. Of course it would be wise to seek support in that process from whatever quarter, be that the UK Order or elsewhere but not from sources that are ideologically rigid. We need openness as to how the Order and FWBO will evolve here, not prescription or comparison. There are many challenges within the culture to spreading the dharma, but it's in the interaction with that culture, on the deep level that those who live within it have access to that the opportunities will arise.

Well that's more than a few cents worth! I don't take what I say as 'The Truth'. It's a perspective and even as I send it off I am aware how partial and one sided it is. Even so, as something to stimulate discussion, it seemed worthwhile to send it. I am very aware that I make many more criticisms than I do suggestions for how to improve things. This is partly because I needed a focus and this article is more that long enough already and also cos its kind of as far as I have got in my thinking. Perhaps it's worth stating that I have not lived within the FWBO UK since 1998 and have visited less and less frequently over the years mainly for visa reasons and also as a natural process of settling here in the US. I read shabda, speak to friends and meet visiting order members when they are over, but it amounts to increasingly less contact with the lived experience of the WBO in the UK. So this account may strike those living there as being too extreme. I acknowledge that from the UK perspective it is probably a view from the edge, but as I have argued above, perhaps there is value in listening to voices from the edge. In another sense I don't feel at the edge, I am living my life, which for now, is also part of the unfolding of the WBO in America so I am at 'the center' not the edge. My life is rich with the ups and downs of a life fully lived. The process that we, as an Order, are going through makes me feel more connected to, rather than alienated from, the Order, however weird that may seem to some of you after reading this. People speaking their truth is what we have been asked for and debate and re assessment are is what is needed.

Some Reflections on Change

2007-07-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

Dhammaketu, Ghent, Belgium

First published in ‘Articles Shabda’, February 2004

On reading Shabda in an isolated spot like mine, one could get easily the impression the Order and the movement are almost collapsing. But on the European Chairmen's Meeting I am just back from I heard reports of growth and strength, corresponding to my experience: not just here in Ghent, but in all the centres I visit at times, I see the Dharma at work, and thriving sanghas.

In trying to make sense of these two - mutually exclusive - experiences of the movement, I had the idea they both go back to what essentially distinguishes the (F)WBO from other Buddhist movements, one following from living up to it, the other from departing from it.

What makes us different is Bhante's insistence on living the spiritual life, not as an compartment of life, but enclosing the full life in this civilisation, irrespective of life style.

And to me his most outstanding contribution to Buddhist thinking is that he saw the consequences of this in the relationships between those who lead such a life: he formulated the difference between a group and a spiritual community, and in doing so he added a sociological dimension to Buddhist thinking.

This dimension was absent in the civilisations in which Buddhism developed and prospered - as it was in ours up to a couple of centuries ago. Buddhist tradition has an immensely rich view on the spiritual development of an individual, but very little on his relationships with others who do the same. It offers an immense treasure of meditations and teachings for personal development, but spiritual relationship stays limited to the teacher-pupil relationship, or to essentially functioning in a group, mostly of monks.

Bhante spelled out the difference between a mere group member, who does what the group expects, and the individual, who engages in spiritual life out of his commitment. He pointed out the consequences of this for another dimension of life which is absent in the traditional analysis: communication. Truthful communication is dealing with one another as individuals, not as group members. And he spelled out the difference between a spiritual community of individuals and a group, however positive it may be.

Individual and Sangha arise wherever the dharma is practised seriously, it is not limited to the (F)WBO, but mostly this happens at a pre-conscious level, as a by-product of the spiritual life so to speak. The secret of the (F)WBO is that we foster this process consciously. This is what attracted me to the Order and the movement, from my very first contacts onward, this is what I see at work wherever I go in the movement, and this is what accounts for our extraordinary success.

Inversely, I am sorry to say, much of the moaning, doubts, hurt feelings, messages of doom and impending collapse one comes across seems to be largely the expression of the disappointment of group members, feeling wronged in what others did to them, and feeling the wrongdoers are not properly punished. In as far as this is the case, it has been fed by tendencies to establish groups - and not always very positive ones - instead of spiritual communities. The most devastating expression of this was found in Croydon in the 80ies, but Croydon was not an isolated case.

Falling back on the group and its norms is a tendency we all have - it is an expression of the third fetter, faith in doing the right things, turning means into goals - and we all have to keep working to avoid it taking over. This tendency is conspicuously present in our structures, and I am afraid this is partly a negative inheritance we have from Bhante.

From the beginnings of the movement on he set out to coach people to live up as individuals, and encouraged them to set up structures that would underpin this life: the 3 C's (Centres, Communities, and ‘Coops’ ie Team-Based Right Livelihood businesses), the single-sex principle, no other teachers.... In the early years of the movement these were highly helpful - if not even downright essential - to the great majority, as he was starting from zero (or even from minus one thousand!). But their very success meant that they tended later on to harden into absolutes, i.e. into group norms, and gradually new ones were added, e.g. exacting criteria to become a mitra and a rigid ordination process, and the spiritual development of people tended to be measured by their compliance with them. And I am afraid Bhante may not always have seen to what extent it was a group process, and may have encouraged it unduly.

(Just a footnote: what I describe was a tendency, to which there were luckily numerous exceptions, and me being an order member is a testimony to this. I was ordained in almost no time, although I was an irregular in absolutely all aspects of the group norm).

The present reform (2004) I see as growing out of these group aspects, which are in contradiction with Bhante's fundamental vision, and have lost all their supporting value. Replacing the ossified mitra system by a mitra community has been the first go at it, and by and large it had an enormously positive impact. And I see a few more changes of that kind to come or already on their way. Some of these are:

- stopping seeing the 3 C's and the single-sex principle as normative. (Read carefully, I have already been misunderstood on this point, I am not advocating getting rid of them because I do not like them!). The present growing disaffection with them is in all probability just a reaction against their normative imposition. They are valuable instruments, and I am sure they soon will be on the up again, but they will be taken up only where people experience them as helpful, not because they need to do so to get ordained fast, or something.

- seeing the preparation for ordination as a function of the needs and strengths of the aspirants, not as part of what a standardized ordination "process" has to offer.

- the establishment of genuine leadership within the Order and the movement. To develop ourselves and bring the Dharma to beings we need structures, and these need leadership.

Leadership is freely accepted by the true individual, because he operates out of trust instead of suspicion and fear of power. And it is freely given by the true individual who is entrusted with it, because he does not look for power or domination to prop up a self. To establish such leadership we all will need to get rid of negative group attitudes towards the "top"- both rejecting leadership, and slavishly accepting it - and those entrusted with it will need the courage to exercise it, especially when the going is a bit rough, as it is at the present.

These are a few reflections on what is going on at the present, and I hope they may be helpful for the future. May all beings be happy!

What is An Order Member?

2007-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Articles Shabda May 2004

Dhammaketu, Gent, Belgium

(Open to all)

Up to Bhante's full retirement the FWBO was a nicely structured, well oiled and well running machine, in which everybody had a well defined place. From a structural point of view, it was a pyramid, with controls very much at the top. The undisputed summit was Bhante, who acted as supreme watchman. Next came the Order, running things and keeping all strings securely in hand. Then came the mitras, non-officially but very really divided over three levels: first those who had asked for ordination, who had a clear program of things to be done to get ordained; then the old mitras who did not make it to ordination, were parked on a side track and eventually dropped out; and third the newer ones, who got attention as long as there were signs they might make it to ask for ordination. And at the bottom were the two classes of regulars: those who might become mitras and got attention, and those who would not, were sidetracked and eventually dropped out also.

All this gave a strong sense of security, and it was working quite well, as the astonishing growth figures testify: from very unpromising beginnings in 37 years to more than 1200 order members today, plus of course a few thousand mitras, a hundred Dharma centres reaching tens of thousands of people - and in India even far more ... . But since Bhante's retirement and especially since Yashomitra's article, this sense of security has gone. At the West-European Order Forum recently, I heard a very senior, highly regarded and deeply committed order member ask – “what it is to be an order member?” He was about the last one I would have expected this question from, but to him it clearly was not a rhetorical one at all. His question shows how deep and far-reaching the questioning goes, so I volunteer some reflections, not just about what it is to be an order member, but also about the order as a whole and its functioning within the movement. To understand both the past successes and the present state of questioning, we have to go back to one of the most weighty of Bhante's numerous fundamental contributions to present day Buddhism, both in the East and in the West: his emphasis on the Going for Refuge of the 'individual' - which happens to be also the foundation of our vision on the spiritual life in general, and on the Order specifically. I think that both what went well and what went wrong is connected to this, and so is the way out to the future.

Maybe we have repeated it so often, and often so unthinkingly, perfunctorily or at times maybe even dishonestly, that it may sound as a platitude, but the very foundation of what we are doing is just this: working at effectively Going for Refuge - and doing so as an individual.

Going for Refuge means somehow integrating the vision of the Buddha our lives. This is possible at various intensities and levels of stability, and as we all know, Bhante distinguished five levels we all know by heart, with only the first four being relevant at present.

At the bottom there is ethnic Going for Refuge: at its best this is living according to whatever of the vision of the Buddha has been integrated into the values and norms of the group one belongs to, and doing this in order to be accepted as a member of that group. Within the FWBO we tend to look down a bit patronizingly on this - unwarrantedly, because it is a very valuable thing. In as far as a group is inspired by the dharma, it will be a very positive one, and living according to its norms and values is highly beneficial. It is problematical only to the extent to which non-dharmic norms and values, or even counter-dharmic ones are mixed up with its dharmic ones.

But to live the spiritual life fully, we have to act as an individual: no longer to comply with group norms, but taking on shikshapadas, training rules, and acting according to them out of our personal growing emotional positivity and mental clarity. We start by trying out, with maybe still a lot of question marks and doubts, but definitely adjusting our lives out of our inner motivation. This phase Bhante has dubbed as 'provisional Going for Refuge'. And when we keep this going seriously and long enough, there comes a point at which the dharma is more and more becoming the centre of our lives and motivation, and we are able to decide this is how we will live on henceforth. And this is of course 'effective Going for Refuge'.

Now, according to traditional FWBO lore, ethnic Going for Refuge is typically found at the regulars level, provisional Going for Refuge with the mitras, and order members are distinguished by their effective Going for Refuge. But I think things are not that simple.

First, these are not three different and clearly demarcated levels, but rather three different mental attitudes, all three are still present in my mind, and I cannot help seeing them operating in others also. Our motives are mixed, we often act just as group members - luckily ours is an exceptionally positive group - , at times we have question marks and doubts, and only at our best moments we act out of inner clarity and positivity. These days [ie, in 2003] in Shabda we find ample evidence of rampant doubts and question marks within the order, and I think it even possible to meditate regularly, to be ethically decent and generally to be a 'good' order member when doing all this mainly in compliance to group norms. The only thing we can do about all this is working at keeping effective Going for Refuge the dominating attitude.

Second, this view about which level represents which attitude in Going for Refuge was formulated by Bhante very early on in the history of the movement, when the level of spiritual maturity was far lower than it is nowadays. When I hear some old stories, I have a feeling that some who become mitras nowadays are going for refuge far more effectively than was required to become an order member thirty years ago. And when I look at the practice of the majority of the mitras in Gent - including also the friends who will become mitras at next Wesak - I can testify the dharma is at the centre of their lives, they have no substantial doubts, and they have clearly decided this is how they will live henceforth - so they go for refuge effectively. Provisional Going for Refuge seems to be the province of some regulars and the people who came along very recently, and so is ethnic Going for Refuge..

I honestly think that effective going for refuge is no longer mainly limited to the order members and mitras approaching ordination. The old clear-cut demarcation lines do no longer obtain, and this has far-reaching consequences for the working of the movement. Bhante has always insisted, and very rightly so, that Buddhist movements should be run by committed people. In the early years the required level of commitment, stability and dharma knowledge was found only in order members, so we became a movement in which controls were kept tightly in the order. For a long time this has been a source of stable growth, but now it is becoming counter-productive. The great mass of effective Going for Refuge outside the order needs outlets to express itself, and it is noticeable that the most vigorous situations in the movement are mostly those in which mitras and committed friends are taking serious responsibilities. And instead of seeing this as threat or an exception to be avoided as much as possible, we should encourage it and create opportunities for it.

As the demarcation lines have gone, I think we need to get rid of the aura of exclusivity around being an order member and around the order. We order members are definitely not a special breed of Buddhists, we do not come back from our ordination retreats as new beings - in those of us who did not return as stream entrants the old person has not died at all! Maybe in the isolation of an ordination retreat we can whip ourselves up to believe this, but as soon as we are back in normal circumstances the old person just takes over - with post-ordination blues as a result. I sincerely hope the new ordination (non)-process will start dealing with this, and take down that wall, a bit in analogy with the dismantling of the old mitra system - which had a strongly invigorating effect on most of our centres.

Where does this leave us order members? When we no longer have the monopoly on effective Going for Refuge, are no longer running the show, and are no longer a special breed, where do we stand? Well, I see the order as the growth point of a movement which has set out to live an bring the dharma in forms which fit in with our culture, and we welcome into it those whose effective Going for Refuge is sufficiently intense, stable and mature to allow them to function at that growth point in our collective process of spiritual development. As for those of us who are already in the order, this means we have to keep growing, otherwise we will be overtaken and left behind. A tree has to grow to full maturity, and if we content ourselves with stagnating at the point we have reached, we are turning ourselves into a kind of bonsai order member - very decorative maybe, but rather useless this world needs more from its trees and order members.

In keeping growing we will be able to do what is most needed : instead of concentrating on running things ourselves, it will often be far more effective to concentrate more on being a kalyana mitra to all those who are ready to do their bit of work, and to operate as much as possible as givers of inspiration rather than as managers. To some characters such as mine letting-go of control does not come naturally, but it is a fine exercise in letting go of self-view - and maybe also a bit of a test of how seriously we are working at that. This does not mean we should stop doing things ourselves, there is quite a lot we still may have to take on, the need is to change our attitudes in this respect.

And of course, it is very unlikely we will in this life run out of personal growth opportunities. In our line of business, full maturity is Awakening for the sake of all beings, so we may kept busy for a few more lives or kalpas. But according to our teacher the first decisive step in that process is not that far off: real Going for Refuge, Stream Entry or the Awakening of the Bodhicitta. I still think, as I wrote a year ago, in the long run effective Going for Refuge is sustainable only when our perspectives are not limited to good meditations, good actions and being a good order member generally, but go for the next step in realising the full vision of the Buddha: Awakening, for the sake of all beings. In other words, in order to stay effectively Going for Refuge, we have to set out for that real Going for Refuge, not just by ritually repeating the words, but by acting on it, however inadequate our stumbling steps may seem. And only that, I think, makes us into real order members.

A Note on Revision of Bhante's Teachings

A couple of Shabdas ago Saccanama started a thread on the need of having a fresh look at Bhante's teachings. I intended to send some reflections on this topic also, but this article illustrates how I look at this question, so a short notice at the end of it will do.

Over the 16 years I have been involved in the FWBO, 9 of them as an order member, I have read extensively in Bhante's enormous output of books, talks, etc. In them I have found a lot of very inspiring insights for my life as a committed Buddhist in post-industrial Western Europe at the turn of the 21st century, and very little I did fundamentally disagree with - his interpretation of the Buddhist tradition about women and the spiritual life being the only instance coming to mind now. But especially recently I have noticed there are quite a few bits and pieces which do not fit any more. And when looking closely at them, it turns out they are sometimes just expressions of Bhante's personality or even idiosyncrasies or, more often, they were said in situations which are quite different from the present one.

So I have started to read Bhante with the eye of higher criticism. When I come across something which does not seem to fit, I ask a few questions, such as:

- in how far may this be an expression of the author's personality?
- who were the people to whom he said this?
- what were their needs at that time?
- in how far are these needs still present in our situation now?
- in how far are the means he recommended then still available or appropriate?
(This is just a sample; other similar or more detailed questions may be asked)

This is a powerful instrument for sifting, not the chaff from the corn - I have come across very little chaff in my reading of Bhante - but the universally valid general principles from what is circumstantial and no longer applicable in the present situation. It is not likely we will always all give the same answers to this kind of questions, but I think we have to ask them again and again, if we want to avoid ending up just parroting Bhante, with ironclad rules and immovable institutions cast in reinforced concrete - exactly the opposite of what he wanted us to be.

I have applied this approach in writing the above article, and I hope at least the questions will be useful for the further growth of our movement, even if we do not all agree on my answers.

Of the Shadows of the Past, and the Road That Goes On

2007-07-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

Dhammaketu, Gent

Reprinted with permission from Articles Shabda May 2003

Yashomitra's article in February Shabda is the latest of a series of events - mainly the Guardian article and its aftermath, and a series of resignations or considerations to resign of senior OMs feeling out of tune with the movement - which indicate we have not yet fully left behind the growth pains and even traumas of the early years of the Movement.

Now there are basically two unhelpful ways of dealing with traumas, and one helpful one. It is unhelpful to repress, to refuse to see, to cover up what has gone wrong, but it is equally unhelpful to keep them alive by constantly analysing them, finding more and more details, and more and more grounds for feeling unhappy about them. Helpful is to acknowledge them (which may need a fair amount of analysis), accepting they are a shadow on our otherwise impressive Dharma heritage, and then finding ways to let go.

I have not gone personally through all that, I am second generation, ordained in 1995, so for me it is relatively easy to write this. It will evidently be much harder for those of us who have gone through it, especially if there are still old wounds not properly healed. But we all have to deal with the shadow of the past, if not because of personal traumas and pain, at least because Bhante's attitudes to sex permitted some wrong views to develop within the Movement, which influenced our ways of operating in an unhelpful way.

In this article I will first try to clarify my thoughts about these Shadows of the Past, and then reflect a bit on the Road that Goes On - hoping we will walk it all together.

1. THE SHADOWS OF THE PAST

The present discussion is limited very much to questions as whether Bhante acted unethically, and whether things where covered up, and who were the culprits in what went wrong. I will not go into the covering-up question, I take the publication of Yashomitra's article and the present possibility of discussing the whole area fully and openly as the uncovering of whatever might have been covered up. And as for seeking culprits - and having them pay for it - I think this is not a helpful attitude; maybe it is just an attitude we carried over from our Christian past, and which I think we’d better leave behind. I prefer a more constructive approach: frankly acknowledging what went wrong, redressing whatever can be redressed, healing whatever can be healed, and getting on with what has to be done, hopefully a bit wiser for the experience.

But the question of what went wrong is much farther-reaching than just the question of unskilful behaviour. There was evidently quite some unskilful behaviour going on in those early days, but to me it is far more important to dig up a few doubtful or downright wrong views, which were connected with the sexual mores of the day, and which influenced and hampered - and partly still do so - the way the movement operated.

1.1 unskilfullness on Bhante's part

Yashomitra's article put into the foreground the question whether or how far Bhante acted skilfully or unskilfully. This question is not unimportant, but I think it is essentially unanswerable, because skilfulness and unskilfullness are based on mental states, and the only judge in this is the person acting. Bhante says he acted out of friendliness, and whether this is true, or a rationalisation, or a mix of both, or whatever, he is the only one to know, and the only one to bear the karmic results, both good and bad. The question whether there was appetite present, whether a little or a lot, is really irrelevant: contrarily to our Christian conditioning, there is nothing wrong with appetite, it becomes unskilful only when indulged at the expense of others.

Vishvapani's moving article in the Threads section of April 2546 (see A Letter to Norman Fischer), which gives us a bit of a clue. It reads like the kind of story Bhante might have written himself, if he had been able to do so. I gather from it his sexual activities were largely the result of his needs for friendship and intimacy in a situation which must have been lonely to the extreme, and it makes understandable the idea that he really had the feeling of acting out of friendliness.

But there is more to it than the question of (un)skilful behaviour. It is quite evident in this situation he developed a blind spot - in stark contrast with his usual clarity - to things that were essentially in contradiction with his vision of the Dharma. In the first place, a blind spot for the projections of probably quite a few of the youngsters involved, and of their inevitable suffering when left behind. It must have been very deep indeed, looking at Yashomitra's article, written more than twenty years after the facts. I felt deeply sorry when I read it, in the first place for his suffering and the suffering of probably many others, but also for Bhante, for the OM who insulted Yashomitra when he left Aryatara, for Padmaraja, for all those wounded in Croydon and elsewhere. We cannot take away the suffering, but we can acknowledge it and respond to it with metta, which takes the aspect of karuna in this context.

And in this way I am sure we can help those who suffer(ed) to leave it behind.

1.2 Wrong Views

However detrimental to the Order in itself, these possibly unethical actions and the suffering they caused are not the last thing, but only the consequence of something even more disruptive: a set of doubtful and sometimes downright wrong views about sex and the spiritual life which developed implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - in the wake of the sexual practices, views to which Bhante developed a blind spot also, or maybe encouraged, tacitly or even explicitly.

As late as 1992 or 1993, on one of my first GFR retreats in Padmaloka, I heard someone affirming gay sex is better for the spiritual life than straight sex. By then I was well aware of Bhante's sexual preferences and former activities, and of the general (F)WBO attitudes to homosexuality, which I shared and still share - although I myself am as straight as they come.

But to me this statement sounded simply absurd, and I thought it was just one man's illusion, until later on I learned it was much more widespread, and at one time and in some places even was the dominant mood. Underneath and behind this opinion I discovered some other views, such as "homosexual sex is liberating" or "homosexual relationships are supportive of spiritual guidance".

Stated that bluntly, it is not hard to see they are simply wrong. Sex, whether hetero or homo or solo, is a hindrance to spiritual development, and a very strong one at that. In my experience, the best thing one can do with it is to keep it within ethical channels, and so avoid gross unskilful mental states - but even then there remain plenty of still quite gross but less evident mental attitudes present, such as mutual exploitation, violence, dependence, possessiveness....

It is only because the sexual experience is so violent that they seem relatively minor, but they are not. And they are in no way any good for furthering spiritual growth.

1.3 doubtful, or wrongly applied views

The above-mentioned views were rationalised by calling in other ones, some of them rather doubtful, and some applied wrongly. For instance, the view that homosexual sex is liberating was linked with the promotion of a doubtful entity called "manhood", and the view that homosexual relationships are supportive of spiritual growth/guidance was linked with a wrong application of an in-itself correct analysis of heterosexual relationships.

When doing the GFR retreat on Spiritual Friendship, I was thrilled with the subject (and still am), but I had no use whatsoever for some of the ideas proposed, such as "leaving the woman's world" and "developing manhood" - and not just because by then I was already 53. I felt then that it did not fit my life experience, but later on I began to see more clearly it is a very un-dharmic way of looking at things. It is making fixed things out of what are very complex mental and physical processes, which are widely different for different human beings. "Manhood" and "the woman's world" are, from a dharmic viewpoint, just as unreal as "soul" or "self", such 'dharmas' are nowhere to be found, and making them up and acting on them can be very misleading - and cannot but lead to suffering.

Such ideas may be or may have been helpful on the level of psychological development, but the development and liberation we strive for is of an altogether different quality. Using them beyond the sphere where they can be useful reduces the dharma to mere therapy, and using them to underpin the idea that homosexual activities are useful or even almost required to develop this "manhood" and thus further "spiritual" growth, is just asking for trouble.

Leading to trouble also were the wrong conclusions taken from Bhante's critique of the illusions our society has about romantic love and the family. I am a family man, and from a 35-year experience I can fully underwrite his misgivings about these two sources of all blessings and full happiness. This is probably the most widespread wrong view of our times, and as such a source of massive suffering. Single sex activities were the standard answer the movement developed to avoid or counter these illusions, and although they had their limitations they were by and large quite successful and spiritually helpful. But the same cannot be said about the illusion that homosexual relationships are, at least to a large extent, free from the faults of heterosexual ones, or even that they can support spiritual development: holding those views is also asking for big trouble.

1.4 A new light on the Croydon crisis

Rereading Yashomitra's article, the thought struck me that the FWBO’s Croydon crisis may have been the ultimate consequence of the wrong views we are reviewing here. This crisis, in all likelihood, was not just Padmaraja turning a guru and manipulating the Croydon sangha to this end, as it is usually presented, and as I saw it up to now. Yashomitra's description of the way he was treated (corroborated with what I heard before over the years from first-hand witnesses, mainly my good friend and kalyana mitra Bodhimitra, and my ordination brother Dhammasena and his wife Vijayasri) made me see the basic creed of Padmaraja's Croydon must have been this set of wrong views: homosexual Buddhism as the pinnacle of spiritual development, and developing "manhood" as paramount to developing transcendental Insight. They were present and must have done some harm elsewhere in the Movement also, but in Croydon they were applied undiluted and rigorously.

No wonder they left such deep wounds, even after all those years.

1.5 Men, women and the spiritual life.

It looks very probable that Bhante's sexual preferences have had a bearing on one of the most controversial issues in the Order: the question of the ability of women for the spiritual life. He has regularly pointed out that, according to the unanimous Buddhist tradition, women are at a handicap in leading the spiritual life. The fact is there, of course, but what does it mean?

According to the same unanimous tradition, the Earth is constituted of four continents around Mount Sumeru, which is 80, 000 yojanas high, roughly 400,000 km., and therefore well beyond the orbit of the moon. This example highlights the fact that not all tradition, even if held unanimously, is dharma: it has been clothed in the representations of the world current in the cultures and the times in which it spread, and sifting out dharma from culture has been the main task Bhante took on when he founded the Order and the Movement.

In fulfilling this task he has been hugely efficient, but on this point I am afraid he failed to do so. For in all the said cultures women were held to be second class beings - as, by the way, they were also in our culture up to a century ago. Among the Indian Aryans, they could not be warriors and they were too impure to be priests, in China they could not be Confucian scholars, so they had no part in the groups which made the spiritual discoveries of the Axial Age, and thus appeared as incompetent in such higher matters. All of this is culture, not dharma.

Dharma is the frank statement of the Buddha, made without any reservations or additions whatever, that women can, when they lead the spiritual life fully, reach as well as men the four aryan levels, from Stream-entry all the way up to Arahantship. And we have the Therigatha as a witness to their success. But this went so strongly against the grain of cultural preconceptions that very soon they were put back in their place, and pushed to the fringe of spiritual life, or even pushed out entirely, and so the truth of the cultural preconceptions was established again: everybody could see that women were no good for the spiritual life, that this was a men's business really. (Much of this is just jumping at the eye, as soon as one starts reading the relevant texts through the eye of higher criticism. I intended to do this for this article, but it takes some research I had no time for, because of the threatening deadline. So expect a sequel on this subject soon.)

And it is fairly easy to see why in this question the Buddha was right and the later tradition wrong. Just as there is not such a dharma as (superior) "manhood" there is not such a dharma as (inferior) "womanhood". Both men and women are just very complex bundles of processes, of skandhas, and for both of them the core processes are mental, at the level of the samskaras.

Both men and women have the same work to do: getting out of greed, hatred and delusion, and developing their positive counterparts. And I honestly fail to see any difference between men and women at this level.

There is a difference, though, but only at the material, rupa, level. Rupa is inextricably linked with the mental processes, but does not dominate them at all, at least not when one learns to handle the mental processes, which is what the spiritual life is about. The remaining, and real, difference is that rupa can influence mental processes in different ways, because of differences in hormones and brain functioning, but this is really a difference at the surface, not at the core of the matter, and it becomes more and more negligible the more one is effective in the spiritual life, i.e. the more one learns to handle the mental processes towards giving, love and clarity.

Happily, Bhante must somehow have seen there is no difference at the core, when founding a unified Order. But it looks later on the surface differences were overstressed, and when the single-sex principle was carried through so rigorously it almost developed into "apartheid" between men and women. This may have been a needed skilful means in the formative years of the movement, when the pioneers were learning to handle mental processes, but I hope most of us by now have developed this skill so far we can have a fresh look at it, as I intend to do further on.

2. THE ROAD THAT GOES ON

So having - hopefully - disposed of the shadows of the past, or at least indicated how we could handle them, I turn to the real subject of this article: what to do next? And there is an enormous amount to be done, not least because -

2.1 Our world desperately needs the dharma.

Greed, hatred and delusion are as rampant as they ever have been, but our world has lost its instruments to do something about them. Traditional religion, including traditional Buddhism, have been out-competed by science, technology and consumption, and so have lost their impact on society. The materialist "religions" such as Marxism and consumerism cannot fill the hole, nor does the fundamentalist revivalism in Christianity and Islam, who merely go back to the externals, not to the positive inspiration behind them, and preach hatred instead. And the whole of humanity is heading, in a mad race of greed, into ecological disaster and maybe into its own self-destruction.

To this madness I see only one possible remedy: the realistic and clear vision of the Buddha, with its penetrating insight in the functioning of the mind and its effective instruments to do something about it. This I see as an inestimable surplus value over any other teaching, analysis or way of life I have tried out before in my life (mainly: Christian monasticism, rational philosophy, Marxism, ecological life, and political action), and, having it tried out myself, I am confident it will work with other human beings also. But our world needs the Dharma not dressed up in the garb of pre-industrial oriental cultures - this can appeal only to a fringe minority - it needs to be translated into our (post-) industrial ways of thinking and living. And this exactly is what Bhante has set out to develop.

2.2 Bhante's position as our teacher.

So to me there is no shred of doubt possible about this: in Bhante's teaching there is such a wealth of clear thinking about the essence of the Dharma, such a wealth of insight into the practical applications, and such a supporting setup of institutions, all of it geared to the situation and the mentality of the industrial world. The consequences which were the result of his blind spots and human shortcomings are just a shadow on all this, but in no way diminish its value. They can easily be removed, and in doing so his teaching is not weakened, but strengthened. No other teacher I know of combines the same breadth with the same depth, and I would not be surprised if future generations recognise him as the most important Buddhist teacher of the twentieth century.

With many others, I deplore he has not spoken out explicitly about the shadows of the past, but I take his returning to brahmacarya himself and his renewed urge to us to move in that direction as an implicit distancing of them. And somehow I feel the Croydon debacle may have been a decisive element in this change of attitude, which to me is his real message in this matter.

2.3 A fresh look at our institutions.

Our Movement has largely been shaped by Bhante, so it is not surprising his personal preferences at times may have had a disproportional - but not necessarily negative - influence.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the standard Order Member seems to read literature, to go to art galleries, to have Blake on his bookshelf, to read the more imaginative Mahayana Sutras - and if one reads Greek philosophy instead, has no eye for visual arts, has the Bible and the Quran on one's bookshelf, and prefers the Pali and Prajnaparamita texts one can sometimes get the feeling of being a bit of an oddity as an Order Member. But Bhante himself has urged time and time again we should be individuals, not clones of a teacher, so we may need to have a look at our institutions and habits to see what is just Bhante, and to develop more oddness where it is called for.

The above examples are perfectly innocuous, but this mechanism has played also with respect to Bhante's sexual preferences and the views associated by them. Here I will limit myself to just one area which many of us feel the need of looking into, the "single sex principle".

Building further on my analysis of the fundamental identity of men and women with respect to the core business of the spiritual life but different angles at the surface, I think it remains sensible to provide some single sex activities. But contrarily to the accepted wisdom of our movement, the more we grow spiritually the less - underline, please! - this may be necessary! And the strict and almost mechanically applied apartheid from the mitra level onward needs to be broken down. I have no simple answer to what should be single sex and what not, we probably will need to work it out experimentally. Some activities are more likely to stay single sex, communities for one; but it may surprise you to hear intensive meditation retreats need not be at all - as I experienced to my own surprise on Varamitra's brilliant Dutch winter retreats. Doubtless this is because on them we worked so intensively at the core level at developing positive samskaras, that the surface effects lost most of their hold for the duration of the retreat.

Especially at the Order level something needs to be done. I hear that in bigger Centres Order Members who are not involved in Centre work may live almost their whole Order life without any contact with Order Members of the opposite sex, except for the meagre 4 days every two years at the mixed Convention. The newish Order Forums I experience as helpful in this respect, we could try having a longer mixed Convention (seven days each women - mixed - men?), and we could do with some mixed Order weekends also.

2.4 Taking our institutions further.

As Bhante pointed out frequently enough: because of the samsaric pull, standing still is sliding back. As long as we are not an Order of predominantly Stream-entrants, our task is to move on.

In March Shabda I pointed out this implies we need to go for a higher spiritual goal than just being good Buddhists and healthy human beings (another dharma nowhere to be found), we need to develop Transcendental Insight itself. And this has implications for our institutions.

The first 35 years of the Movement - I will call it the Bhante period - was essentially geared to developing an Order of committed individuals, taking the Dharma as their life guide. And it has been a spectacularly successful period: we have a large Order, an even larger Movement, and most of us are very different from what we would have been without this all, and the difference is unambiguously to the credit side. But our efforts and our successes have largely been limited to the psychological level, to building only the foundation for what the spiritual life really is for: Transcendental Insight, and our institutions are essentially serving this need.

Do not expect me to say now they have become obsolete; they will be needed probably for most of us for a long time to come. But when we mark up our goal, they will not be sufficient any longer as the growth point of the movement.

For this we need a new instrument: vihara-style communities, where people commit themselves to live, not just for an experimental period, but indefinitely - with the resolve of the Buddha who decided he would not leave the foot of the Bodhi Tree until death or until Awakening, whichever came first. (Luckily for us, Awakening came first). What is needed is full commitment, not for a limited period with the perspective of time-off for a sabbatical afterwards - and of course no time-off for boyfriends or girlfriends. As far as I can see, none of the present initiatives really fulfill the bill, not even the very laudable experiments at vihara-style life in Guhyaloka and elsewhere.

Even a few pioneers starting this could have an immense uplifting influence on the Order and the Movement - not just by living the life itself, but also by offering the occasion to share their life, for a weekend, a week, a month... to those of us who - like me - are not yet up to, or not in the possibility of leading this kind of life ourselves. This means the viharas have to be established not too far away from the inhabited world, hereby following the example of our Christian (and the early Buddhist) monastic tradition. The project Varamitra has set out for is of this kind, and I hope many of us will follow his example.

Unfortunately, to the great majority of us this is almost certainly not what we are ready for yet, but there are other ways of working toward Insight. Insight is Wisdom-Compassion fully interlinked, and one can work towards it from both sides. Vihara life is more to the Wisdom side, working among and for beings may be an alternative more from the Compassion side. And here I see two wide-open possibilities.

One is developing TBRL in the direction of vocational activities: old age care, hospice work....

This will have no easy start, as it needs highly trained people, and a commitment over a far longer period of time than what is usual at the moment, comparable to the commitment in the future viharas. I am glad some initiatives are already taken in that direction, and I hope they are the first steps to what in the long run should become the dominating form of TBRL in the Movement.

A second alternative is a consequence of what I wrote earlier about the world desperately needing the Dharma. During the Bhante period of the Movement, our Centres were - and still are - largely inward turned. All energies went into deepening the commitment of those coming to them. One could say, almost without exaggeration, the Centres were essentially the breeding ground for new Order Members. Consequently, almost all who came along and were not ready for that intensity dropped out sooner or later - both Friends, and Mitras who did not go on to ordination. Up to now, this was almost inevitable, because the danger of watering-down was lurking around the corner.

But I think we have come to a stage of development where we safely can start catering for the needs of those we had to leave behind before, and have a kind of "Buddhism-lite" activities suited to what they can handle. This our Beginners Nights and even our Regulars Nights cannot provide: they are far too much embedded in our habitual vision and so are just temporary stepping stones to higher activities. From what I hear, Buddhafield is working along those lines already, but we need much more: not just reaching fringe groups in our society, but offering something which can attract people from far more standard settings. One big warning here: this will work only if we set it up as a gift to the participants, not as a recruiting ground for the Order.

And an even bigger warning: it will work only if we keep our intensity intact - which means going on upgrading our spiritual life.

I hope these reflections will be of some use to you, reader. It was hard work getting them a bit coherently into my word processor, and some of them arose while writing, so they are not all as mature as I would like them to be. I will be glad to hear of any thought or reflection which might improve on them.

My e-mail is: dhammaketu [at] gmail.com

May all beings be happy.

Sexual Evolution

2007-07-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Dhammadinna
First published in Dharma Life 8, Summer 1998

In 28 years as a Buddhist, Dhammadinna, has seen or done it all. She recalls experiments in the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order around sex, celibacy and lifestyle and discusses how its collective experience has matured.

In the late Sixties I lived in a large commune of ten adults and four children. Some friends lived in a much looser commune where people didn't even have a room of their own, but changed rooms and partners on a nightly basis. The Sixties was a time of both genuine idealism and great naivety. Some of us believed, at least for a while, that anything was possible and that we could change ourselves and the world through love.

This was the era of free love, jazz, poetry and drugs; the development of humanistic psychology and the cult of free expression; the re-emergence of the women's movement and the advent of gay pride; the greater availability of birth control, especially the pill; and, from a background culture of drugs, the explosion of LSD to a wider public. It was a time of exploration and experimentation in many areas of life - political, philosophical, mystical and religious, psychological, artistic, musical, social, chemical and not least sexual.

Sexual liberation meant hedonistic, guilt-free sex: heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual, with one or a number of partners. From both humanistic psychology and drug experimentation came attitudes such as 'letting it all hang out', 'going with the flow' and 'if you feel like doing it, do it'. The positive side of this was a willingness to explore and experiment, taking nothing for granted. There was also a darker side induced by confusion, bad trips and sometimes descent into addiction, alienation and despair.

When Sangharakshita returned to England in the early Sixties, after 20 years in India as a Buddhist monk, it was with people from this counter culture that he found himself working. As the incumbent at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, he encountered a much more respectable section of society. But increasingly, the people he taught came from the 'counter-culture', and their energy and radicalism seemed to offer a basis for engagement with the transformative teachings of Buddhism.

In 1967 Sangharakshita founded the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) with the aim of developing ways of practising Buddhism that were appropriate in the modern world. From these beginnings a Buddhist movement developed. During the 1960s and '70s, the numbers involved in the FWBO were small. We were a 'circle of friends' attempting to put our ideals into practice and develop a new society based on Buddhist principles. Many of us were young and were willing to question and challenge all areas of life.

But times have changed, and some of the things we did in the past have given rise to controversy. Perhaps it is time to take stock; to look back on those early experiments, and consider what was learnt and what has been left behind. This means understanding the attitudes and activities of previous decades in the context of their time. We should be aware of the tendency to see the past through the eyes of the present: a time affected by Aids and by discussion of sexual abuse, as well as by political correctness and gender politics.

When I first encountered the FWBO in 1970 I was 24 and a hippy. I was in an 'open marriage' and, although I had personal sexual difficulties, I subscribed to the ethos that sex was a form of communication and it was open to each person to decide what they wanted to do. In my commune people had changed or shared partners, and I was not prejudiced about homosexuality or lesbianism, having friends of both persuasions.

In the FWBO people were of differing ages but many were young like myself and shared my ideas. When I first met Sangharakshita, he cut an unusual figure. He was dressed in orange robes, but had long hair and wore a Tibetan mala. He was also friendly and informal, although with an obvious air of spiritual authority and wisdom. Early retreats could be quite wild with people dancing and drumming on the lawns, engaging in drama or dream groups, forming and leaving relationships, as well as engaging in serious spiritual practice

Sangharakshita initially gave us a great deal of leeway, affirming our enthusiastic search for Truth, but he also knew when to begin to demand more. On the summer retreat of 1972 he introduced triple periods of meditation, long periods of silence, and an emphasis on mindfulness and reflection. After this retreat many of us decided to take our spiritual lives more seriously and formed the first residential communities around Pundarika, our centre in north London. And in 1973 I was ordained into the Western Buddhist Order.

Early in my involvement I wanted to go away and meditate for a few days and I chose a Tibetan Buddhist centre. The people there were friendly but referred to rumours concerning Sangharakshita and sex. I was not at all bothered; it didn't occur to me to check with Sangharakshita whether they were true. It struck me as a fuss about nothing. I had made a spiritual connection with Sangharakshita, and through him with Buddhism. He had befriended and guided me. I knew he wore robes for ceremonial reasons but less and less so otherwise.

I did not think of Sangharakshita as a traditional bhikkhu, and at that time I wasn't particularly interested in traditional forms of Buddhism. I trusted him. I had always found him willing to talk to me about all aspects of my life. He was sympathetic and helpful to me when my marriage broke up, encouraging when I practised celibacy, and understanding when I gave it up.

As our practice deepened my contemporaries and I in the WBO began to see that sex could cause a lot of confusion and be a distraction from Buddhist practice. Moreover we were beginning to realise that the romantic ideal - so prevalent in our western conditioning - could lead to dependency, and work against the development of friendships and a harmonious sangha (spiritual community). Reflections such as these led to the establishment of single-sex activities. This began with retreats for men and for women, but developed into the establishment of single-sex communities and 'Right Livelihood' working projects. By the mid-Eighties we came to feel that single-sex activities in all areas of practice were most conducive to spiritual growth.

Our decisions to practise within these single-sex situations and to question our sexual involvements and attitudes arose out of a desire to break our dependency on the opposite sex. This kind of exploration, however, was specific to the West; it arose from the need we felt to discover which lifestyles were most helpful at a time when conventions were being challenged. It wouldn't be appropriate in a more traditional society, where it might be unacceptable and undermine social stability.

My open marriage had ended amicably in 1972. Through forming other friendships and meditating I had realised how dependent I was on my partner, and I wanted to be more independent. I embarked on further relationships but soon became aware that I still had a tendency to emotional dependence. I wanted to experience myself single and alone, responsible for myself, with the time and energy to devote to my friendships and my spiritual practice. I also suffered from sexual guilt and I wanted some time free from that sort of conflict.

For me, moving to a single-sex lifestyle went along with giving up sex. For others it meant engaging in same-sex sex. Some people did this for a while, perhaps realising they were more bisexual than they had thought, while others discovered their true orientation was towards their own gender. Other people remained heterosexual, and still others became celibate. We were trying to break taboos, perhaps derived from Christian and social attitudes to sex, which sometimes resulted in irrational guilt. Some people began to speculate that homosexuality might be in some way more 'spiritual' than heterosexuality, because it was less likely to lead to domesticity and settling down. We also discussed whether spiritual friendship and sexual involvement could go together.

To what extent did these ideas derive from Sangharakshita? In assessing this I have looked back at transcripts of the seminars he led between the mid-Seventies and mid-Eighties. These were intensive and intimate retreats when Sangharakshita led the participants through a Buddhist text, discussing its meaning and its relevance to our spiritual lives. Seminars also provided an opportunity to discuss anything of interest to us. Sexual relationships, sexual orientation, gender, friendship, community life, and lifestyle were all crucial issues as we set up our new Buddhist movement. They were discussed openly and frankly.

These transcripts show how careful was Sangharakshita's thinking. In one discussion he was asked if he thought homosexuality was more 'spiritual' than heterosexuality. He commented that we had to consult our own experience and be honest, and he was not sure that there was less psychological projection in homosexuality. However, he suggested, men often fear expressing their feelings for each other in case they are seen as sexual, and this fear can lead to a general emotional repression. He thought that a man having strong feelings towards another man, even if those feelings are tinged with sexual attraction, need not mean he is homosexual. Sangharakshita concluded that spiritually speaking there is probably not much difference between heterosexual and homosexual relationships, and that we must be equally mindful in either. What is important, he said, is that we cultivate friendship, which will help us to leave sex behind.

In 1981 experimentation took another direction at one FWBO centre where a number of people decided to engage in friendly heterosexual sex outside committed relationships - in other words, promiscuity. This experiment involved very few people, did not last long, and soon people returned to being single, or celibate, or in settled relationships. Perhaps in response, Sangharakshita gave a lecture in 1982 on the virtue of fidelity. The lecture covered fidelity to oneself, to ideals and to other people. Under fidelity to others came the question of sexual fidelity and Sangharakshita outlined three possible modes: monogamy, promiscuity and celibacy. Each, he suggested, has a healthy form and a neurotic form. By promiscuity he meant non-continuity of sexual partners, in other words serial monogamy. He warned that people should be alive to the difficulties of each approach, and seek to avoid the dangers of neurotic attachment, distraction and so on.

Sangharakshita has always encouraged celibacy. He has stressed that people with a natural desire to be chaste should not be encouraged into sexual relationships by others who might think this more normal. He has also urged his disciples, as they get older, to start thinking of moving towards chastity. In an interview in Golden Drum magazine on 'Sex and the Spiritual Life' (autumn 1987), Sangharakshita discussed the powerful, sometimes destructive nature of the sexual drive and the need for those on a spiritual path to invest less emotional energy in sexual relationships.

He also expressed pleasure that more people were taking the Anagarika precept, which enjoins chastity. He never urges anyone to take this precept and Order members need not be celibate. 'One is only asked to keep one's sex life at the periphery, or towards the periphery ... But if one can be celibate ... in a positive and healthy way, I'm sure that will enable one - other factors being equal - to develop spiritually more rapidly.'

During the late 1980s and early '90s more men and women Order members took the Anagarika precept. Becoming an Anagarika does not constitute a higher ordination but it involves the precept of abstention from sexual activity (abrahmacarya). Some Anagarikas have maintained this precept while others have ceased to be chaste and reverted to their previous status. It seems that being celibate is not easy in the West, as the culture that surrounds us is so concerned with sex.

Sangharakshita maintains, however, that the extent to which we are caught up in sexual activity and craving is a matter of degree. In this sense we are all celibate or non-celibate to some extent, and he said that he would like to see everyone in the FWBO progressively moving away from sexual craving, and becoming 'more and more celibate every day'.

These then were the attitudes and examples that informed my own approach to sex. When I decided to end my sexual relationship and give up sex, I initially saw this as a matter of taking 'time out', and the first couple of years were helpful. But as time passed I came to think sex was bad and unspiritual and that I should give it up for good. To do otherwise would have been to 'fall back'. But I had not taken a vow, so in reality I was free to choose whether or not to begin another sexual relationship. This became painful and confusing when I started to experience sexual desire again, but it was also illuminating as I began to understand the extent of my irrational sexual guilt.

Sangharakshita was understanding. He said it was important with any decision to keep the initiative and that perhaps I had lost touch with my reasons for choosing celibacy. Some time later I started a sexual relationship. Over the years I have had a number of sexual relationships, interspersed with sometimes quite long periods of being single. The periods when I was able to be alone and still feel contented and happy have been important to me and helped my relationships to become less neurotic. At the moment I am single and happy with this state.

These days the FWBO is much larger: at first the whole Order could sit in one room and discuss its future in terms of principle and practice. It is harder to see what sexual attitudes in the FWBO currently are, except that they're varied. The average age of Order members has risen steadily, many of us have been practising for many years. We also attract more people with families, which has raised further issues. The emphasis on single-sex activities, community living and team-based Right Livelihood work has sometimes led people with families to feel marginalised.

This is an area of continuing discussion but recent years have seen many more family groups around FWBO centres. There is a creative tension in this area. On one hand we emphasise renunciation and 'going forth' from worldly life (with the institutions of the FWBO offering a practical means of doing this). On the other hand we need to help people in families to find ways of deepening their Buddhist practice.

I find it is now much easier to work with this tension. When I was a young Order member trying to set up communities and projects with few resources, I was sometimes alarmed if a team-member expressed a desire to have a baby. I could see the whole project collapsing. Now I find my greater life experience and maturity enable me to discuss such issues much more openly than in the past, and I can understand the experience of people with families much better.

Although there is now an undoubted ability to address such matters in the Order, sex and sexuality will continue to be an issue for a community that is neither lay nor monastic. In the FWBO there has always been discussion of sexual ethics - both in general terms and on specific issues. One key area is sexual relationships between Order members and the people they teach. Are these relationships exploitative? Can sex and spiritual friendship ever go together, or are they mutually exclusive?

Some people wonder if such relationships need to be governed by rules. But this would fail to express the spirit in which we approach ethical practice: we seek to understand the underlying principle expressed in the Buddhist ethical precepts, rather than proscribing particular actions. Furthermore in a Buddhist movement of the size and diversity of the FWBO - which is active in cultures as different as the modern us, India and South America - any attempt to dictate norms of behaviour could become enormously complex.

It is a mistake to regard an Order member in the same way as a therapist or a priest. An Order member is simply an individual who has made a decisive commitment to Buddhism, and who may express this by leading classes and retreats. However, people coming to learn will have expectations; and if sex is in the mix, it can be confusing. So this area needs careful scrutiny and discussion.

Personally I am convinced that the FWBO's exploratory approach to issues of sex and sexual relationships has been hugely helpful to me and my contemporaries. I have been involved in the FWBO for 28 years and have grown up within it. I have been both instrumental in and affected by its developing ethos. The FWBO's emphasis on spiritual friendship, going beyond emotional dependency, trying to make sexual relationships less central to one's life, thinking about ethics, and working towards celibacy have all had their effect on me.

I have been married, single, celibate, engaged in 'serial monogamy' and in periods of non-monogamy. I have tried to behave ethically and when I have failed I've tried to make amends. I have felt able to be open with my friends about sex and they have been honest with me. By working through strong feelings of irrational guilt about sex and Buddhist practice, I have freed up a great deal of energy. I certainly do not think everyone in the FWBO needs to experiment sexually. But I hope people feel they can be honest about who they are without incurring condemnation.

Particularly in the West, where there are so many options, we need to examine our sex-lives and make choices in accordance with our overall spiritual direction. As a result of our early explorations, we now have thriving single-sex teams and communities, which provide good conditions for serious Dharma practice. We have slowly - sometimes painfully - developed the maturity that enables people to discover their own path, and the lifestyle that best helps them to practise the Buddha's teaching.

How the FWBO Presents Itself

2007-07-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Paper for Representing Buddhism Conference, Institute of Oriental Philosophy European Centre, March 1999

by Vishvapani

1. Introduction
The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) is one of the largest Buddhist movements in Britain. To be more precise it is one of the three largest movements catering principally to Westerners, the other two being Soka Gakkai and the New Kadampa Tradition each of which gives its membership as 'several thousand'. Taking the numbers affiliated and the number of FWBO centres in the UK, the FWBO may fairly be said to account for between ten and fifteen percent of Britain's non-Asian Buddhist community. There is no doubt then that the FWBO is a significant aspect of Buddhism in Britain. However it is a disproportionately significant force in the dissemination of Buddhism, and in shaping perceptions of Buddhism in British society. The FWBO has always placed a strong emphasis on teaching and communicating its message and around 20,000 people a year learn meditation at an FWBO Centre or outreach activity in the UK. Many thousands more have contact with one of the FWBO's ancillary activities, such as hatha yoga classes or arts events, not to mention going into a shop run as one of the FWBO's 'right livelihood' businesses, or supporting its social work projects in India, through the Karuna Trust fundraising charity.

In addition, the FWBO's emphasis on external communications is evident in the three magazines it publishes, in Windhorse Publications the FWBO has its own publishing house, and there are two video production companies creating FWBO-related material. The work of the FWBO Communications Office, which is the UK's only dedicated Buddhist press office, has ensured that it has a fairly high profile in the media, and that members of the Western Buddhist Order are to be heard broadcasting on UK radio. I must confess my own role in this communicative zeal as I myself edit Dharma Life, the leading FWBO magazine, and am the Director of the FWBO Communications Office.

How the FWBO presents itself is therefore an important aspect of how Buddhism is presented, re-presented and perceived in Britain. But before it is possible to discuss FWBO this, it is necessary to ask what the FWBO is.

2. The FWBO's Stance
The FWBO conceives itself as a middle way within the transmission of Buddhism to the West between the approaches of transplantation and westernisation. By 'transplantation' I mean the approach of the many representatives of traditional Asian schools in the West, whose concern tends to be the transmission of 'authentic' traditions of Buddhism. The FWBO's approach is based on a belief that it is impossible to transplant developed Buddhist traditions from an Asian society into the West without creating many problems and anomalies. One will inevitably be importing a large amount of Asian culture which has no spiritual significance for westerners Therefore, as Stephen Batchelor argues, ‘adaptation is not so much an option as a matter of degree' for all Buddhists in the West. The question posed by Sangharakshita's writings is, on what basis does this adaptation take place, so that it makes Buddhism relevant to the new context, but does not compromise the integrity of the tradition?

At the same time the FWBO sees itself as distinct from the secularised and 'westernised' approach which understands Buddhism in the light of particular traditions of western thought, such as psychotherapy or socialism, drawing on it as a source of techniques and instruction. Those Buddhist movements that might be characterised in this way tend to me lay-oriented and to place a relatively low emphasis on affiliation. They also tend to emphasise meditation rather than engagement with the full range of the Buddhist teachings and practice. Sometimes it has been assumed that the FWBO's 'Western Buddhism' is an adaptation of this sort. However the FWBO is a very different body than, say, the Insight Meditation Society. It emphasises affiliation and tends to require a relatively high level of commitment; it teaches a systematic path that draws on a range of Buddhist practices; and it presents these in the context of the ultimate aims of Buddhism. It also stresses the roots of its teachings in the Buddhist tradition, and indeed its non-sectarian engagement with all aspects of that tradition. From the FWBO's perspective the danger of the secularising approach is that it may reduce the Buddhadharma to a set of ideas and techniques that ignore its soteriological dimension and assimilate it to a materialist worldview that is fundamentally at odds with that of Buddhism.

The premise underlying FWBO's approach is that the central insights and teachings of the Buddhadharma are extra-historical and universal, while the forms Buddhism has taken are historically specific and contingent. Sangharakshita expresses this point in his key teaching of the centrality of going for Refuge to the Three Jewels (the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha). 'Going for Refuge is the essential Buddhist act,' he says. For Sangharakshita this traditional formula, which is common to all Buddhist schools, encapsulates the spirit and fundamental orientation of Buddhism and the individual's relation to it. Being a Buddhist therefore means reorienting one's body speech and mind towards the values, qualities and understanding that are represented in the Three Jewels and to following the Buddha's path to Enlightenment. Because individuals do this to differing degrees it follows that there are different levels of going for Refuge. Practising the Dharma means learning to go for Refuge more fully. This same spirit is expressed in the core teachings that are common to all schools which emphasise that Buddhism is a path to Enlightenment, rather than a set of customs or injunctions regarding lifestyle.

The FWBO seeks to adhere to these central teachings and this timeless core, but to apply them pragmatically within the cultural context of its practitioners. This makes the FWBO's praxis varied and flexible in some respects and remarkably coherent in others. At the heart of the FWBO is the Western Buddhist Order, a community of nearly 800 men and women whose commitment is described as 'effective going for Refuge to the Three Jewels'. Their ordination is described as being 'neither lay nor monastic', and is based on the principle that 'going for Refuge is primary, and lifestyle is secondary'. Some Order members lead a fully monastic life, and practice chastity; others have families. But the commitment each has made to Dharma practice is the same, and it is for each individual to find their own way to live that out in practice. The FWBO is in one sense no more than the product of the joint efforts of those 800 people, and the flexible, adaptive forms they have developed in the FWBO are expressions of their responses to the circumstances in which they found themselves. This is the great virtue of the contingency of lifestyle in the FWBO, its middle way between monk and lay. As Andrew Rawlinson says, ‘Sangharakshita is equally critical of orthodox “cultural” monasticism and innovative “rational” non-monasticism. The FWBO is apart from - one might almost say, above - these extremes.’

From the point of view of its practitioners the FWBO is an expression of their own relation to the core of the Buddhadharma itself. 'How the FWBO presents itself' is therefore a secondary concern. Primarily its adherents are concerned with the practice and communication of Buddhism as they understand it, and with their personal Dharma practice. As Sangharakshita puts it, the work of the FWBO to spread its version of the Dharma represents 'the altruistic dimension of going for Refuge'.

It would be wrong to suggest that the FWBO has an overarching presentational policy, as particular expression of what it stands for reflect the individual approaches of particular Order members. Moreover the FWBO's distinction between the underlying principles of the Dharma and their cultural expression implies that these expressions should vary according to local cultures. The FWBO is now active in twenty countries, including such diverse cultural contexts as the Indian Ambedkarite movement and the South American bourgeoisie, and how it presents itself varies accordingly. Having said that FWBO centres follow broadly follow a common syllabus; they are based on the same core set of teachings; they attempt to co-ordinate their teaching work; and they fund collective bodies such as the FWBO Communications Office. In this paper I hope to suggest something of the variety of presentations of the FWBO, and yet also to suggest some of the principles and common concerns which structure these presentations.

As its dialectical relationship to other Buddhist movements suggests, the FWBO is built upon an awareness of the cultural and historical forces that mediate the expression of individuals' going for Refuge. Indeed it may be said that the over-arching project of the FWBO is the creation of a tradition of Buddhism that is genuinely at home in the modern world and Western culture. While Buddhists in the West may hope that an intrinsically Western Buddhism will arise naturally in the course of centuries, the FWBO sees it as something to be systematically cultivated. Sangharakshita has sought to outline the basis on which a Buddhist tradition may arise that is as much Western as Zen is Japanese, or the Nyingmapas are Tibetan.

The FWBO's role as an organisation is to make these principles manifest in institutions, ideas, lived experience and forms of practice, and these manifestations of Dharma practice are also presentations of the FWBO. Given its relationship with other forms of Buddhism, both Eastern and Western, it is natural that the FWBO seeks to avoid portraying Buddhism as an Asian tradition that is, however venerable and profound, culturally alien to the West. And it does not wish to present Buddhism as a system of philosophy, ethics, psychology or relaxation which may be easily assimilated to otherwise unchanged western lifestyles. It wishes Buddhism to be seen as a universal spiritual tradition, that applies equally to all ages, and transcends culture. It wishes to suggest that Buddhism has great relevance to the modern world and that its wisdom, and radicalism can be re-expressed within that world and make a profound contribution to it.

3. The FWBO's Representations
The movement that has grown up over the last 30 years as a result of this project is complex and multi-faceted, and the question of 'how the FWBO presents itself' is accordingly complex. I want to consider a few examples of FWBO activity to suggest this complexity a mediation class at the London Buddhist Centre; pieces of work by three visual artists; and Dharma Life magazine.

(i.) The London Buddhist Centre.

The principal way people encounter the FWBO and learn about its approach to Buddhism is through the activities of its urban public centres. Of these the London Buddhist Centre (LBC) is the largest and most fully developed. Several thousand people pass through its doors every year, and it has become a well-know landmark in East London.

The main teaching work of the LBC consists of meditation classes. Each week it holds one main introductory class on Wednesday evening, plus one or more six week courses, and a class every lunchtime. These teach two samatha meditation practices, anapanasati, or the mindfulness of breathing, and mettabhavana, or the development of loving-kindness which are typically taught in a single session. There are also follow-up sessions or courses that address topics such as how to work with the difficulties encountered in meditation, and the relationship between ethics and meditation. On average about fifty or sixty people attend the evening class, and those who decide to pursue what is taught there continue to attend for a maximum of nine months before moving on to a 'Friends Class', on Tuesday evenings.

The first point to note is the emphasis on meditation as the medium through which Buddhism and the FWBO are introduced. The implication is that the FWBO's teaching is related to personal experience, and especially to the experience of personal change. Thus Buddhism is not presented initially as an intellectual discipline, a movement for social change, or a devotional discipline in these introductory activities, although the FWBO contains all of these dimensions. Devotional practices are not taught at introductory level, and chanting and mantras come later too. When concepts from the Buddhist tradition are introduced in talks their practical import, and experiential significance is usually stressed, as opposed to their philosophical interest.

Secondly neither the anapanasati nor the mettabhavana requires any prior knowledge of, or assent to specifically Buddhist teachings. In this sense they differ from Theravadin Vipassana practices or Tibetan tantric practices, and this makes the FWBO's meditation teaching less overtly 'Buddhist'. However, there is no attempt to disguise the Buddhist origin and orientation of the meditation practices that are taught at the LBC. Classes are led by Order members who wear a kesa (a brocade indicating their membership of the Order), use their Pali or Sanskrit names, and take place in a shrine-room that is dominated by a large Amitabha rupa, albeit one with a Western face.

Similarly no expectations are placed on individuals that they will affiliate to the FWBO, or even that they have an interest in Buddhism. Peggy Morgan has contrasted the FWBO's approach in this respect to that of other groups in being both out-going and non-coercive. ‘I have found something of a middle way in the styles referred to above in the activities of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, who do actively initiate contacts and discussion, and seek to inform people, but who have never been accused of putting any undue pressure on people.’ However activities are carefully structured to allow a clear path of progressive involvement in the LBC, which also involves engagement in more specifically Buddhist practices such as puja (worship).

It might be said that at the LBC's introductory classes makes meditation is explicit while Buddhism is implicit. However the environment in which the class takes place gives an additional message. Around 25 people live in the building above the Centre in residential communities. Next door, and open before classes, is a co-operatively run vegetarian restaurant, and in the surrounding streets are several Buddhist-run shops, a café, the London Buddhist Arts Centre, and Bodywise Natural Health Centre. Indeed the LBC is the focus for a community of several hundred Buddhists. The shops, communities and so on are outward manifestations of the decisions of the people involved to live in an overtly Buddhist environment. These activities have been described as the seeds of a 'New Society', which offers an alternative to conventional social forms and is informed by and supportive of Buddhist practice. Their proximity suggests to the people attending meditation classes that the practice they are learning has social and economic implications over and above the purely personal benefits that meditation brings.

Many people attending the LBC's meditation classes have no interest in the FWBO, and perhaps none in Buddhism – they just want to explore some of the benefits of meditation. The Centre's teaching meets this interest on its own level, yet introduces other aspects of its teaching and practice which people are free to pursue if they want to. Buddhism is communicated as something that is not culturally alien, has a universal relevance, is accessible to people's lives and experience, and yet which implies a radical alternative. This tried and tested approach underlies all of the FWBO's teaching work.

(ii.) The Dynamics of Cultural encounter – Envisaging a Western Buddha
The second aspect of the FWBO's representations I want to explore is the visual arts, and this in turn suggests a further aspect of the FWBO project: it aspires to create a Western Buddhist culture, making links between the western artistic heritage and Buddhist practice. I will look at work by three Order members, Chintamani, Aloka and Dhammarati, and for the sake of simplicity I have chosen three treatments of Buddha or Bodhisattva images in three different media: sculpture, painting and graphic design. Each of these men is a senior member of the Western Buddhist Order, Chintamani was ordained in 1973 while Aloka and Dhammarati were ordained in 1976). Each of them produces distinctive work that attempts to articulate a visual language for Western Buddhism.

(a) Chintamani's Amitabha

A bronze Amitabha rupa (cast in 1996 from an original in the Essen Buddhist Centre in Germany) dominates the main shrine room at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. It is in full-lotus posture, and rather than the traditional dhyana mudra, its right hand holds up a lotus. In other respects it follows the principal iconographic conventions that have been used for two millennia. But the eyes are rounded and its strong-featured face has a distinctly European cast.

Dharmachari Chintamani is the Chairman of a charity called FWBO Arts, which seeks to encourage engagement in the arts within the FWBO, and for a number of years it has run the London Buddhist Arts Centre in Bethnal Green where Chintamani is based. His early training was in theatre design, and his rupa is dramatically conceived as a focal point within a public space, which arrests attention and provide the room with a dominating presence.

This rupa, like others by Chintamani which are to be found in several FWBO centres, is based on a synthesis of Buddhist and Western influences, as well as an element of personal interpretation. If one were to relate it to an Asian tradition it would be most associated with Japanese Amitabha sculpture. In a western context the musculature and face connects it with Greek and Roman classical statuary and the tradition of heroic sculpture that derives from it. The drapery is more realistic than the stylised cloths of Asian sculpture, and less so than the super-realism of Hellenistic art and much sculpture of the classical Greek period. The result is a reduced realism that connects it with western traditions, yet emphasises the archetypal quality of the image. Similarly the musculature is based on the western tradition of anatomical observation, but it is less pronounced than in classical models, reducing the heroic quality of the piece, and softening its lines. In this respect it differs from another Amitabha rupa by Chintamani that presides over the principal shrine room of the London Buddhist Centre (1978). This rupa draws on the artistic traditions surrounding Amitabha and, more discreetly, those around Apollo. It therefore suggests an iconographic synthesis and a mythological analogy, which enables it to be seen in ways that draw on both oriental and occidental modes.

As a matter of policy FWBO public centres only have images of Shakyamuni or Amitabha on their principal shrine. Because Shakyamuni stands behind the entire Buddhist tradition, taking him as an object of devotion does not imply affiliation with one school in particular. It also relates to the FWBO's desire to follow the central teachings of the Buddhist tradition, and to define these through an emphasis on the teachings of the historical Buddha, so far as these may be discerned from textual records. The use of Amitabha images is an extension of this, in that the two are so closely connected iconographically. Additionally Amitabha is connected with the Western direction, so his use suggests a connection between him and Western Buddhists. This round-eyed Amitabha therefore expresses the essential stance of the FWBO. Some might take 'the Buddha with a Western face to be a symbol for the FWBO's project.

Is this, then, an example of a truly western Buddhist Art; the expression of a genuinely Western Buddhism? Although stylistic elements have been combined, what cannot so easily be synthesised are the meanings of these elements in their traditional contexts. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this rupa is the flower held in Amitabha's hand. The inspiration behind this is a vision of Amitabha described by Sangharakshita in his first volume of memoirs, The Rainbow Road

One night I found myself as it were out of the body and in the presence of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, who presides over the western quarter of the universe. The colour of the Buddha was a deep, rich, luminous red, though at the same time soft and glowing like the light of the setting sun. While his left hand rested on his lap, the fingers of his right hand held up by the stalk a single red lotus in full bloom…

But how is one to interpret this new depiction of Amitabha? In Tibetan sculpture the artist may not change the principal details of the Buddha or Bodhisattva's form, and Buddhist art in general does not encourage alteration of such details for simply pictorial ends. The authority of a Tibetan sculpture as an object of devotion rests on a belief that in some sense it depicts the Samboghakaya form of the Buddha, as perceived by a Lama in visionary experience. What then is the status claimed by Chintamani's Amitabha rupa? What is the status of the form of Amitabha it depicts? And what does this imply about Sangharakshita's own status?

Chintamani has made no claims for this image, just as Sangharakshita has never made any claims for his vision. Indeed Sangharakshita has questioned the Tibetan account of iconography and points to the variety of ways iconic imagery is understood in Buddhist cultures. But these questions are implicitly raised by Chintamani's Amitabha because of the proximity it retains to the conventions of Asian iconography.

(b) Aloka's Manjushri
The second image I have chosen is a depiction of Manjughosa by Aloka, painted in oil on wood. While Chintamani's Amitabha rupa is a public image, Aloka's thangka is in the personal possession of an individual, and similarly, Aloka's lifestyle is that of a solitary artist. At times Aloka has played a prominent role in the Western Buddhist Order, but then he has been drawn back to his art. He lived for many years in a disused railway carriage on a Norfolk farm, which slowly filled with an immense output of paintings and sculpture on both Buddhist and non-Buddhist subjects.

Manjusri is seated in full lotus posture, and carrying his sword, yet the imagery and treatment has been interpreted in the light of Aloka's response to Manjusri, and also that of the person for whom it was painted, whose daily meditation practice revolves around the visualisation of Manjusri. The face is personalised, the background detail is greatly reduced, and the image as a whole is flecked with white, as if it were seen in motion, or through snow. There is a dynamism to the composition – as if the sword were about to e wielded – quite different from Asian forms.

Aloka's work is manifestly a personal response to a bodhisattva, which breaks many of the iconic conventions of Asian tradition. In this sense it suggests an analogy with post- Renaissance depictions of Christian imagery, which place previously conventionalised figures in dramatic contexts using new resources of form, perspective and figuration.

Aloka consciously stands outside the Asian traditions of iconography, and feels compelled to re-evaluate them:

'There are traditions of "Buddhist" art, that western Dharma practitioners are heir to, but, removed from their cultural settings and in relation to each other, they can be a source of inspiration only if one can resonate with the spirit of their significance rather than getting side-tracked by the cultural forms displayed…'

This is clearly an analogue, not to say an expression, of the project of the FWBO as a whole. Yet it would be wrong to see his painting in programmatic terms, as an attempt to depict Western Buddhas because the FWBO requires them. Rather it is an exploration of what the Buddha's Wisdom, Compassion and so on might look like, when envisaged by a Western psyche. For Aloka image-making is not a specialised activity called 'art', but a universal human impulse, an aspect of perception:

'Our desires take concrete form. The transformation of desire (the essential work of the creative/spiritual life) must consist in the transformation of what we find to be compelling images… We need images that attract us beyond our immediate appetites, that compel us to deal with the realities of life and do not distract us with novelty.'

Aloka is dismissive of the artistic merits of his work with traditional Buddhist imagery, which he calls 'painting by numbers', and does to commission. His view of the iconography of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as contingent on an imaginative engagement implies that the best expression of their qualities may dispense with traditional Buddha images altogether and his primary interest now is in non-Buddhist subjects. None the less, the exploration of the inner landscape of his imagination infects his depictions of Bodhisattvas. His paintings imply a new relation to these figures reconciling them as articulations of aspects of the mind, and spiritual experience which elude conceptual expression. Other images he has created are far less conventional than this one; in some cases traditional figuration and iconography is entirely deconstructed, and refashioned according to formal principles that grow from the artists response to the Buddha.

Having questioned Asian modes, the resources on which an artist may draw expand to include the traditions of western art. Both in his Buddhist and non-Buddhist work Aloka shows formal influences from the major figures of Twentieth Century Western art. But perhaps most important is the influence of the tradition of English visionary painting, especially figures such as Stanley Spencer and Eric Gill. These modern painters make no ontological claims for their images, but have an interest, mirrored in Aloka's work and writing, in the nature of the image per se and the mode of perception and experience to which it relates, and which it may express.

The link is Sangharakshita's discussion of the imagination, a concept he draws from Coleridge and the Romantics, and the Imaginal, which he draws from the work of Henri Corbin the scholar of Iranian Sufism. This approach potentially frees the Western Buddhist to engage deeply with the artistic traditions of Buddhist cultures in a way that is not defined by the artistic conventions of those cultures. If Buddhist art is understood as an articulation of an imaginal realm it opens the possibility that they may be conceived within the same context as western arts; and indeed that they may help provide a symbolic language for an individual's spiritual life, without necessarily defining that life in a particular conceptual structure. As Sangharakshita says:

'The imaginal faculty is, in reality the man himself, because when one truly perceives an image, one perceives it with the whole of oneself… one is transported to the world that image inhabits… Truly to perceive an image is to become that image, so that when one speaks of imagination… what one is speaking of is image perceiving image . That is to say, in perceiving an image what one really perceives is, in a sense, oneself.'

(c) Dhammarati's Graphic Design

One of the most significant influences in shaping the image of the FWBO to the general public is the design of its publicity leaflets, the covers of Windhorse Publications' books and the pages of Dharma Life magazine. Most of this work is done by one individual, Dharmachari Dhammarati, who has been a full-time graphic designer for the FWBO since stepping down as Chairman of the London Buddhist Centre in 1994. In my view his work is based on an awareness of the semiotics of Buddhist imagery in a post-modern context as sophisticated as that of anyone working in any visual medium whatsoever.

The example of his work I have chosen is the cover of Sangharakshita's What is the Dharma?. The principal element of the design is an image of Manjughosa taken from an Tibetan thangka. On this is superimposed a title, subtitle and the author's name. Yet the effect of the cover is an intriguing mix of traditional and modern. Firstly, while the image has been treated respectfully it has been cropped, and furthermore it is placed off-centre, presumably for compositional reasons. The title has been superimposed on the Buddha's arm and body while the author's name appears across his legs. Such effects have only become possible with the advent of graphic design technology, so the image as a whole is based on the contrast between the traditional image and its treatment. This suggests the encounter of the Tibetan iconic tradition with a modern - not to say post-modern - sensibility. These tensions are reflected in even the smallest details of this design: the title is in a Times Roman typeface, which is a long-established typographic form, somewhat old-fashioned, and typically used where print needs to be read as authoritative and reliable. However, the subtitle, 'the essential teachings of the Dharma', is in the modern serif typeface, printed white on black, and super-imposed somewhat unconventionally, perhaps even iconoclastically, upon the Buddha's waist.

Dhammarati's work sends a message about the book, which also establishes a stance in relation to the Buddhist tradition - respectful and yet unable to take the tradition on its own terms; needing to make a new sense in a fresh context and to find a fresh harmony that is built precisely on the tensions between traditional and modern, content and treatment. It is the fluidity of the elements and the sophistication with which they are combined that suggests the sobriquet 'post-modern'. This is yet another version of on the FWBO's relation to the Buddhist tradition: deeply engaged, and yet not defined by traditional modes. It speaks to a sophisticated western audience in its own language while also growing from the resources of the Buddhist tradition.

These three visual engagements with Buddhist iconography differ greatly from one another, yet are all expressions of the FWBO's project of practising and expressing Buddhism in the context of our culture as Westerners: Chintamani's Buddha with a Western face; Aloka's free and fluid reworking of Tibetan iconography in the light of modern art in the West and post-Romantic notions of the Imagination; and Dhammarati's post-modern use of Buddhist imagery, employing the freedom afforded by graphic design technology. Each represents a modern Western engagement with Buddhism, and each has achieved some measure of success.

This diversity says something about the variety and fluidity of the Western culture to which the FWBO seeks to introduce Buddhism. It also suggests something of the breadth of the FWBO's project when it is translated into practice, its experimental character, and the creativity to be found among its members. Each of these images represents a version of a Western Buddha, and by extension a somewhat different version of the Western Buddhism the FWBO is seeking to develop and to present. The criteria for evaluating their success from the perspective of the FWBO's project is two-fold. First there is the pragmatic question of whether they create objects that are significant to Westerners and enable them to establish a relationship with the Buddhist tradition. But more important is the question of whether they are adequate expressions of the Buddhist meanings that underlie these iconic forms. Which of them best expresses the qualities of Buddhahood, given the conventions and modes of perception that are available to us as Westerners? The unanswerability of this question suggests the open-ended aspect of the FWBO's project.

(iii) Dharma Life Magazine

My final case study is Dharma Life which is the principal magazine of the FWBO, taking as an example Issue 9, Autumn 1998 [note: the image is of the cover of the last issue, Issue 26]. I must first declare an interest as I founded Dharma Life in 1996 and have edited it subsequently, but hope these reflections point to broader issues in considering the FWBO.

Dharma Life's predecessor was called Golden Drum, which was produced for ten years, and before that came The FWBO Newsletter. As might be expected there has been a steady progression in length and production values from one magazine to the next, so that Dharma Life is 68 pages, while Golden Drum was 32 (although Dharma Life is published three times a year, while Golden Drum was quarterly). Thanks, once again, to Dhammarati, Dharma Life is designed to a very high standard.

Dharma Life also represented an editorial shift. Golden Drum was intended at its launch to be more than simply an in-house magazine, which the Newsletter had happily remained. It sought to address a broader Buddhist community and to offer a voice on issues in Western society. As Nagabodhi, Golden Drum's editor, wrote in the editorial of the first issue:

'The FWBO has, in a sense, come of age. And now it is time to speak out with a new voice. That voice is Golden Drum'

In practice that Golden Drum's features were expositions of aspects of Sangharakshita's teachings, in addition to which there was news of FWBO activities, book reviews, and editorial comment on current affairs. The magazine sought to present the 'FWBO's stance' on various subjects, and the relationship it established with its readers was essentially pedagogic, while its relationship with Buddhists outside the FWBO was polemical.

When I was asked to take on the editorship of Golden Drum, I knew I wanted to change the magazine dramatically - a change symbolised by the new name. In my first (and only) editorial I wrote:

'Western Buddhists are coming of age. It is time for them to speak out in their own voices. Those voices can be heard in Dharma Life.

However the magazine needed to remain based on the principles of Sangharakshita's exposition of Buddhism, and on the core values of the FWBO. Indeed there has always been a tension at the heart of Dharma Life's editorial policy , the tension, as it were, between 'Dharma', with all the clarity and comprehensiveness this implies, and 'Life', with its complexity and irreducibility. As I continued in my editorial:

'I am personally more interested in difficult questions than easy answers. And in Dharma Life I hope to publish writers who are able to express their Buddhist values by speaking up for what they believe to be the truth. I want to find Buddhist writing that is new true and considered.'

The magazine has gradually evolved, but most of the elements in the first issue remain. At the front end of the magazine is a section of short features called Real Life, which deals with news and cultural aspects of Buddhism in the modern world. It starts with a visually based spread and short pieces around the influence of Buddhism with popular culture - in Issue 9 this is based around Richard Gere's photographs. In the rest of Real Life there are news stories about Buddhist activism East and West, here including pieces on the growing recognition of the Tibetan independence struggle in western countries; and the suppression of Buddhism in Vietnam. Real Life has also given detailed coverage to stories in Western Buddhism, such as the dispute over Dorje Shugden, the FWBO's own difficulties with the press, and so on. The feature articles are mostly themed, and in Issue 9 the theme is 'Freeing the Heart: the Buddhist Path of Love'. This is a broad subject, which enabled me to draw on a wide range of contributors. An opening sequence on five aspects of loving-kindness includes a piece by a Buddhist prisoner on death row in America; an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi; and advice on friendship from a Sufi text, as well as a short interview with the Chairman of the London Buddhist Centre.

There are three other themed articles. One is on the South African Truth and Justice Commission, by an FWBO mitra who is a TV director and had interviewed Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and others while making a documentary. Another article, by an Order member, is about maternal love; and the final piece is about erotic and romantic love, by a writer who is involved in the FWBO, and wrote a PhD on the subject.

These examples should suggest something of Dharma Life's approach . Implicit in the breadth of the contributors and subject matter is an attempt to present the FWBO as a part of the Buddhist world, engaged with the issues and personalities who are at its cutting edge, and relevant to and interested in the world beyond Buddhism. I defined the broad subject of the magazine as 'the encounter of Buddhism and the modern world', and I wanted to draw on the breadth of that engagement as it is occurring in fields such as science, psychotherapy, poetry, social action, philosophy, and so on, as well as trying to make sense of the burgeoning Buddhist world outside the FWBO. This breadth grew partly from a desire to reach an audience outside the FWBO, but it was also born of a desire to open the FWBO's internal discourse to broader influences.

There is a tension between the desire for breadth and the desire to stay true to Sangharakshita's teachings and FWBO's values and this tension is one of the most important factors that defines Dharma Life editorially. The need to ensure that the version of Buddhism that Dharma Life expresses is broadly in line with the FWBO's means that most of its writers are from the FWBO itself. Behind the emphasis on coherence is Sangharakshita's concern that the version of Buddhism presented by the FWBO is as clear as possible, and based on what he considers to be 'right views' with regard to the Dharma. The problem with the diversity and sometimes confusion of the western Buddhist world is that it can obscure confusion or misunderstanding about Buddhism itself. Thus Sangharakshita is insistent that Buddhist teachings should not be conflated with and reduced to prevalent attitudes and ideas within western culture. Indeed it might be said that the FWBO as a whole faces a tension between having a distinctive stance within western Buddhism, and being a part of it.

An implication of saying that the magazine should stay true to the teachings of the FWBO is that there is indeed a unitary FWBO position. While individuals are always free to hold whatever views they may wish the core teachings of the FWBO are defined by Sangharakshita and his senior disciples, rather than by consensus or democracy. But where, does that leave an individual who differs on a particular point, and wishes to discuss his or her views in a public context such as Dharma Life? To what extent is the magazine taken to define and uphold the FWBO's stance; and to what extent can it include diverse views? These are questions with which I have had to contend as editor, but they may be extended to any presentation of the FWBO. While it may appear as a single movement to outsiders, it is in fact very diverse, and there are disagreements and debates on many issues within the Western Buddhist Order. A presentation of the FWBO such as Dharma Life must do justice to this diversity whilst also communicating the factors that bind it together.

A similar tension is that between the need for Dharma Life to service the FWBO, and the need to reach a wider audience. Golden Drum's News section was dropped, and there is now no publication that gives news of FWBO activities (although Clear vision produces a video 'newsreel' of such activities biannually, and there is a plethora of local newsletters). The question of how to service the FWBO is complicated by the diversity of the FWBO audience - which ranges between people attending introductory classes in FWBO centres, to people who have been practising for several decades. The choice of such an accessible theme in Issue 9 was an attempt to appeal to the wider audience, while it seeks to retain the interest of more experienced readers through the diversity of the subject matter in the articles.

Although as editor I am often aware of the incommensuality of some of these aims I think that where Dharma Life has been successful it is because it has been prepared to take on wholeheartedly the issues that face any attempt to present the FWBO. Modern society, the Buddhist tradition and Buddhism in the West are all complex phenomena and so is the FWBO. A magazine, or indeed a Buddhist movement, that seeks a coherent and spiritually significant approach to all of these, does not have an easy task, but may yet be worthwhile and illuminating if it makes the attempt with integrity.

Conclusion
Expressions of the FWBO are extremely varied. Alongside the discussion of the London Buddhist Centre's meditation class, I might have placed Buddhafield, the collective that teaches meditation at Glastonbury and other festivals in Britain, as well as running camping retreats for people from the travelling and alternative scene. I might also have discussed the very different issues facing people teaching the FWBO's version of Buddhism in the slums of Western India. Alongside the discussion of depictions of Buddha images, I might have discussed artists who treat non-religious subjects; or else the work of some of the composers, poets or choreographers who practice within the FWBO. Alongside the discussion of Dharma Life, I might have discussed the work of Clear Vision Education, which is the leading provider of educational materials on schools, and advisor to RE teachers on the teaching of Buddhism. Indeed it is hard from my position within the FWBO to perceive the particular characteristics of the FWBO's presentation as opposed to others.

In this paper I have attempted to suggest something of the scope of the FWBO's project. It is in the nature of this project that it requires interpretation, and any such interpretations must encompass the subtlety of Sangharakshita's teaching; the diversity of FWBO praxis; and the exploratory nature of its engagement with its project. Without such an effort of interpretation the ways the FWBO presents itself will most likely be characterised as either bewilderingly diverse, or blandly homogenous. Practitioners within the FWBO take many years to start to comprehend the overarching vision that informs its work, and as they do so, they are able to contribute to its work in not just presenting Western Buddhism, but also helping to create it. It is the FWBO's very combination of underlying coherence and varied expressions defines its own, particular character.

Sex and the Spiritual Life - an interview with Sangharakshita

2007-06-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

An interview with Sangharakshita published in Golden Drum in 1988.

This is probably the first time Sangharakshita spoke 'on the record' about his sexual experiences.

A more recent interview, also with Nagabodhi, is available on DVD. It is entitled 'A Retrospective' and covers a wide range of topics including sex.

Nagabodhi: The Five Precepts are the common 'minimal' ethical observance of Buddhists throughout the world. The third precept, Kamesu miccachara veramani sikkhapadam samadiami, is translated: 'I undertake the training principle of refraining from sexual misconduct'. What is the essential meaning of this precept?

Bhante: There is a personal aspect and a social aspect. One must avoid sexual behaviour which is socially disruptive, and one must at the very least avoid engaging in sexual behaviour of any kind to such an extent that one's ethical and spiritual progress is seriously impeded.

Nagabodhi: In the Buddhist East this precept is often taken to mean simply the avoidance of rape, abduction, and adultery.

Bhante: This is really quite a narrow view. The thought that immediately springs to mind is that of prostitution in Bangkok. Bangkok is almost the world capital of prostitution, so much of it goes on there. Yet Thailand is a Buddhist country, and the prostitutes in Thailand are all, presumably, good Buddhists. So those who engage in prostitution - assuming they are not married women doing it for a bit of extra house-keeping money - are not committing rape, they're not committing adultery, and are therefore, according to the current, popular Buddhist understanding, not committing any breach of the third precept. But one certainly couldn't feel that by having recourse to prostitution they were really leading ethical lives from a Buddhist point of view!

Nagabodhi: Why has the precept come to be interpreted in such a narrow way?

Bhante: I think people in the Buddhist East, including parts of India, don't really examine their sexual behaviour in any detail. At least until recently, you simply conformed to tradition and custom, rather than trying to work out what was ethical or non-ethical for yourself. More often than not, tradition and custom kept you on the right track - one has to acknowledge that - but perhaps not in a very intelligent way. People wouldn't usually examine their sexual conduct any more than they usually examined any other aspect of their behaviour. They'd be concerned only with SOCIAL approval or disapproval. And, naturally, the group interprets the precept in a rather social sort of way.

Generally speaking, in the Buddhist East, they don't worry too much about what goes on between consenting adults in private, provided it does not amount to rape, adultery, or anything of that sort. Certainly, in Buddhism, there isn't that preoccupation with the minutiae of sexual behaviour that we have had in the West, as a subject for gossip and enquiry, nor even, perhaps, for ethical scrutiny.

Perhaps it should also be said that, in those countries, there is no very serious expectation that the lay person will lead a spiritual life. The monks or nuns, on the other hand, ARE expected to lead a spiritual life, and for them there is the Vinaya, in which the precept is explored in far greater detail, probably to make it clear that absolutely all forms of sexual behaviour are excluded.

Nagabodhi: To what extent can the rules of the Vinaya be taken as the Buddha's own words, or as representing a detailed working out of his views on the subject of sex?

Bhante: Whether or not they are Buddha vachana in all their details can be debated; I am not at all sure that the Vinaya offers a fair representation of the Buddha's thoughts on the subject. It is very legalistic in tone, and I don't think the Buddha could have viewed anything in a purely legalistic way. But I think the Vinaya does give legalistic expression to an attitude, or a principle, which was the attitude of the Buddha himself.

There can be no serious doubt that the Buddha expected his monk disciples - those who had Gone Forth from their spouses and families - to be celibate. That seems to have been understood, not only by the Buddha himself, but by others of his day. One who had Gone Forth from home into the homeless life did so probably because he or she wanted to be free from all entanglements. So even if one disregarded the personal aspect of sexual ethics - if one disregarded the effect of sex upon the mind - one would still have to avoid sexual activity if one wanted to be free from worldly (in the sense of household) entanglements. If one did engage in sex, a sexual relationship might develop, children might be produced, and you would be back where you had started.

From this point of view, such abstention from sexual activity would be the concomitant of a certain LIFESTYLE, rather than of the spiritual life as such. The Buddha certainly wouldn't say that one who hadn't completely given up sexual activity couldn't make any spiritual progress, and it wasn't that you couldn't make spiritual progress without being a monk. The Buddha had householder disciples who were Stream Entrants, who appear not to have given up sexual activity. But, if you did follow the lifestyle of a monk, it would have been contradictory to engage in sexual activities in a society where there were no contraceptives.

Nagabodhi: When you were in the East, living as a monk, what part did chastity play in your own personal practice?

Bhante: I'm not so sure that it played a very active part. I knew I was expected to be celibate, and so I was. I accepted it as part of the deal, part of the spiritual life; but looking back, I don't think I regarded chastity as a PRACTICE, something I should WORK on.

I was chaste for many, many years, in body, and I think in speech. Unchastity of speech always displeased me from a quite early age. But I don't think I made a particular effort to eliminate sexual thoughts. I was more concerned with eradicating unmindfulness, and was much more distressed by angry or violent thoughts than I was by sexual thoughts - which I tended to think of as being more 'natural'.

But, even when I was in the army, these feelings, though strong, were very much at the background of my mind. I was finding the East so interesting. I was reading whatever Buddhist books I could get hold of; I was writing - it was a very exciting time for me. So even sexual THOUGHTS played a very minor part in my life. It was only when my thirst for such things as the Dharma, literature, poetry, and philosophy had been slaked to some extent that I started thinking about sex, towards the end of my stay in India.

Nagabodhi: In your experience of the modern Theravada, did the monks seem to be spotless in their practice of chastity?

Bhante: Some of them did talk to me about these things, and from what they said I gained the impression that most Theravada monks had committed minor breaches of celibacy, at least from time to time. I even met and heard of a few Theravada monks who had wives and children - though they kept them as secret as they could - but who none the less continued to wear the yellow robe and expected to be treated as monks.

Minor breaches of celibacy were generally overlooked, as if it was almost too much to expect of ordinary human beings that they should be completely celibate in body, even though they were monks. Among themselves, the attitude was fairly forgiving. After all, many of them had become monks purely for social reasons: because their parents wanted them to become monks, or because, by becoming monks, they could be sure of receiving a good education, or of achieving economic security. So there would be no question of any conflict between their breach of the precept and their spiritual aspiration. They were usually only concerned with what might happen if they were found out by the lay people.

Nagabodhi: Even so, in many traditional Buddhist countries, sex is the 'great divider', perhaps the major point of difference between the life of the monk and the life of the lay-person. The monk is chaste; the lay-person is not. Is this a fair observation?

Bhante: It is certainly fair with regard to the Theravada countries and those Mahayana countries where they do have celibate monks. But it wouldn't be a fair observation with regard to Japan, where celibate monks ceased to exist centuries ago, or to some of the sects of Tibetan Buddhism who do not emphasise the monastic life, and therefore do not emphasise celibacy.

In the Theravada world, the monks and the laity seem to have very little in common. They certainly don't seem be following one and the same spiritual path. The Mahayana's main emphasis, though, is on the Bodhisattva Ideal, and therefore on the development of the Bodhicitta (or 'Will to Enlightenment').

In the early days of the Mahayana there was a very strong conviction that the Buddha had taught what was, essentially, one path for all: not only in the sense of his having taught one yana instead of three, but also in the sense of his having taught a spiritual path which could be followed regardless of lifestyle. The Bodhichitta can be developed both by the monk and by the layman; the emphasis was very much on following the path of the Paramitas (Perfections), and on becoming a Bodhisattva. Celibacy and non-celibacy thus became less important issues. One did not have to be a monk - or a layman - to develop spiritually. In our FWBO terminology, we would say that commitment was primary and lifestyle was secondary.

A further development was of course that of the Vajrayana. There were great teachers, even in India, who were not monks. Chandragomin, who composed the 'Hymn to Tara', was a layman. We have the famous example of Vimalakirti, who was a Bodhisattva APPEARING as a layman. Marpa too is a famous example, - though his most celebrated disciple, Milarepa, led an extremely ascetic life and was certainly celibate. In this way, the ground was prepared for the 'married lamas' of the Vajrayana.

Nagabodhi: Do you think the Theravada has placed too much emphasis on the importance of chastity in the monk's life?

Bhante: I think it would be difficult to attach too much importance to chastity. It is, however, possible to attach too much importance to being a monk, in whose life chastity occupies an important place. You could say that the Theravada places too much emphasis on monasticism, too much emphasis on chastity as an aspect of monasticism, and, therefore, too much emphasis on chastity of BODY: on chastity in a purely TECHNICAL sense.

You see, it's not as if you've got the chaste as the sheep, as it were, and the rest as the goats. We shouldn't think of chastity and non-chastity as if they were white and black, and as though you were either one or the other. There are degrees. To begin with, there's chastity of body, chastity of speech, and chastity of mind. We can't divide Buddhists into those who are chaste and those who are not chaste. We can't even divide them into those who are bodily chaste and those who are not. One certainly can't associate chastity exclusively with the monk and non-chastity exclusively with the layman. I would prefer to say that there are infinite gradations, and that everybody is chaste to some extent and everybody is non-chaste to some extent.

Nagabodhi: I believe the Buddha once said, 'If there was another human passion as powerful as the sexual urge, there would be no hope of Enlightenment for human beings': What do you think he meant by that?

Bhante: One COULD argue that the Buddha was simply trying to point out how powerful that passion is, so that his disciples would guard against it. But I take it quite literally.

The sex drive is very powerful. From a common sense point of view, the sex drive is what enables the human race to perpetuate itself; it would seem to be nature's great con-trick. If there was no sex drive, and we were asked, on rational grounds, to do what the sex-drive impels us to do instinctively, most likely we wouldn't do it! If you didn't have any sex urge, or sex drive, would you REALLY want to be responsible for bringing into the world, and supporting, and educating, children? You'd have to be quite altruistic to want to do that on purely rational grounds!

Then again, the sex drive can have a very destructive effect. It can be a source of very strong feelings of attachment and possessiveness, of jealousy, hatred, and despair. It can completely overwhelm people, making it impossible for them to follow the spiritual life, or even think in terms of any higher human development.

I suppose the Buddha's view was that sexual desire is a form of craving. Craving is, of course, an unskillful mental state, and unskillful states hold us back from gaining Enlightenment. For Buddhism - certainly for early Buddhism, and certainly for the Theravada - sexual desire is thus axiomatically unskillful. I doubt very much whether it is anywhere considered that you can engage in sexual activity without, at least to some extent, that activity being an expression of an unskillful mental state.

Nagabodhi: Under no circumstances or conditions?

Bhante: It would seem so, yes.

The emphasis of Buddhism in this respect - its realisation that sex is, or can be, an obstacle to spiritual life - is virtually unique. The theistic religions tend to believe that God created everything in the world: he created human beings, and he created their bodies - including the reproductive organs. So, in a way, God is BEHIND sex, and approves of sex. In some religions, God even blesses sex (- though the Christian position is ambiguous, because the Fall has rather spoiled things).

In the case of Buddhism, however, there is no creator god, no god responsible for sex. So who IS responsible for sex? YOU are. Your past desires - 'past' in the sense of desires experienced in a previous existence - have brought you, in this life, into the gross material human body, equipped with sexual organs, by means of which you can give expression to the desires you have carried from your previous existence.

People are not aware of how powerful this force is. You experience the strength of a force when you oppose it. Usually people tend to go along with their sexual drives, and so don't experience their strength - except, perhaps, when they come up against external obstacles, in the form of parental disapproval, or something of that sort.

So, since Buddhism regards sexual desires (along with others) as binding you to the Wheel of Life and causing you to be reborn again and again, it therefore teaches that, if you are serious about not being reborn, if you are serious about following a spiritual path and attaining Nirvana, then you will need to avoid sex, not simply in the sense of abstaining from sexual activity, but in the sense of overcoming, eventually, those particular desires or cravings that find expression through sexual activity.

Nagabodhi: You have been using the words 'desire' and 'craving'. Craving is usually understood to imply a neurotic element, as distinct from 'desire' - which is sometimes understood to suggest more of a healthy appetite. Is sexual desire always to be regarded as a form of 'craving'?

Bhante: I think traditional Buddhism, especially Theravada Buddhism, would maintain that even a healthy appetite for sex is the expression of an unskillful mental state. It follows from Buddhist principles that one could be Enlightened and at the same time enjoy one's food, without any associated craving. But I doubt if that principle could be extended to cover sexual experience. Buddhists might well acknowledge that even an Enlightened person has to eat; but an Enlightened person does not have to engage in sexual activity, he does not have to procreate.

Then, of course, the sexual appetite usually involves other people. When one comes into close physical, or emotional, contact with another person within the context of a sexual relationship, usually all sorts of psychological projections take place, and sometimes a very complicated, even negative situation develops - which doesn't happen with regard to food, say, or to sleep. Even the so-called 'healthy appetite' for sex, if satisfied, very quickly leads to the development of attachment. That attachment can lead to the arising of very strong emotions of possessiveness, jealousy, hatred, and so on.

It could of course be argued that it is possible for someone to enjoy sex without any of these things arising. But then there would very likely be present in the mind of that person, the unskillful states, not so much of sexual craving, as of indifference, lack of positive emotion, and exploitiveness.

Nagabodhi: To return to the Five Precepts for a moment, you once composed a 'Tantric version', in which the third precept was rendered: 'Do not misuse energy.' Could you expand on that?

Bhante: The third precept represents an important form of ethical discipline. I discovered that a lot of young people in the West didn't take very kindly to the idea of discipline, so it wasn't very easy to talk about the importance of the precept in disciplinary terms.

What I had in mind was that sexual energy was a sort of paradigm of energy in general. I don't think there is, specifically, a special, separate, 'sexual energy'. The psycho-physical organism is itself an expression of energy, and sexual activity is simply one form in which that energy manifests itself. It's obviously important that energy should not be wasted, so if you can point out that sexual energy is a form of energy, then it becomes immediately obvious that that energy should not be wasted.

Nagabodhi: Some people argue that sexual activity - and particularly the orgasm - bestows energy, and that its denial depletes. Could you comment on this?

Bhante: I rather doubt whether sex does actually give people energy, as they maintain. At the time of orgasm there is an expenditure of energy; you experience yourself as spending energy, and therefore you experience yourself as being 'energy full' - as you might when you throw a cricket ball.

When people talk of sex and orgasm actually giving them energy, they are talking about something quite different. I think, especially in the case of men, that when they experience orgasm, there's a sort of sense of achievement, as if they've had their way: they've done something that they consider worthwhile. Their ego becomes a bit bloated and swollen, and this they interpret as a sort of access of energy. It isn't at all a healthy or positive state.

When one has experienced orgasm, one is often left in a state of what could be called 'enervation'. Having made the effort that the approach to orgasm involves, your natural tendency is simply to rest. If you want to meditate, to overcome the hindrances, to concentrate the mind, and enter the dhyanas, you have to make a very great effort, and after an orgasm, you won't feel like making an effort. Some people may not feel like making an effort - especially that mental effort - for many hours afterwards; for others it might be quite a few days. They are just not able to get their mental energies together. It's not that they feel physically weak, or even mentally exhausted: they have lost a certain cutting edge, not only in relation to meditation, but to all sorts of other areas. They need to give their energies, and especially their mental energies, time to build up again and to want to express themselves.

Nagabodhi: You sometimes hears it said that, at the moment of orgasm, one experiences a dissolution of ego and a sense of union with one's partner. . .

Bhante: There seems to be a confusion here between sinking below the ego and transcending it. Ego is lost in deep sleep; you are not self-conscious in all sorts of situations, not because you've transcended the ego, but because you've temporarily reverted to a state lower than that of the ego, or self-consciousness.

As for 'union', the very idea is nonsensical. Often, those very people who feel this sense of union at the time of orgasm are fighting and quarrelling five minutes later! So where is the union? What has been achieved? If one really achieved unity in a spiritual sense, not just by way of mutual unconsciousness, then one's attitude to the other person would be completely transformed: one would be positive, affectionate, and caring,- which ordinary human sexual relationships rarely are.

Nagabodhi: Even so, sex is usually regarded as a vital route - even the vital route to emotional fulfillment and satisfaction....

Bhante: I wonder whether people really do get emotional satisfaction and fulfillment out of sex. Certainly there is a MEASURE of satisfaction and fulfillment, but it's usually very short-lived.

Emotional satisfaction and fulfillment is quite a big thing. From a philosophical point of view, Buddhism sees man's predicament as stemming from the fact that he is looking for absolute happiness in something which is quite unable to give absolute happiness. He's looking for permanence in something which is quite unable to give him permanence, looking for the real in the midst of the unreal. No finite thing is capable of giving infinite and unlimited satisfaction and fulfillment - emotional or otherwise. But this is very often what people are looking for in sex. So sex may give them a measure of satisfaction, a measure of fulfillment; but it can't give satisfaction and fulfillment to the degree that people expect or hope.

Nagabodhi: But people look to sex at least for the enjoyment of emotional intimacy...

Bhante: Well, there is certainly physical intimacy in sex. Whether there is emotional intimacy is quite another matter. It is well known that all sorts of misunderstandings and confusions occur between people who are involved in sexual relationships. When a sexual relationship comes to an end, it often does so in a very unfortunate and emotionally negative way: the two people separate, perhaps with fairly negative feelings towards each other; their so-called intimacy might never have been.

Nagabodhi: So when people speak of their sexual partners as being their best friends, do you think they are absolutely deluded?

Bhante: Friendship and sexual infatuation are two very different things. Sexual infatuation can arise and reach its physical consummation very, very rapidly. Friendship is a plant of much slower growth; it takes much longer to develop. You become friends with someone as you really get to know them, as you develop confidence in them, as you come to feel that they really do know and understand you. This is very different from the process of sexual infatuation.

It may be that, when sexual infatuation subsides, if the two people are reasonably healthy, and if they have certain things in common, including the raising of a family, or if they have religious and spiritual ideals in common, they MAY be able to develop a friendship in the long run, especially as they get older. But, even so, a sexual relationship is a very different thing from a friendship. If anybody ever tells me that their wife is their best friend, or their girlfriend is their best friend, or their husband is their best friend, or their boyfriend is their best friend, I can't help feeling that they are using the word 'friendship' in a totally different sense from the sense in which I use it.

Nagabodhi: I believe you once said that the worst thing you can do to someone is to fall in love with them. Could you explain what you meant?

Bhante: Falling in love implies psychological projection, or seeing in the other person qualities and aspects which are in fact qualities and aspects of yourself, but of which you are unconscious. This means that you do not see the other person as they really are; in a way, you're not treating them as a human being; you are treating them as an object, a thing. Perhaps you're both treating each other in that way, and it may be that by that means you satisfy certain appetites. But there won't be any question of your development as a human being, much less still of any spiritual development.

Nagabodhi: Presumably, you have had to spend a fair amount of time over the years discussing this aspect of your pupils' lives?

Bhante: In the early days of the FWBO, especially, when people tended to bring their more everyday problems to me rather than to Order members, very roughly a third of my discussion time would be devoted to the subject of sex, and particularly to sexual relationships that had gone wrong or broken down.

Nagabodhi: Did you find that men and women have different problems and preoccupations in this area?

Bhante: It's not easy to generalise, but it does seem that achieving a sexual RELATIONSHIP was more important for women than for men. In the case of men, it was perhaps more a matter of gaining sexual satisfaction - not necessarily with one and the same woman.

In the case of women, sexual desire is very much bound up with the desire for children. At the back of the woman's mind all the time is the desire for a child, and there is therefore the desire to have someone to help her, and look after her, when she is having the child. That question doesn't arise in the case of the man - who has to be wary of adopting a purely self-indulgent and exploitative attitude with regard to sex. Men may want children, but rarely in the passionate sort of way that women very often do.

Over the years, I came very much to the conclusion that the reason why sexual relationships were so difficult, and sometimes ended so disastrously, was that people were investing far too much in them. Very often, they seemed to have built their lives around their sexual relationships, and had no other serious relationships: not with their parents, for example, and certainly not with their friends.

Nagabodhi: Is this a particularly Western syndrome? Or did you have to deal with similar problems in India?

Bhante: I don't remember having to, partly because people - if they did have problems concerning sex - might well have considered it inappropriate to bring them to me, a celibate monk. But I also think that people did not have that sort of problem - certainly the non-westernised people - because most Indians lived as members of a joint family; there was a good spread of relationships, even of important relationships, in their lives.

Nagabodhi: Could there be a lesson in that for us?

Bhante: In the FWBO we sometimes talk in terms of the 'mandala' (or, 'magic circle') The mandala, is your whole life, and what is within your mandala represents the contents of your life. A mandala has a centre, so there will be, in the mandala of your life, something which occupies a central position: the interest, activity, idea, or ideal around which your life is centred. Then, we include the other interests and activities of our lives, putting them nearer to the centre as they are more important, and nearer to the periphery as they are less important.

So, with regard to sex, I think we could say that, for most people, sex has a legitimate place somewhere near the periphery of the personal mandala. It certainly shouldn't be at the centre of the mandala; THERE we place the Buddha, representing the ideal of Enlightenment.

It is possible for a human being to develop spiritually while still engaging in a certain amount of sexual activity. But that is provided that not too much importance is attached to that activity, that our emotions are not invested in that sexual activity to a very great extent, and provided especially that there is a strong spiritual ideal seated right at the centre of the mandala.

Obviously, we have here to be very careful that we don't engage in rationalisation,- which is why I am sometimes very reluctant to admit that sex has a place in the mandala at all! I've heard so many men and women say that they are not very deeply involved in their sexual relationships, but who nonetheless absolutely broke down and were completely demoralised when their sexual partner left them.

Nagabodhi: But how is one to know when one is over-investing?

Bhante: You should ask your spiritual friends to tell you. It is very difficult to tell yourself. Of course, if you want to spend as much time as you possibly can with your sexual partner, then you've probably put them in the centre of your mandala.

You may also notice - or your friends will notice - that if you have a sexual partner and are very attached to them, you tend to relate in a certain way, engage in almost meaningless communication simply to reassure yourself that the other is still there. You find that people who are involved in a sexual relationship often do this. This suggests quite deep attachment and emotional dependence, which is not at all desirable.

Then, if you want to make sure that your sexual relationship really is towards the periphery of your mandala, you should be very careful not to spend too much time with the person you're having the sexual relationship with, and preferably not live with them. And you should ensure that you have strong friendships with members of your own sex.

In the FWBO, as you know, people who are having sexual relationships often live in separate communities, the man living in a men's community, the woman living in a women's community. I would say that this not only helps to ensure that the sexual relationship occupies only a peripheral place in those two people's mandalas, but also assures a happier, more truly human relationship between them, because they allow themselves space.

Nagabodhi: Would fidelity be an important factor in a 'successful' relationship?

Bhante: Fidelity is faithfulness over a long period of time, especially in the absence of the friend or sexual partner. It implies not only time: it implies space. It implies the ability, or the capacity, to behave in the absence of a friend, or a sexual partner, as though they were present. And you can only behave as though they were present if you have a strong sense of their existence when they're not actually there with you.

For this to be possible you must dwell much more on the 'mental' level - using that term in the Buddhist sense - than on the physical. You must be less susceptible to every passing physical stimulation, be less carried away by the senses, and live less in the present in a forgetful sort of way. Fidelity is a very human, very individual quality, like friendship or 'impersonal' love in the sense of metta. You are able to look ahead, able to imagine - or to feel - the presence of another person who is not physically with you. This suggests that you don't just see the other person as a body: you have some consciousness of them as a mind, as a 'spirit' if you like, and you relate to them in that way and on that level.

Fidelity is of course different from attachment. Perhaps it isn't always easy to distinguish between the two. Fidelity is a positive quality, whereas attachment is not. When you practise fidelity towards someone, you are, as it were, valuing them for their own sake. But when you're attached to them, you are wanting something from them for YOUR sake.

So I've observed that men and women can have very happy relationships, including sexual relationships, provided they live quite independent lives, and see each other just from time to time. When the man and the woman have each placed Enlightenment firmly at the centre of their mandala, they've got something to get on with; their lives don't centre around their sexual partners. Then, paradoxically, the relationship becomes more satisfactory, and they can relate more as human beings. You have to strike a sort of happy balance, where you see someone sufficiently often to keep up a continuity of contact, but not so often that you become attached, or become bored with each other's company.

Then, if you are committed to a spiritual way of life, or if you are committed to your personal development, and if you do see your sexual partner infrequently, and if you do both live in single sex spiritual communities, and if you have strong friendships with members of your own sex, and if you are making a very determined effort to develop spiritually, with the help of meditation, with the help of Dharma study, altruistic activity, retreats, and so on, then the danger of over-investment in a sexual relationship will be far less.

Nagabodhi: Obviously, many couples live together in order to bring up a family. They might argue that having and nurturing children is itself a spiritually challenging activity. Would you agree?

Bhante: Well, every human activity can be regarded as having a spiritually demanding aspect. There is always the possibility of a skilful, positive response, and of an unskillful, negative response.

Supposing it rains. You can have a positive response to the fact that it is raining, but does that mean that rain is, as such, a spiritual experience? In the same way, if you have children, you can be patient, forbearing, kindly, - and that can be a spiritual experience. But that does not mean that having children is, itself, a spiritual experience any more than the weather is.

Raising children and helping them to get on in the world can be a challenging and creative pursuit, but I would say that there are already far too many beings in the world who have never had that help, and who need that help; it would probably be much better for us to direct our attention towards THEM.

Nagabodhi: Even so, as you mentioned a moment ago, bearing children is a major issue - and a major source of conflict - for some women. Is there any general advice that you would offer?

Bhante: Some years ago I wouldn't have ventured to give a piece of general advice. Now I very definitely do. Quite a few women in the FWBO have experienced tremendous conflict between the very genuine desire to lead a spiritual life, and the desire for a child. I have come to the conclusion, after discussing the matter with quite a number of women, and observing women in the Movement who have children, that, if a woman has a genuine desire for the spiritual life, then having a child will not in the long run get in the way.

Of course, for two or three years, she will be very tied down by the child. She won't be able to go on retreats; she may not even be able to attend classes at the Centre, or able to attend Order meetings. She will have to be patient. But that period of almost total dependence of the child on its mother does come to an end; the mother does become more free with the passing of every year. And, if the mother's original interest in, or commitment to, the spiritual life has been genuine or sincere, it will re-emerge, and be free to express itself again.

Of course, if her involvement isn't very strong, the likelihood is that, even if she doesn't have a child, she will drift away from the spiritual life. Men often drift away from the spiritual life without even thinking about having children!

Nagabodhi: I believe you have said that heterosexual sexual activity and attitudes can have a polarizing effect on the individual, leading him or her to a one-sided kind of development. Could you say a bit more about this?

Bhante: If you're involved in a heterosexual relationship, you think of yourself as a man, the other person as a woman, or of yourself as a woman, the other person as a man. In other words, you don't relate to your partner so much as an individual, but as just a man or just a woman. So, within the relationship, only half your total 'nature', has an opportunity to express itself,- because a human being is not 'just a man', or 'just a woman': there are other potentialities too.

Then, if one relates predominantly as a member of THIS sex or THAT sex, the qualities and characteristics associated with the opposite sex are not developed; one becomes one-sided in one's psychological, and possibly even in one's spiritual, development. Thus you get the very 'macho' man and the extravagantly feminine woman, in whom the complementary qualities of the opposite sex have no opportunity to develop.

A human being should try to develop the whole range of human qualities: the so-called 'masculine' and the so-called 'feminine', and in this way become - to talk in these 'sexual' terms - androgynous. This doesn't necessarily mean that a man will become bisexual or a woman will become bisexual; they may continue to confine their sexual activities to partners of the opposite sex. But, nonetheless, they will have developed - if they're truly, psychologically androgynous - the psychological and spiritual qualities of, so to speak, both sexes.

Nagabodhi: Is there less risk of polarisation, attachment, or psychological projection in homosexual relationships than in heterosexual ones?

Bhante: It's very difficult to generalise. I get the impression that, among men who might be described as 'professionally gay', sexual relationships can become quite turbulent. But where the men concerned are not actually gay, or not gay in an extremely one-sided way, it is possible for them to have a relationship in which sex may play a part, if not a very important part.

The case of women is rather different. So far as I've observed - and of course I am generalising - sexual relationships between women can result in very powerful emotional attachments of a very 'heavy' kind. Sex, and the emotions associated with sex, play a much more important, and in a way constant, part in the life of a woman than in the life of a man. So when two women come together, you tend to get a much more emotionally charged relationship.

Nagabodhi: But do you think that people who are looking for a clearer sexual mode might at least benefit from experimenting with homosexuality?

Bhante: I don't think one can experiment with homosexuality - or even with heterosexuality come to that - on purely rational grounds. It simply doesn't work. The essence of the matter is that there is a natural, spontaneous attraction, whether sexual or non-sexual.

Nagabodhi: But is anybody 100% heterosexual or homosexual?

Bhante: There are people who appear to be 100% heterosexual, and to have not even the slightest homosexual inclination; but it is very hard to be sure. The least one can say is that the majority of people, under certain conditions, would be able to find at least some sexual satisfaction with members of their own sex.

But, you see, we've made it all into such a big deal; we've classified and labeled people as 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual'. You can speak of certain actions as homosexual actions, or others as heterosexual, but can you speak of individuals as either 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual'?

I don't like people being spoken of as 'gay', or speaking of themselves as 'gay', as though their sexual identity is the most important thing about them. I don't blame them too much, because that attitude is a reaction against years - even centuries - of oppression of people engaged in homosexual activities by people who did not engage in homosexual activities, but it is nevertheless unfortunate.

This raises an issue which is, I think, quite a serious problem for Western men, and especially perhaps for those involved in Buddhism. Spiritual friendship is important, and it can only arise on a basis of ordinary friendship. Friendship implies closeness, mutual confidence, intimacy, and even physical contact.

For most people in the West it would seem that physical contact occurs in association with sex. We consequently seem to confuse the two, or to regard the two as being inseparable. Purely physical contact is therefore quite difficult for people to obtain, especially, I think, for men to obtain from other men. Normally, in the case of other men, there's no 'danger' of sexual involvement. Even so, men find it quite difficult to experience physical contact with other men because of their fear of homosexuality.

I've observed cases where men are even afraid to give each other a brotherly hug! It may take them years to get through that. And when they succeed in doing it, they are quite overwhelmed and overjoyed, as if they've had a real breakthrough! This illustrates the terrible mess we've got ourselves into; such a simple thing has become an enormous problem.

During the time when I was living at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, I was quite celibate. Even so, I remember how bothered some people were by my close friendship with Terry Delamare. Actually, as they really ought to have taken for granted, that was a completely Platonic relationship,- in fact it wasn't a relationship in the ordinary sense at all, and certainly not a sexual relationship. The crux of the matter seemed to be people's inability to believe that there could be a close friendship between two men without their being a sexual element.

Women, generally, seem much less inhibited in this respect. They don't hesitate to put their arms round each other's waists or hug each other; they even kiss each other quite freely. Men normally would not dream of doing such things, and limit their contact. Because of that, they very often limit the possibilities of friendship with other men. And so, because they don't develop friendship with other men, they don't develop SPIRITUAL friendship with other men. And because they don't develop spiritual friendship with other men, they're not able to develop what the Buddha declared to be the most important element in the spiritual life.

Nagabodhi: So what can Western men do about this?

Bhante: They must break down their fear of homosexuality, by facing it, and by not being afraid of sexual contact with other men.

This is not necessarily to say that they should have sexual contact with men, but at least that they should not be afraid of the idea. They have to realise that physical, and even sexual, contact between men is JUST physical or sexual contact between men. It is a quite ordinary thing, and one's fear of that should not be allowed to get in the way of one's friendships.

Nagabodhi: Some while ago, I believe you did engage in some sexual 'experimentation' yourself. Could you say something about that?

Bhante: In 1967, when I returned from India to start the FWBO, there was a lot of talk about the place of sex in communication. I therefore thought I should perhaps experiment a little in this field.

In those days, everything seemed to be in the melting pot. I was, in a sense, free to do what I wanted, free to do whatever I felt was best. It was a very important period, a creative period: I was giving all those classes, all those lectures. This was also the period of my experimentation with psychedelic drugs, the period when I let my hair grow. . . You could say I was feeling my way, feeling my way around.

I think I've always been guided by instinct or intuition. I very much tend to DO, and then worry about the implications afterwards. I'm sure that appetite did play some part in the 'experimentation', but it was all definitely more to do with intuition than appetite.

Nagabodhi: The ancient Greeks encouraged 'educative', erotically charged, friendships, especially between older and younger men. Did you have something like this in mind?

Bhante: No, I don't think it was from this point of view at all. I have had hundreds of pupils and disciples without there being any sexual element entering into the relationship. When I engaged in my period of 'experimentation', it wasn't so much within a pedagogic context, as just in a context of ordinary friendship. Of course one can learn from friends, but the experimentation wasn't part of the education of some other person. I was just exploring certain things for my own benefit, for the satisfaction of my own curiosity.

But even now, I don't think I could really explain what it was that I was intuitively reaching for - without setting myself to write about it seriously, when I can really 'dig around' and ask myself what I really felt about things. I do in fact intend to describe this period in a volume of memoirs, which I hope to write in the next few years.

Nagabodhi: Did you come away from that period of experimentation with any conclusions?

Bhante: One of my conclusions was that sex didn't really play much of a part in human communication. Bodily contact sometimes functioned as a MEANS of breakthrough in communication, but it didn't result in a permanent breakthrough: it only gave one a certain opportunity, which one then had to develop. Sometimes the breakthrough came to an end and things were as they were before. In fact, that was almost always the came. So I came to the conclusion that sexual contact wasn't really much help in developing human communication, and again I ended up celibate.

At the same time, I CAN definitely say that, in the case of certain people, I found that having physical contact with them (and I'm speaking now of physical, not sexual contact) certainly did release them from their fear of homosexuality, and enabled them to develop friendships - by which I mean non-sexual friendships - with other men more easily.

Nagabodhi: In the early days of the FWBO you seemed to be very patient with our tendencies to sexual distraction and sexual indulgence. Were you as tolerant and patient as you seemed?

Bhante: I had no choice but to be patient! I was starting out - in the 'permissive' Sixties - with people who were, on the whole, completely fresh to Buddhism. I was more concerned that people should develop some sympathy for Buddhist ideals, and gradually bring their conduct into line with those ideals. I didn't take the view that, 'Well, you've got to give up all your present unskillful actions and mental attitudes, and THEN we can start thinking about Buddhism.' That would simply not have worked. So I mainly followed what I afterwards called the 'path of irregular steps'.

Nagabodhi: Were you ever afraid that the FWBO might disappear in a cloud of sexual permissiveness?

Bhante: Well, sexual permissiveness is not the only danger. We mustn't dwell too much upon that, even though we are at present dealing with the subject of sex. The FWBO could dissolve for all sorts of reasons, and there will always be the danger of it dissolving so long as, within the FWBO, and within the Order especially, we don't have a sufficient number of Stream Entrants. If you're not a Stream Entrant you can resile from the spiritual life, you can resile from your commitment to the Three Jewels; you can become anything, do anything.

Nagabodhi: But do you think that we in the West need to work harder at our understanding of the third precept than those from a more traditional, Eastern culture?

Bhante: I think we have to fight against a cultural message that overvalues sex and regards sex as an unqualified good. A lot of people still think that so long as you don't actually harm people you can have - should have - as much sex as you please. Because of this attitude, there's no understanding of the fact that if you want to develop spiritually, then sex has to take a peripheral place.

We're living in a transitional period. Formerly the great disincentive, particularly for the woman, was the fear of pregnancy. That fear has been largely removed, and people find themselves (or, at least until the advent of AIDS, found themselves) free to engage in sexual activity without the fear of consequences. This has certainly altered attitudes towards sex. But there have been side-effects: the contraceptive pill does have certain physical dangers for some women; then, it may be doubted whether promiscuous sex is necessarily very psychologically satisfying, or even healthy. Perhaps the freedom with which people can now have sex has resulted in an altogether disproportionate amount of attention being given to it.

Nagabodhi: More recently, you have been encouraging us to think more seriously about, and to aim ourselves more decidedly towards, celibacy.

Bhante: Well, in the early days, most of our early members were in their twenties or even in their late teens. One could not really expect or demand celibacy of people of that age. But those who were twenty-five or even younger when they joined us are now in their forties. People of that age can certainly start thinking seriously about celibacy,- and I have asked people to do no more than that: just to think about it seriously.

Nagabodhi: Though you do seem content that a few people are taking the Anagarika precepts - which include a 'vow' of celibacy.

Bhante: I'm not only content: I'm very pleased that they are. They are really nailing their colours, their saffron colours if you like, to the mast. But I never urge anyone to take the vow of celibacy. When people tell me they want to take such a vow, I almost invariably ask them to think about it for a while longer.

One can be a member of the Western Buddhist Order without being celibate. One is only asked to keep one's sex life at the periphery, or towards the periphery, of one's personal mandala,- or at the very least not too near the centre. But if one can be celibate in a non-neurotic way, in a positive and healthy way, I'm sure that will enable one - other factors being equal - to develop spiritually more rapidly, and enable one to be more free to be of use to the Dharma and of use to other human beings.

Nagabodhi: What would be the distinction between a 'neurotic' and a healthy, 'non-neurotic' celibacy

Bhante: You could be celibate because you were so absorbed by the beauty and attractiveness of the spiritual ideal, that sex just didn't interest you. That would be a very healthy sexual mode. But then you could be celibate out of guilt, or for the sake of some material advantage. You could be celibate for all sorts of quite negative reasons, which would be neurotic.

It certainly isn't just a question of being celibate. Being physically celibate by itself probably has very little value. What is more valuable is being RELATIVELY celibate because the main object of one's emotional energies is something of a higher order. You can't be healthily and happily celibate unless you are celibate for the sake of a higher cultural, artistic,, humanitarian, or spiritual interest. You could even say that sexual frustration takes place when you don't have at the centre of your mandala an interest or an ideal which absorbs your emotional energies.

Nagabodhi: In the Udana, Sundarananda complains that his mind is always dwelling on the beautiful girl he left behind when he became a monk. The Buddha takes him to a heavenly realm, and shows him goddesses of even greater beauty. What is the teaching there for us?

Bhante: Sundarananda's experience represents an experience of beauty more refined that ordinary human beauty. So he becomes less attracted, less attached, to lower, human beauty.

I don't think that while still remaining on the level of ordinary human beauty you can simply put it all behind you. You only have a reason for doing that if you have a glimpse of a higher, heavenly beauty.

Nagabodhi: So what are we to do? Pay more visits to the art gallery?

Bhante: A visit to the local art gallery is not to be despised. Then there is refined music, or engaging in a creative activity. This can certainly absorb one's energies.

Then of course there is meditation. So long as you haven't developed Insight you will be swaying between engaging in sex and experiencing sexual craving, and being free from that craving. So, in order to make spiritual progress while continuing to have sex, you have to ensure that the sex is peripheral, and that you are mentally free from the hindrance of sexual desire for sufficient periods, from time to time, to be able to achieve higher states of consciousness, and on that basis develop Insight. Once Insight starts being developed, then of course you are attacking the craving at the source. The more you do of that, then the weaker any craving will become.

Nagabodhi: So there is a sort of gradual path to celibacy: taking some of these things on, developing Insight, adding these refined elements to our lives?

Bhante: Yes indeed! - Like a caterpillar passing from leaf to leaf. While with his rear legs he is still adhering to one leaf, with his front legs he is grasping hold of another. And he doesn't pull his rear legs forward onto the new leaf until he has planted his front legs very securely on the front leaf.

It is quite impossible to give up everything all at once, though some spiritual disciplines seem to demand that: 'Give up everything to God: give up everything to the Guru...' I don't think that is humanly possible; you may have a nervous breakdown if you try. But at least seize hold of the spiritual, just like the caterpillar seizing hold of that leaf with his front legs. In a sense, it doesn't matter if you've got two front legs on that new leaf and twenty legs back on the old leaf: at least you've grasped hold of that new leaf. Then you can proceed to haul yourself slowly forward.

Psychologically and spiritually speaking, it's not so much a question of just giving up the old, but of seizing hold of the new while you are still, to some extent, involved with the old, even trapped in the old. Just make sure you do seize hold of the new, and try to seize hold of it more and more. Don't think there's no point in seizing hold of the new because you haven't yet completely relaxed your hold on the old. There are degrees of celibacy. Everybody is celibate to some extent, and everybody is non-celibate to some extent. No one is engaging in sexual activity all the time (I'm speaking here about physical celibacy), and nobody, except for Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, is celibate in body, speech, and mind all the time.

One should therefore understand the PRINCIPLE of celibacy, which in Buddhism is called Brahmacharya. This can be translated as the 'divine life', or even the 'angelic life'. It represents a transition from a lower to a higher sphere, from the kamaloka to the rupaloka, from the rupaloka to the Brahmaloka. Brahmacharya means, literally, walking with, or 'faring' with Brahma - Brahma meaning a very lofty, spiritual state. When you are celibate in body, speech, and mind, well, you dwell in that state. But you're TRYING to dwell in that state all the time. Some people make a nearer approach to it, others don't succeed in approaching so near. But everybody, one might say, is to some extent on their way - even if only by accident.

Of course, If you're leading a specifically spiritual life, if you've taken up the Brahmacharya, you can try to be more and more celibate. If, for instance, you normally engage in sexual intercourse once a week, then try to make it once a fortnight, or once a month, or even once a year, as some of our friends do. In that way you gradually detach yourself from attachment to the material world, from the senses, from unskillful pleasures, and you experience skilful pleasures more and more intensely, and pursue them.

I see the FWBO - and the Order especially - as never standing still. I would like too see everybody involved with the Movement, everybody involved with the Order, becoming more and more celibate, every day if you like.

I'm not asking anyone to give up sex all at once; I'm not expecting them to do that. But inasmuch as I expect people to progress a little every day, then I expect them, in a way, to give up a little bit of sex every day, so that over the years there is an appreciable difference - so that overt sexual activity plays a smaller and smaller part in their lives.

Nagabodhi: You've said from time to time that, so far as you can see, the monk's life is the happiest life you can imagine. To what extent is their celibacy a factor in that?

Bhante: Well, I must first define what I mean by 'the monk's life'. I don't mean a formally monastic life; I don't mean simply wearing yellow robes and shaving one's head; and I certainly don't mean being celibate in a neurotic way. By the monk's life I mean a life totally devoted to the Dharma, in one way or another, a life which is, so to speak, wedded to the Dharma. I certainly see THAT as the happiest life, and I've certainly seen many, many very happy monks - in the formal sense - in the East. Very often they did seem to be much happier than the lay people who were presumably indulging in the enjoyment of all the worldly pleasures. I won't say that the monks were always strictly celibate; sometimes they weren't. But they were certainly much more celibate than the lay people! And, at the very least, they were to that extent happier.

Seven Years’ experience of Working At Windhorse Trading

2007-06-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Akasaraja
first 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

the FWBO and feminism - approaches to Buddhism

2007-05-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

This is a link to a well-argued and thought-provoking discussion of the differences between the FWBO and American feminist approaches to Buddhism and Buddhist practice in the West. The author is Dharmachari Dayamati, aka Professor Richard Hayes of the University of New Mexico. He begins by stating his position that "the Friends of the Western
Buddhist Order appear to provide an alternative theoretical framework to the
one articulated by Rita Gross in Buddhism After Patriarchy".

An alternative (and less scholarly) treatment of the same subject can be found in an article by Maitreyi on Akasavana, the FWBO's women's ordination retreat centre.

Vipassi - Crisis or Critical Moment?

2007-04-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

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.

FWBO Academic Bibliography

2007-04-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

This is a list of books and academic articles that deal wholly or in part with the FWBO. It excludes treatments by FWBO writers in non-academic contexts.

Barrett D. V. (2001) The New Believers: Sects, 'Cults' and Alternative Religions, Cassell, 307-310.
Batchelor S. (1993) The Awakening of the West, HarperCollins, London.
Baumann M (1996) ‘Buddhist Dissemination in the West: Phases, Orders and Integrative Buddhism’, Day Internacionales Asienforum 27/ 3-4: 345-62.
(1998) ‘Working in the Right Spirit: The Application of Buddhist Right Livelihood in the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order,’ The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 5.
(2000) ‘Work as Dharma Practice: Right Livelihood Cooperatives in the FWBO,’ in Queen CS (Ed.) Engaged Buddhism in the West, Wisdom Publications, pp. 372-93.
(2002) ‘Buddhism in Europe: Past, Present, Prospects.” In Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, edited by M. Baumann and C. Prebish, 85-105. London: University of California Press.
Bell S. (1996) ‘Change and Identity in the Western Buddhist Order,’ Scottish, Journal of Religious Studies vol. XVII no 2, pp.87-107.
(1997) Review of Extending the Hand of Friendship, The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, March 1997.
(2002) ‘Scandals in Emerging Western Buddhism’ in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, edited by M. Baumann and C. Prebish, 230-242. London: University of California Press.
Bluck, R. (2006) British Buddhism: Teachings, Practices and Developments, Routledge, Oxford, 2006.
Chen C.M. (ed. Khantipalo) (1967) Buddhist Meditation Systematic and Practical, Free Distribution.
Clarke P. (2005) Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements, Routledge, London, 2005.
Coleman J.W. (2001) ‘The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition,’ OUP, Oxford,
Conze E. (1979) Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic, Samizdat Publishing Co.
Cush D. (1996) ‘British Buddhism and the New Age’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 11(2):195-208
Ganguly D. ‘Yet Another English ‘Gift’: The Role of English Bhikkhus in Indian Dalit
Buddhist Conversions (1970-2000)’ Paper for the 15 Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference, 2004, http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/2004/Ganguly-D-ASAA2004.pdf
Harris E. (1998) What Buddhists Believe, Oneworld, Oxford.
Harvey P. (1990) An Introduction to Buddhism, CUP, Cambridge.
Henry P. (2006) ‘The Sociological Implications for Contemporary Buddhism in the United Kingdom: Socially Engaged Buddhism, a Case Study,’ Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Volume 13, 2006
Humphreys C. (1978) Both Sides of the Circle, Allen & Unwin, London.
Inaba K. (2005) Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, University Education Press.
Kulananda (1992) 'Protestant Buddhism' [A Response to Philip Mellor], Religion 22
McAra, Sally (2007) Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand. Published by University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.
Mellor P. ‘Protestant Buddhism? The Cultural Translation of Buddhism in England,’
Religion, 21(1): 73-93.
‘The FWBO and Tradition: a Reply to Kulananda, Religion, 22, 104-107.
Olle H. (2001) ‘The Lotus in the West,’ Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research, No 4, July 2001, http://www.shef.ac.uk/socstudies/Shop/olle.pdf
Ratnaprabha (1987) ‘A Re-emergence of Buddhism: the case of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order', in Clarke P, (ed.) The New Evangelists: Recruitment and Aims of New Religious Movements, London, Ethnographica, 57-75.
Rawlinson A. (1997) The Book of Enlightened Masters, Open Court, Chicago.
Smith, S. (2003) “Widening the Circle: Communities of Color and Western Buddhist Convert Sanghas.” In Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism, edited by C. Queen, C. Prebish and D. Keown, 220-236. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Snelling J. (1987) The Buddhist Handbook, Rider, London.
Sponberg A. (1996) Engaged Buddhism, Ed. Queen C. and King S. SUNY, New York.

Unpublished Papers
Bell S. (1991) ‘Buddhism in Britain - Development and Adaptation,’ doctoral thesis, University of Durham.
Clarke P, ‘New Religions in Britain and Western Europe: In Decline?’ paper presented at day seminar on the methods and aims of evangelization in contemporary society with special references to New Religious Movements, Kings College, London, June 14th 1985.
McAra S, ‘The Land of the Stupa and the Sacred Puriri: Creating Buddhism in the Tararu Valley, New Zealand,’ MA Thesis University of Auckland.
Scott D, ‘Modern British Buddhism: Patterns and Directions, seminar paper to The Buddhist Forum,’ SOAS.
(1996) The Friends of The Western Buddhist Order: British Buddhism in Transition?,

Growing Pains: an inside view of change in the FWBO

2007-02-18T02:38:00.000-08:00

by Vishvapani

In January 2003 I started a new job. I was to survey the FWBO in the UK and make recommendations on how it should develop. I agreed to take this on for two years while living at Madhyamaloka and continuing to edit Dharma Life. The job meant that I would rejoin the Chairmen’s meeting, become an auxiliary member of the Preceptors College Council (PCC), and join the Madhyamaloka Meeting – the small working group that Subhuti had gathered around him to look at how the movement was developing. I continued in this post for the next two-and-a-half years up to summer 2005 and in that time the movement went through considerable turmoil and change. I did engage with the movement in the UK but, at least to start with, the job I had been asked to do turned out not to be the job that needed doing: that job was working with Subhuti to help the movement make a transition in its organisation and culture.

I have finished this work now, and as a last bow I am writing this account. I have taken my own perspective and experiences as a starting point because that offers a useful focus, and it is part of what I want to communicate, but I have also tried to describe what happened to the movement as a whole, and to suggest why. Of course, there are many other perspectives and many other possible interpretations of this period, and I would not claim that mine is the most accurate: no doubt even others who were involved would give different accounts; and it is very soon to make such an attempt. But despite this article’s necessary limitations, my intention is to offer information and background on what has happened for people within the FWBO. I hope that this will be helpful to others who are interested in our community, as well.

Part 1 - 2003: The Need for Change

i. Starting work

In August 2000, on his 75th birthday Sangharakshita handed on of the Headship of the Western Buddhist Order to the College of Public Preceptors and appointed Subhuti to be its Chairman for a five year term. The College, which was responsible for ordinations, had eleven members and it was to continue to work with centre presidents in the PCC as it had since had since 1994. It may have seemed that the seal was being set on a second generation who had now wholly succeeded Sangharakshita in the movement’s `leadership’ while he withdrew into a peaceful retirement. But this was also the point at which the prevailing model of leadership came under scrutiny by this second generation of leaders. As Subhuti later commented, once the College had been given full responsibility he felt more free to question the status quo. There was reason to question. Members of the Madhyamaloka Meeting had been becoming aware that something in the current arrangements wasn’t working: the movement seemed to be settling into safe and predictable patterns and losing the dynamism of earlier years; some quite senior Order members did not fully trust the `Madhyamaloka’ leadership; and Public Preceptors felt increasingly over-stretched. The College and the PCC were unable to address these underlying issues: members of the former were too caught up with ordination processes, the latter was too unwieldy, and the individuals members of both bodies were not necessarily suited to asking such questions.

In 2001 Subhuti formed the Madhyamaloka Meeting as a think-tank, more manageable and focused than the PCC, with a brief to review the movement `from top to bottom’. Its initial members were Subhuti, Sona, Kovida, Srimala, Dhammarati, Cittapala and Kulananda; and by 2003 Sona and Kovida had left the group while Dayanandi and I had joined. They quickly concluded that what was needed was a concerted campaign of revival and change, encapsulated in the slogan, `Deepen the Order; open up the movement’, but by 2003 more progress had been made with the second of these objectives than the first. Deepening the Order meant emphasising chapters, and a series of retreats was held at Madhyamaloka in which Order chapters met with Subhuti, the local president and others to explore how they could be more effective. Two new UK Order Conveners were appointed: Mahamati for men and Dayanandi for women; a network of regional Order Forums was established in which Order members discussed issues affecting the Order; and more energy went into chapter conveners retreats. Despite all these initiatives, my impression is that those concerned felt they were taking a thimble to the ocean: the Order had a life of its own, and attempts to change things from `above’ had a limited affect. But `opening up the movement’ (i.e. the activities of the FWBO beyond the Order) involved structures such as the mitra `system’ and the centralised ordination process. The College, supported by the PCC, had ultimate responsibility for these, and the Madhyamaloka Meeting had influence as the advisor to the College and PCC.

The two main initiatives to `open up’ the movement prior to 2003 concerned changes to the mitra system, to which I shall return, and `regionalisation’. This meant locating responsibility for the movement’s coordination and strategic development with the people already taking responsibility at local and regional level, not with the PCC. A group of senior Order members was already meeting in India, and other meetings started in the US and Germany, where there are just a few centres. But the real problem was the UK which in early 2003 had thirty centres and around 600 Order members: a meeting of those taking major responsibilities would include up to 100 people. Someone needed to take a good look and find a way forward.
Madhyamaloka Meeting and the European Chairs Assembly asked me to take on this job and I agreed, but with some reservations. I doubted that the FWBO in the UK was manageable in the way that had been suggested. The UK makes up at least 70 percent of the FWBO outside India, and addressing its needs would in fact require looking not just at the symptoms (the limitations of the movement in the UK) but also identifying the underlying causes that were affecting the whole FWBO. But before I had gone far in doing this, a development occurred that changed the landscape in which I was searching.

ii. Sangharakshita and Yashomitra: January 2003

In January 2003 I heard that a long-standing Order member called Yashomitra had submitted an article to Shabda, the Order’s confidential journal, detailing his sexual contact with Sangharakshita and making some trenchant criticisms. A debate ensued at Madhyamaloka: Should Yashomitra’s piece be published? Should it be withheld? Who should decide? Should we ask Sangharakshita, anticipating that he might well say no? Was it fair on him to publish it – or even to ask him, given his current ill health? What if it killed him? But then, was it fair on Yashomitra not to publish? On one side was loyalty to Sangharakshita, a desire to protect him – especially now he was ill – and exasperation at the seemingly endless stream of criticism. On the other side, for Kulananda and myself, was frustration at the constraints on talking publicly about Sangharakshita’s sexual past. We had had the task of responding to the 1997-9 campaign against Sangharakshita and the FWBO that used the press and the internet; and in August 1998 we had co-authored with Cittapala The FWBO Files: a Response. This document had offered only minimal comment on the accusations about sex: one reason was the request from Lokamitra and a a team of senior Order members in India that he had convened to say as little as possible to confirm that Sangharakshita had been homosexually active. They told us they were afraid of the response in their community, even fearing that there would be violence against members of the movement. The other reason was that Sangharakshita himself had said that he wanted to write his own account in his next volume of memoirs. But when he came to write that volume he covered only a period in which he was still celibate. By 2003 we could wait no longer.

When I read Yashomitra’s article I saw it was incendiary stuff. I had heard his story from his own lips ten years before, and I had been forced to think hard about issues around Sangharakshita’s sexual history when responding to our public critics. In a sense there was nothing surprising in what he had to say: it always seemed inevitable to me that Sangharakshita’s behaviour would produce feelings such as Yashomitra’s in at least some of his partners. But the article was made especially powerful by its tone. Unlike some previous accounts, Yashomitra’s was largely free of rhetoric and venom, and portrayed Sangharakshita in a credible yet troubling light. Telling details included descriptions of Yashomitra’s sense that Sangharakshita had lost interest in him when their sexual relationship ended, and his frustration when he had tried to discuss the events with Sangharakshita years later and, as he saw it, been rebuffed.

My own response to reading this was mixed. I admired Sangharakshita greatly and felt great affection for him; but I saw that some of his actions had led to suffering in ways he seemed unwilling to consider. I had tried hard to understand this apparent incongruity while living with him, and had seen something of the complexity of his character and the peculiarity of his life experience. But it wasn’t just a matter of making an ethical assessment: reflecting on these issues I felt very, very sad. I had known both Yashomitra and Sangharakshita since I fifteen years old and thought of them both as friends. I found myself writing out my thoughts on Sangharakshita’s life in a letter to Zoketsu Norman Fischer, who I knew a little and who had lived through the San Francisco Zen Center’s struggles to come to terms with the flaws and virtues of its former leader, Richard Baker Roshi. I later published my letter and his response in Shabda. I saw that the issues needed to be faced squarely and that doing so touched strong feelings for everyone in the FWBO, whether or not we were directly involved in these events. As I wrote: `all these people – the critics, the doubters, the writers, the leaders, Sangharakshita and everyone else – had shared their lives for two or three decades. They had wound round each other, and lived with each other, and sometimes slept with each other. If these people weren’t their lives, then what were their lives?’

iii. Madhyamaloka Meetings 1: Attitudes

A problem with publishing Yashomitra’s article was that Shabda had a policy of not printing personal criticisms of individuals. So I contacted Subhuti, who in India, for advice. He proposed that we hold off publication until key people were back in the UK, and in mid-February 2003 the Madhyamaloka Meeting gathered (the Preceptors’ College having delegated the decision about publication to us). Concerns about the effect on Sangharakshita were allayed when we heard that he didn’t want to be told anything that might hinder his ability to sleep. The meeting was unanimous that we should advise the Order conveners to revoke the injunction against personal criticisms and publish the article. The mood of the meeting and the enthusiasm for publishing surprised me, and it seemed significant that the article would appear with the conscious agreement of people at the heart of the movement. It appeared in the March 2003 Shabda along with a preface by Subhuti, saying: `Yashomitra writes with honesty and objectivity and raises issues that, in our view, do need to be aired in the Order and movement, whether or not one agrees with everything that he says. Indeed, I am glad that Yashomitra has written the article and am pleased that another piece of our collective history is being opened to us all.’

Over my years in the Order, even while working hard for the movement, standing up for it in public and living with its leaders at Madhyamaloka, I often disagreed with Sangharakshita’s views and was sceptical of the PCC’s leadership role. I admired some of them, and some were my friends, but I favoured greater openness in our communication, diversity in our norms and reform of our structures. Dharma Life magazine, which I had founded in 1996 and had edited since then, had been my main attempt to influence the movement’s discourse and frames of reference in this way. I had expected that in joining the PCC and the Madhyamaloka Meeting I would find myself fighting those more concerned to conserve the movement’s cohesive values. What I actually found was a group led by Subhuti that was willing to consider changes to the movement’s structures that were more radical than any I had thought possible.

An agenda for change had been emerging in the Madhyamaloka Meeting over the previous two years. The main change it had already achieved was to the mitra system. Perhaps someone closer to events will one day give an account of why the mitra system developed as it did. But by 2000 an arrangement that had started as a way to help newcomers connect with the FWBO and the Order required a lengthy handbook to guide mitra conveners through the many expectations the candidate mitra was expected to fulfill, including declaring that they would not have or encourage others to have an abortion and that they did not adhere to a strong political philosophy deemed antipathetic to Buddhism. The resulting arrangements were often experienced as a demand for conformity from the candidate, while Order members had the role of judging and approving them. What is more, Order members in general were not involved in deciding the criteria they were expected to enforce. The Madhyamaloka Meeting’s solution was simple and radical. They proposed that becoming a mitra should be entirely up to the candidate, who simply needed to make three declarations: that they were a Buddhist, that they would follow the five precepts, and that they saw the FWBO as the current context for their spiritual lives. Notions of acceptance and criteria were discarded and the mitra `system’ was finished. This was an early sign that serious changes were afoot, and that the future of the movement lay in an as yet undefined, but definitely more voluntaristic arrangement.

While the appearance of the article was painful for everyone, at least some at Madhyamaloka thought it was also fortuitous. A
number of us agreed with Yashomitra that the issues stirred up in 1997 by the Guardian lingered as unfinished business, and his article brought these into the open. We actively embraced the opportunity to open up a range of issues that started with Sangharakshita’s sexual ethics but went much further.

iv. Responses to Yashomitra

It was in this spirit that the Madhyamaloka Meeting decided not to make a collective statement in response to Yashomitra’s article: that would have reinforced the role of `Madhyamaloka’ as owners of the FWBO’s `official’ position. Instead, Subhuti proposed in a letter he sent to Order members in late March 2003 (published in the May 2003 Shabda): `It seems to me the most important thing is that those of us who want to tell our stories, and that we just let everything come out into the open … I would value hearing from as many Order members as possible about their experience of their past in the Order and movement, if they feel there is something unexpressed.’

This suggestion was taken up widely, and the Order embarked on a period of turmoil and soul-searching that reached a climax at the Open Forum at the August 2003 Order Convention and gradually settling down in the following year-and-a-half. Yashomitra’s article was discussed at Order gatherings, along with other personal stories. Many Order members contributed articles and reports to Shabda, and we proposed to the Order conveners that a digest of these should also be circulated to interested non-Order members. Many contributions were thoughtful, balanced and kind, and the discussion was far too varied to be neatly encapsulated. But I want to suggest elements that I think were significant for the movement’s future development.

Similar stories to Yashomitra’s had appeared in The Guardian newspaper, been explicated by The FWBO Files, and endlessly repeated on the internet by long-time critic Mark Dunlop and others. In 1998 Shabda contained many angry reports about Sangharakshita’s sexual history and the movement’s other troubles. And yet the repeated cry in 2003 was, `Why weren’t we told?’ and even, `Why was this hidden?’

What explains this response in the Order at this time? One reason was suggested by the character of those who were affected this time around. Whereas many of those who had been most outspoken in 1998 were already to some degree disaffected, it seems significant to me that in 2003 Yashomitra touched many who were inclined by experience and temperament to be loyal supporters of Sangharakshita and the movement. Such people were touched because of Yashomitra’s character: he was generally liked and respected within the Order – and the honest tone of his article. Whereas previous criticisms had come from outside, and perhaps been disregarded, Yashomitra’s story was a part of the Order’s own experience and his words matched its ethos of open communication. Significantly, and in contrast to 1997/8, those at Madhyamaloka, from whom these loyal Order members tended to take a lead, were at pains not to defend Sangharakshita: indeed, open discussion was encouraged. Subhuti wrote in his March letter to the Order: `I shall not defend Bhante’s actions as described by Yashomitra. Although I was well aware that Bhante was sexually active at the time Yashomitra writes of, with a number of partners, Yashomitra’s article presented me, for the first time that I am aware of, with activity of this kind that I cannot condone.’

Many Order members were also stung by Yashomitra’s suggestion that the Order was in a state of collective denial about Sangharakshita’s sexual activity and its consequences in the movement. Perhaps `denial’ is the mind’s tendency to avoid what it finds painful, and in 2003 people were confronted by a painful reality in a way that could no longer be set aside. There were many expressions of dismay, shock, anger and sadness; as well as relief that the issues were at last being confronted fully. Some people suffered a crisis of faith, asking if the Western Buddhist Order was truly founded on sound spiritual experience, and if the sacrifices they had made were worth the cost. As well as these immediate factors changes in the Order and movement, the response in the Order was also influenced by changes in the culture of the Order (which I will discuss later) that made many Order members more open to hearing criticisms of their teacher.

Responses in Shabda also included expressions of love for Sangharakshita, gratitude for his teachings and his other personal qualities, and some questioning of Yashomitra himself. Some people wanted to defend Sangharakshita against the accusations. Nonetheless, while there was a strong wish not to be uniformly condemnatory, criticism of Sangharakshita’s behaviour with Yashomitra and his sexual history in general was a strong element in many contributions to this discussion. Some people said they thought he had been unskillful, while others emphasised the difficulty of knowing motives or making moral judgments about others. However, from this point on I think it has been possible to speak of a broad swathe of agreement within the FWBO that Sangharakshita had been unwise in his sexual dealings. Some would dissent from this, while others would make criticisms of him in much stronger terms.

Several of the personal accounts in Shabda described homosexual experiences in the FWBO (many of them on the part of men with a largely heterosexual orientation), including encounters with Sangharakshita. These were mostly reflective in tone: after all, they were describing events that had taken place twenty or thirty years earlier, when the now-middle aged writers were young men. Neither condemning nor condoning, several people said that, while they did not regret what had happened, they realised it had brought them difficulties later on. A number of writers were at pains to resist a caricature of the movement’s past as an unbridled sexual ferment, and to emphasise the variety of experiences and the relative unimportance of the sexual side for them. A view of Sangharakshita was increasingly articulated that included more ambiguity, more criticism and more sense of his complexity than had previously been common.

A further theme was the attitudes and ideas that had led to these difficult experiences. These included views on sex that tended to value homosexuality more highly than heterosexuality; views on gender that tended to value men more highly than women; and views about lifestyle that tended to value single sex communal living more highly than family living. The perception among these writers was that such views were interwoven and therefore relevant to the events described in Yashomitra’s article. One writer used the blunt traditional term `wrong views’ to describe them. Debate on gender topics had for some years been the sharpest point of dissention, and a test case for the degree of agreement that was required of Order members in relation to their teacher.

As well as being about sex, Yashomitra’s article stirred up other unresolved shadows from the Order’s past. In its early years as a tightly defined group of idealistic, mainly young people who were strongly influenced by the movement’s leader and on a mission they considered to have unbounded significance, the FWBO had made rapid progress; but it had also left behind many painful experiences. So the stories Order members told included sexual experiences, but also concerned difficulties affecting lifestyle (especially people with families who had felt excluded), beliefs, gender (including suggestions that misogynist attitudes had sometimes flourished in the FWBO), and pressures that had arisen at work or in centres. In 2003 the FWBO’s culture was far more diverse and inclusive than in its early years, but it had sometimes seemed that the cloud of these old, painful experiences remained hanging over it. The debates of 2003 offered room for them to come out in an atmosphere that was free from judgment; and I for one hoped that their influence over would at last be dispelled.

v. The Question of Authority

Debate continued in the Order and movement over the following months, but while the discussion was still young, Subhuti made a contribution in his March letter to the Order that took it in a direction it might not otherwise have followed. He connected this debate with his underlying concerns about how the movement was structured: `The article must raise questions in many people’s minds about spiritual “authority” in the Order. I regard this as a very good thing - although not one that is easily and finally resolved. … Early on, Bhante’s spiritual authority was everything. Simply with growing numbers and greater geographical spread, increasing experience and maturity among Order members, the emergence of new Preceptors, and Bhante’s withdrawal, the situation is much more complex and requires a new consensus. Revelations about Bhante’s behaviour underline that questions must be asked about spiritual authority, including about who confers ordination and on what basis. I believe we need to debate this very widely so that we can try to reach a new common understanding on the subject.’

Over the next few months the Madhyamaloka Meeting explored these issues, identified the need for a transition to another way of conceiving and organising responsibilities, and formulated the outlines of a new structure intended to match its current reality. In fact, the question of authority had been discussed before 2003. At the 2001 Order Convention Subhuti gave a talk on this very subject, seeking to clarify the role of the College and the limits of its authority; and in November 2002 the Public Preceptors meeting had agreed that the College was too centralised. But by early 2003 the time had come to take this much further. Before describing what took place in the Madhyamaloka Meeting and the proposals that emerged from it, I want to suggest some of the tensions that had been developing in the movement and how these connected with the effects of Yashomitra’s article and the question of authority.

The College and the PCC

The College of Public Preceptors was authorised by Sangharakshita to have the final say over ordinations and the appointment of new public and private preceptors and chapter and Order conveners. It also had the power to exclude people from the Order. Presidents were appointed by the PCC and had an undefined influence over what happened at centres: they were key players in the appointment of new chairmen, and sometimes policed the limits of what centres could do. It would be wrong to suggest that the College and the PCC `ran the movement’: the College’s powers were usually used sensitively and often embedded in processes of consultation; while the PCC was reluctant to impose its views and made policy statements very rarely. More important than the formal powers of the PCC and the College was their place in the Order’s culture. Even before the formation of the PCC, Subhuti gave a talk at Sangharakshita’s suggestion on the `hierarchy of responsibilities’, suggesting that taking a higher level of responsibility within the FWBO’s structures required a higher level of spiritual qualities. He was mainly trying to encourage people to take more responsibility by suggesting that this could be a path of spiritual practice, but his ideas were easily read as implying an equation between the FWBO’s institutional hierarchies and its spiritual hierarchy. Membership of the PCC came to be associated with spiritual status.

But when I joined the Madhyamaloka community in February 1999 I discovered that reality of the PCC reality differed from its appearance. Members of the PCC and the College did not regard themselves as being powerful, privileged or spiritually superior. Although most people in the FWBO assumed the PCC was guiding the movement’s development, in fact they had never tried to produce strategies for its spread or its teaching methods, and had no power to apportion resources or direct people to start new projects. The Madhyamaloka Meeting, with just seven members, had in effect taken over the functions of the PCC and the Presidents Meeting in keeping an overview. And, since its formation in 2001, the Meeting had been concerned with structural issues such as the changes to the mitra system, and never got down to looking at what went on in centres or regions in detail.

Some individual members of the PCC lacked the capacity to encompass a movement-wide perspective, and some lacked the spiritual stature required to be an exemplar. Sangharakshita had chosen the PCC from those he knew well and trusted; but my impression was that some had been drawn to working with him because they were loyal and faithful followers, and this did not necessarily equip them to be leaders or organisers. I think that one or two people in this position found themselves out of their depth, and responded by trying to control more and more tightly the areas for which they were responsible. Another response surfaced in Autumn 2002 when it emerged that Kovida, the Western Order Convener, had for some years been spending money to which he was not entitled that belonged to FWBO Uddiyana, the charity looking after Sangharakshita’s affairs. I can only speculate about why this happened, but my impression was that spending money was a displacement of his conflicts about his work, and perhaps his life more generally. He was capable and loyal, but his qualities and experience made him ill suited to his work and he felt very frustrated.

Even those with the capacity to engage in strategic and organisational work wondered if it was the best use of their time. The movement needed the inspiration of strongly established Dharma practitioners such as Subhuti, but his place at the top of its organisational pyramid meant that numerous issues incessantly came to him and his associates for their urgent attention. Conversely, some other PCC Members felt they could not fully influence its policies because of Subhuti’s dominance. The difficulties people felt in regard to Subhuti were closely connected with his strengths: he was uniformly respected in the PCC as having the greatest spiritual stature, intellectual capacity, organisational ability and ability to engage with great depth with many people. But I think that others found it hard to take initiatives themselves in the face of Subhuti’s dynamism.

The College members were in an especially difficult position. By 2003 around 1,500 people worldwide had asked for ordination; and, even with the support of the ordination teams, all of these requests converged on the eleven public preceptors for final decisions. Between them they had already ordained around 600 people who often still looked to them for support and guidance. As well as their responsibility for ordinations they were the collective Head of the Order; several were also presidents and involved in Order issues; and the four women preceptors were under particular pressure because so many women were asking for ordination. In addition they all had to deal with the expectations, projections and reactions attendant on their place at the top of the movement’s hierarchy. Under considerable pressure but unable to do much to `lead’ the movement, the public preceptors increasingly wondered what their Headship of the Order really meant?

The PCC and the Order

The Order itself had changed. Its 600 members in 1994, when the PCC was established, had swelled by 2003 to 1,000 individuals spread further around the globe. The passage of time also meant that the Order was more mature in both years and experience, and many had been practicing for twenty or thirty years. They were living their lives in their own ways and without a natural feeling of deference to the movement’s institutional leaders. By this time Sangharakshita was a distant figure for many: he was preceptor to only a third of Order members while many of the others had not had substantial contact with him. He had handed on the Headship, withdrawn from involvement in the movement, and finally become the subject of questioning and criticism from large numbers of Order members.

Behind the specific details of the PCC’s responsibilities was a larger question that is harder to define: who ultimately `owns’ the FWBO and determines what it stands for? Initially the FWBO had clearly been `Sangharakshita’s movement’: it was formed around his ideas, run by people he had ordained, and guided in crucial areas by his judgment and influence. Having succeeded to this role the PCC and the College also found themselves, in some sense, the movement’s ultimate owners. With the handing on the Headship of the Order to the College this seemed to be confirmed: they were `custodians’, charged to safeguard and sustain the vision behind the Order; and to balance the `centrifugal’ forces of increasing divergence with the `centripetal’ forces of coherence and a shared set of values. In this sense the PCC and College were set up to be in tension with others in the Order.

But the tension that many Order members felt was not so much with these bodies themselves as with the norms and standards with which they were associated. The movement had tended to present itself in terms of its distinctive institutions such as centres, communities and team-based businesses, and PCC members had all devoted themselves to these institutions as expressions of a shared cause for which they had made sacrifices. But by 2003 only a minority of Order members were involved in all of these institutions. Some lived in family situations; more lived on their own or in informal arrangements with friends. Some had careers; others had found individual ways of supporting themselves. It had even ceased to be the norm that the great majority of Order members had a substantial involvement in FWBO centres. Connected with the sense of a normative lifestyle was a normative set of views that followed Sangharakshita’s. Along with disagreements about gender there were others on sex, families, Christianity and `pseudo-liberalism’. It was clear that individuals had the freedom to disagree; but did such views nonetheless represent the position of the movement? Could an FWBO centre propagate a differing view? People in the FWBO could easily feel that, to the extent that their views and lifestyles differed from the perceived orthodoxy, they were outside the movement.

Whatever the causes, there were signs that all was not well in the movement, and these indications had been discussed extensively in the Madhyamaloka Meeting. Leaving aside India, while the number of women requesting ordination was increasing, the number of men was going down. From a peak of 92 in 1998, the number decreased every year, eventually reaching a low of 32 in 2003. And, for all the exhortations to expand the movement, very few new urban FWBO centres had opened in the 1990s. Conversely, the most encouraging new development in the 1990s was the Buddhafield collective which runs camping retreats and festivals. It had started off as a rebellious alternative to mainstream FWBO centres and been regarded with some suspicion by many others in the movement, and its success suggested that energy lay outside the FWBO’s mainstream. Arguably the structures that followed Sangharakshita, which were intended to offer clear leadership and provide a check on ethical breaches, had tended to inhibit autonomy and initiative. They placed unrealistic expectations and unsustainable burdens on the leaders, and perhaps exacerbated tendencies to passivity, deference and disgruntlement within the Order as a whole. In a letter to the Order June 2003 Subhuti described `the dichotomy of abdication of personal responsibility on the one hand and the egoistic abuse of respect, whether unwittingly or not, on the other.’ The implication was that these things had occurred in the Order itself.

In May 2003 Subhuti and I discussed the movement’s future with Mahaprabha, an Order member who taught strategy at London Business School. We discussed how, as a young movement the FWBO had often defined itself against the world, mirroring the defiant, resolutely self-sufficient character of its founder. Indeed, its language and praxis had sometimes displayed efforts to create a world unto itself, a `New Society’ operating within the wider world, but not of it. Even after 2000, this attitude was still influential, but western society and the Buddhist world in the West were changing, and the FWBO’s tendency to isolation risked making it irrelevant to the society that surrounded it. Mahaprabha observed that new organisations need protection and their founders often wish to safeguard their hard-won achievements. He drew a graph with one axis marked `control’ and another marked `certainty’. He wrote `order’ at the point where the two lines met: the point of maximum control and certainty. An organisation in this position is tightly defined but isolated and liable to forfeit the ability to learn from others; it risked losing contact with the needs it had been founded to address. The other pole, the point of minimum control and certainty, he labeled `chaos’. The question was how to operate with both flexibility and cohesion in the intermediate realm between order and chaos. The FWBO’s tightly bounded character was breaking down and we needed to find ways to inhabit this realm.

Subhuti’s response: Freedom in the Order

Although I have associated the PCC with efforts to maintain cohesion and guard past successes, there was also a countervailing trend within it. The Order’s institutions had been intended to support a `cascade of spiritual friendship’ within a `free association of individuals’; and the movement was intended to be a network of autonomous projects freely collaborating rather than a unitary, streamlined organisation. Subhuti’s concern at the declining sense of collective ownership of the FWBO prompted a talk to a Men’s UK National Order Weekend in August 2002 entitled `Freedom in the Order’ in which he urged a return to the FWBO’s founding principles: `I think we need to learn – or re-learn – the habit of seeing the Movement as the sum total of the altruistic activities of Order members, not as a particular set of institutions.’ At the organisational level, too, he emphasised that power should not play a part as: `There is no hierarchical “chain of command”. If there is any centralising influence at the organisational level, it should come about in response to some common interest, in relation to which co-operation enhances effectiveness.’

Part of Subhuti’s motivation for giving this talk was frustration that his own institutional role, with its connotations of power, constrained his ability to speak his mind freely, especially when he had criticisms. And he advocated an atmosphere of greater freedom of expression for all on a basis of mutual trust and respect. Another motivation was frustration at the growing criticism of those holding institutional responsibilities by others who felt more marginal. He exhorted these individuals to find an alternative: `their best strategy is to show another way … the more approaches we have, the better.’ This suggestion didn’t address the underlying reasons why people felt critical, but the intention was clearly to embrace the new conditions in which the Order was operating: `I think we must accept – and even aim for – a more diverse Order and Movement, and rejoice in that as a sign of spiritual vitality.’

vi. Madhyamaloka Meeting 2: the search for alternatives

If the Order’s debates marked a change in views of Sangharakshita, attitudes were also changing among PCC members themselves. As I had realised in moving to Madhyamaloka, for many, their connection with Sangharakshita was one of the most important relationships in their lives; they had learned to practice, even to think, under his tutelage; their experience of the Order had been formed by the roles to which he had appointed them; and their motivation for taking responsibility was often loyalty and gratitude to him as a teacher. In 2003 Sangharakshita’s sleeplessness and accompanying distress made the community’s collective relationship with him, which had been polite but distant, much more demanding; and this confronted some people with unresolved difficulties in their personal connections with him. Subhuti expressed his experience of the intellectual side of his changing relationship in his June letter to the Order, while discussing Women, Men and Angels: `At the time that I wrote [1994] I was inclined to give Sangharakshita’s ideas a lot more priority than I am now. I don’t think that even then I adopted them blindly and I don’t think that even now I dismiss them easily - indeed, Sangharakshita’s thought is still central to my own. But there has been a progression in my relationship to him.’ He concluded: `Over time … I have increasingly found myself diverging from Sangharakshita on some of his views about the times we live in and the way the Dharma should be communicated.’

A decline in Sangharakshita’s standing also affected that of his successors. While `Freedom in the Order’ admirably outlined the spirit of the changes Subhuti thought were necessary, its appraisal of problematic attitudes did not extend to the structures that had helped to produce them. By the time I joined the Madhyamaloka Meeting, Subhuti’s thinking had moved on. He suggested to the meeting that underlying the concerns about the state of the movement, the tensions around the PCC, and the controversy around Sangharakshita, lay questions about the authority of the movement’s leadership. When Sangharakshita had handed on the Headship to the College it may have seemed that they would now fulfill the role he had once had, but it had become clear that this was impossible. We needed more than a transfer of responsibilities; we needed to find an entirely new way of organising ourselves that took into account the Order’s greater size, its increased diversity, and the gradual decay of the authority that had been inherited from its founder.

For Subhuti, authority and legitimacy were not abstract issues: they defined the limits of his capacity for action and initiative as Chair of the Preceptors College. He was keenly aware that the questioning of Sangharakshita affected his own standing. As he put it, he thought that he had a limited period of legitimacy in which he could make changes; and he wanted to use that time to implement a transition to new arrangements that would be self-legitimating. Working with him in this period, hammering out issues that were central to the movement we had been involved in for most of our lives, was genuinely exciting. His willingness to countenance change, and the atmosphere of controversy, lent an air of urgency, even drama, to our discussions. It sometimes seemed that old attitudes and ways of working were crumbling before our eyes.

However, even Subhuti’s limited legitimacy could not be taken for granted considering his involvement with Kovida and his authorship of Women, Men and Angels. In his March letter, Subhuti noted that some people had resigned from the Order because of this book and he said: `I would far rather that doubts and concerns about me are articulated openly and my suitability to carry my present responsibilities is called into question than that someone should leave the Order … I am quite happy to complete my term of office as Chairman of the Preceptors‚ College and Council. But I don’t want to do so if most Order members do not believe that is in the best interests of the Order.’ The response was generally supportive, but this request showed how seriously he regarded the issue.

Reviewing the College

The agenda Subhuti presented to the Madhyamaloka Meeting focused on the College. It was the Head of the Order and, through its connection with the PCC, it had a role in the leadership of the movement. But its core responsibility was for ordinations, and this was crucial. Ordination was the only point at which standards could really be asserted, and the Order’s existence depended on its members’ mutual acceptance of one another’s ordinations. As Subhuti put it, `ordination is the only “sacrament” within the FWBO’s system.’ As we understood it, ordination centred on the preceptor’s `witnessing’ that the candidate was going for Refuge to the Three Jewels; and this witnessing required considerable depth of Dharma practice and engagement with the WBO sangha. For these reasons, authority to confer ordination had been restricted to a tight group of senior and trusted Order members, then numbering eleven.

By early 2003 this arrangement was buckling. The Public Preceptors were coming to the limits of their energy at a time when, as confidence drained away from the movement’s normative beliefs and lifestyles, their standing was affected. In the previous circumstances authority and legitimacy naturally flowed from Sangharakshita; in the new ones it also needed to emerge from the Order as a whole. As Subhuti put it in his March 2003 letter to the Order: `We are in transition from a band of Bhante’s personal disciples who were constituted into an Order by him to an Order that was founded many years ago by Bhante.’
Did this mean that the old basis for ordinations was no longer sustainable? This was asked in all seriousness, and the Madhyamaloka Meeting discussed the spectrum of alternatives for how ordinations could be conducted, and requested views from Order members. At one end of the spectrum of possibilities was a tightly controlled lineage of teachers authorised to confer ordination: in a sense this is what we already had. At the other end was a radical decentralisation. In its most extreme form this could mean that people selected themselves with no external check; or less radically, in the manner of Theravadin Bhikkhus, ordination could be conferred by any gathering of a given number of Order members. As we mulled over what the Order might be like with these arrangements, more and more concerns surfaced: how would `standards’ be maintained between chapters? Was there any place for the `witnessing ` element of the ceremony and the relationship with the preceptor? In the absence of these, how would confidence be maintained between Order members that they shared the same understanding of ordination? And without that, how could the Order persist? I think all the meeting’s members soon felt that such an Order would rapidly cease to have any meaning.

In fact it would be wrong to characterize the existing system as simply hierarchical: it was tripartite and contained checks and balances. The views of local Order members on a person’s readiness for ordination were extensively canvassed and with very few exceptions their support was before someone could be ordained. Each ordinand also had a private preceptor, a senior Order member with a particular personal connection with the candidate, who conducted the private ordination ceremony. Although they had the final say, the public preceptor’s task was often to supervise the other parties to ensure the maintenance of common standards and the quality of the communication, and to reach a decision with which everyone was happy. Discussion of ordination requests between these three parties had always been taken very seriously in the Order, and over the years a great deal had been learnt about how to conduct them. The experience of ordination and connections with preceptors were also deeply significant for many Order members. By contrast, if only local groups were involved, what safeguards would there be against unconscious motivations connected with pressures to conform, institutional needs, favoritism and so on? For these reasons, the result of exploring the philosophy of ordination was always more likely to be an evolution of current arrangements than a fundamental change.

Having a select group to decide membership is a common practice in comparable bodies (with the exception of those such as the Bhikkhu Sangha that had strong non-negotiable rules for their members – and even these bodies often have a governing authority such as a Sangharaja). But the status of such a group was a matter for debate. The group explored examples of systems in other Buddhist schools including the two levels of ordination within the Jodo Shinshu school, the higher of which brought authority to confer membership of the lower. As someone who was not going to become a Public Preceptor any time soon I balked at regarding the College as a higher `Order within the Order’, and such an arrangement also seemed contrary to the sense of participation and inclusion we wished to encourage. It became gradually clearer that this the College should therefore cease to be regarded as the Head of the Order. This designation made little practical difference, and re-enforced notions of status.

`Shaping the Future’

In May 2003, Subhuti presented the meeting with a draft document entitled `The Constitution Of The Order And Movement’. It outlined the principles on which the FWBO’s structures were established and proposed some changes to arrangements for ordinations. Over the next few weeks we discussed this document, and in late June I co-wrote with Subhuti a final version entitled `Shaping The Future Of The Order And Movement.’ This was distributed to chapters and appeared in the July 2003 Shabda as the basis for consultation between the College and the Order on how responsibilities should be arranged in the Order.

The key to this paper was an effort to balance the conflicting calls of autonomy and diversity with those of cohesion and unity, without introducing notions of power and control or insisting on deference to `spiritual hierarchy’. `A culture of open discussion and debate is a vital context, but when it comes to decision making it is also necessary to be clear where responsibility for making the decision rightly lies. We believe the answer is that it should lie with those in connection with whom the decision is to be made. Hence we have the principle of the autonomy of centres, chapters and so on in making decisions about things that affect them.’ However, individual Order members and the bodies they form may choose to cooperate on matters of common interest, and in this way the Order, movement and College could be seen as `distinct systems’, each of which contained its own innate sources of authority.

The Order was `a spiritual community arising from a recognition of each other as effectively going for Refuge to the Three Jewels. As a spiritual community it is “a free association of individuals”, coming together in a spirit of kalyanamitrata.’ The Order was `self-governing’ at each level, which in effect meant that decisions were made by a consensus of those who would be affected. The Movement was `made up of a number of autonomous organisations and projects that overlap and interweave. These grow from Order members’ engagement in all kinds of altruistic and creative activity.’ Individual projects were authorised by their legal status, constitutions and so on, which expressed the terms on which Order members had come together to form them; and collective bodies were authorised by the willingness of those running these projects to cooperate for common ends.

To a large extent this was how things already functioned – the Order and movement were founded on principles of autonomy and self-determination. However, these proposals signified real change because the PCC and the `Head of the Order’ had existed over and above such voluntary networks. The document stated that: `the Preceptors’ College wishes to relinquish its residual responsibilities in relation to the movement.’ Specifically this meant that it would no longer appoint presidents; but it also spelt the end of the PCC. In future, if the movement in its institutional aspects was to be led, it would be on the authority of those who were taking responsibility within it, especially the chairs of the FWBO charities. The document also expressed the College’s `wish to relinquish whatever institutional responsibilities the Preceptors’ College retains for appointments to offices in the Order.’

While the College was to withdraw from leadership of the movement and Headship of the Order, it maintained its role in regard the Order’s membership: `The College of Public Preceptors is responsible for ensuring that there are common standards of ordination, thereby ensuring that every Order member can consider him or herself to be a member of the same spiritual community.’ The need for a small, cohesive group to guarantee these standards had emerged from our discussion of the alternatives.

Membership of the College (and, by extension, its authority) still derived from its appointment by Sangharakshita, who also empowered it to appoint new members. Conceivably there might be ways to appoint a different group on the authority the Order as a whole to sustain standards of ordination, but the Madhyamaloka Meeting and the College concluded that, in their opinion, the principles underlying the current arrangements remained the likeliest to produce high standards and widespread confidence. They offered continuity with past and connection with Sangharakshita. The principle of a `spiritual hierarchy’ of effective practice and commitment to the Dharma was, after all, fundamental to the Order – otherwise, why have an Order at all? – and we all agreed that it was appropriate to base a College with restricted powers upon that principle.

However, the College also required the support of the Order, so the paper included proposals for its reform; I will just mention the main ones here. The number of public preceptors was to be greatly increased and this would enable the ordination processes to be decentralised. Small groups of College members (`kulas’) could agree to ordinations between them, without needing to refer to all the other members. They would be chosen from among experienced private preceptors only after extensive consultation in the Order and appointed for a five year term, after which their status would be reviewed. Private preceptors would undergo a similar consultation process before they were selected.

We hoped that these arrangements would produce a College that was free from the weight of projections that came with the Headship of the Order, and the expectations of offering a strategic direction that had accrued to the PCC. It would reflect more accurately the reality of what the College was equipped to do, and throw back onto the Order and movement the task of finding a collective direction. Above all, we hoped that it would give space for creativity and initiative in the movement.
Over the following months `The Future Shape…’ and a second, clarifying document entitled `The Future of the Order and Movement: Further Thoughts‘ (which appeared in the October 2003 Shabda) were discussed throughout the Order in chapter meetings, forums, the Convention and personal dialogue; and this discussion merged with continuing fall-out from Yashomitra’s article. Members of the Madhyamaloka Meeting also met with senior Buddhists from outside the FWBO to hear their responses about how we proposed to organise ourselves. As one would expect, these responses varied greatly. Some people were alarmed that the movement was are losing leadership; some were cautiously willing to trust the present College to decentralise; some didn’t mind the proposals in themselves but did not trust the present leadership; and a small number, who wanted a much more radically decentralised Order and movement, wanted the College done away with completely. But most Order members were happy with what had been proposed, and there was broad agreement from most respondents that the College should retain the final say on ordinations. Some people wanted the consultation itself to go much further, so that the entire Order would `co-create’ new arrangements for the future, rather than being an exercise in gathering feedback on proposals the Madhyamaloka Meeting had developed and the College would decide.

In November 2003 the PCC held its final meeting, and the Presidents decided they would cease to meet together. Henceforth a President would be appointed by a centre and not be part of any wider body. Meanwhile the College decided to go ahead with most of the changes that had been outlined. An announcement about the new arrangements appeared in Shabda in January 2004.

It remained to be seen how the Order and movement would function under these new arrangements. The lesson of 2003 was that the Order and movement were not organisations that could be led but cultures – or networks, or perhaps simply sangha – that had a life of their own. So how far would the arrangements we had proposed address the cultural issues we faced? They would mean removing some of the institutions that gave a sense of solidity and certainty to how the FWBO was structured, and that required an act of faith in the integrity of the Order. But would it respond? Would decentralisation and the loss of a clear `leadership’ undermine its sense of collective identity as a shared project, a `cause’ to which one could commit oneself? Where would that leave the movement’s institutions that depended on such commitment? And what about my other work for the movement in the UK? What ways of working were appropriate within this new environment?

Part 2 – 2004-5: Transition or Collapse?

In Part 1 of this account of changes through which the FWBO has been passing I focused on the events of 2003 and the work of the Madhyamaloka Meeting, the small group that advised the College of Public Preceptors. But by the end of that year the changes in the FWBO’s structures initiated by the Madhyamaloka Meeting had been made. Having expanded and decentralised the College, clarified that the Order was `self-governing’, and dissolved the Preceptors College Council (PCC), no group of people was any longer keeping an overview of the movement or guiding its development. For this reason, an account of the FWBO in the couple of years after 2003 cannot be a simple narrative. Instead, I shall do my best to describe the trends that I observed; but I cannot do justice to everything. My role was to keep an overview of the movement in the UK and help it to work more effectively, so I have most to say about the centres and institutions rather than the Order or the College, and little to say about the FWBO in other countries. This was a period of flux in which structures, ideas and attitudes that had helped create cohesion and solidity disappeared, dissolved or were widely questioned. That makes it hard to give a clear account, but the uncertainty is also part of the picture. With all the changes that had taken place people in the FWBO were left asking, who are we now?

2004: Who are we now?

The turbulence that had rocked the Order in 2003 died down in 2004, but the movement was still profoundly affected by it. Looking back I see 2004 as one of the most difficult years the FWBO has been through, although the difficulties were diffused and for the most part not consciously articulated. I want to suggest some causes and some symptoms.

Sangharakshita’s position

It would be wrong to suggest that Order members in general rejected Sangharakshita and his teachings in the wave of questioning of that was prompted by Yashomitra’s article. Many remained loyal disciples, felt deep respect and gratitude to him and continued to appreciate the Order and movement he had founded. But many also became aware of what they considered his faults and were reeling from the discovery. His books and ideas were usually not repudiated, but they were increasingly left unread as attention was attracted elsewhere, perhaps to the works of teachers whose appeal seemed less tarnished.

There is no need to repeat the content of those criticisms but it is worth trying to describe their effect. For Order members a sense of distance from Sangharakshita was perhaps the most serious problem they could face. He was the Order’s founder and his role as preceptor had no authority behind it other than his confidence in himself and the willingness of others to accept ordination from him. Later, ordinations had been conducted by those who had been authorised by him. So for an Order member to reject Sangharakshita was, by extension, to reject the validity of their own ordination. Order members had trained by practicing and studying the Dharma as elucidated by his teachings, and to reject these would, in effect, be to reject the validity of the FWBO.

As Sangharakshita slowly recovered from his illness and started to reengage with the Order and movement, the breach became more palpable. Several of those who lived with him at Madhyamaloka and had FWBO-wide responsibilities believed it would help if he publicly acknowledged the upset many Order members were feeling and expressed regret at the suffering that had resulted from his sexual activity. But Sangharakshita rejected these appeals. Since the start of his period of sexual activity (1969 to 1987) he had made only a few guarded public statements on the subject, and had never expressed regret. He told me he thought anything he said was would be misinterpreted and, because he did not think he had done anything for which he should apologize, it might well make matters worse.

The College

In Part 1 I suggested that behind the wave of criticisms of Sangharakshita was a deeper crisis of identity as the FWBO gradually ceased to be defined by his influence and ideas. This was associated with a drift away from involvement in the FWBO’s institutions on the part of experienced Order members and in questioning of the College. In 2003 the College tried to respond to these changes by withdrawing from organisational leadership and focusing on their responsibility for ordinations. They also expanded their numbers and moved towards a more decentralised structure.

But the doubts had not vanished. Most Order members had supported the College’s maintenance of final control over ordinations, but some felt we were entering uncharted waters and were uncertain about the best arrangements for the future. Many had asked that changes be implemented slowly so they could absorb their implications, but by late 2003 the College had reached breaking point and reform happened fast. A small but vocal group of Order members believed that an entirely new arrangement was needed in which the authority to ordain derived not from Sangharakshita but from the Order as a whole.

The new, expanded group was much less cohesive than its predecessor. Several of the more experienced members withdrew from active involvement in ordinations, and the involvement of some others in the College was very part-time. New members were keenly aware that Order members’ support could no longer be assumed and this made them cautious. Arrangements for ordination evolved slowly, but the College was not willing or able to offer direction and leadership beyond that.

One motive behind the changes to the College and the PCC had been a desire to free their members from involvement in meetings so they could be more available and effective as Dharma teachers. But, initially at least, most of those who were freed up by the ending of the PCC chose to reduce their involvement in FWBO activities altogether. Some were exhausted and needed a break; some wanted to focus on meditation and reflection; some were angry with Sangharakshita or smarting from the difficulties of the roles he had given them; some could not find new ways to be effective without their old roles; and some saw an opportunity to pursue other interests. Madhyamaloka, which had been the bustling headquarters of the movement, dwindled in significance as many of those who had been carrying movement-wide responsibilities left.

Difficulties in the Movement

When the Madhyamaloka Meeting discussed the FWBO’s future in 2003 the lurking question was, will it all fall apart? For a number of years the ideas and shared lifestyles that had helped hold the movement together had been waning in influence. Many of us had seen how, as well as being exciting and inspiring, in the long term these ideas had produced feelings of resentment and exclusion. The institutional changes were intended to allow space for new approaches to emerge. We bravely declared our trust in the integrity of the Order and its depth of practice, and articulated the benefits of removing emotional pressure to participate in the movement’s institutional life. We hoped that new forms that were appropriate to the new circumstances would emerge organically as expressions of individuals’ practice; and we saw that these could not be imposed from ‘above’. We hoped that a new cohesion would arise in the Order that had the more active consent of people involved in it. But we also feared that if those of us working for the FWBO lost a sense that we were part of a shared project, a cause for which it was worth making sacrifices, then much that we valued, and to which we had given decades of our lives, would dissolve away. A year on, as I traveled around the UK in 2004 and met people who were still working within the FWBO’s institutions, I saw the mounting challenges they faced.

Windhorse:Evolution

These challenges were clearest at Windhorse:Evolution (W:E), the gift business where up to 200 people worked in a supportive Buddhist-based environment. W:E was the largest and most fully developed example of the `old-FWBO’ model in which people followed the same lifestyle of communal living and team-based working. Its subsistence wages offered a simple but adequate existence, and working on those terms implied idealistic support for the FWBO ‘project’. They enabled the business to donate generously to movement-wide causes (especially FWBO Central).

Over the previous two years the business had been through a series of crises and the over-stretched management team centred on a small group who had been with the business since the mid-1980s and grown used to making decisions. They were struggling to cope with the demands of the business while also facing growing criticism of their working style and calls to spread responsibility more widely.

The keenest challenge was recruitment because enthusiasm for participating in FWBO Right Livelihood projects seemed to be dwindling. Four Evolution shops (which were run jointly with FWBO centres) had closed; four others had wholly non-Buddhist staff, and in the rest, the Buddhist contingent was sometimes small. At Uddiyana, the central warehouse and administrative base in Cambridge which had a policy of only employing Buddhists, it was getting harder to recruit and the numerous vacancies placed existing staff under growing pressure. Speaking to members of the management team my impression was that they were losing hope for W:E’s future as a Buddhist-staffed business. They seemed resigned to the prospect that it would cease to embody their ideals by offering conditions for intensive Dharma practice, and that before long it would probably change into a conventional business or close down.

Involvement in Institutions

Many FWBO centres and other FWBO projects were facing similar recruitment and wage pressures although, lacking the cohesion and resources of W:E, their problems were less visible, less consciously articulated and often not seen in the context of larger trends. People working for the FWBO had often felt ambivalent about the `renunciate’ lifestyle afforded by support-level wages, and they accepted it because they were drawn to the work for non-financial reasons. But this was harder to accept as they aged and became more concerned about security, pensions and old age while the society around them became more affluent. Many who had worked in the FWBO now wanted to leave behind full-time engagement with its institutions and were finding ways to support themselves independently or through working in conventional jobs. Consequently, many FWBO centres in the UK were facing financial difficulties, having lost their income from right livelihood businesses, and were unable to recruit new people to expand their activities in other ways.

Many who still followed the previously normative lifestyle of institutional engagement felt undermined by growing diversity and the exodus from institutions. Morale dipped and, where working environments had ceased to be wholly Buddhist or there was less sense of intensive practice, people wondered what they were working for. And in the end, FWBO bodies are voluntary organisations that can only survive if people want to work for them.

This crisis of morale was exacerbated by the growing number of Order members who were not just uninvolved in the movement’s institutions but felt positively at odds with them. Sometimes this was based on opposition to the College or criticisms of Sangharakshita; but more often it expressed emotional pain that resulted from bad experiences of working for FWBO institutions, or a sense of exclusion. Those taking a lead in centres or in the FWBO as a whole were sometimes met with mistrust, and the drive for change in 2003 was motivated in no small measure by exhaustion with this atmosphere. But those who were wariest of institutions were also often the most unwilling to participate in them or in consultations. Some refused to believe that the College had renounced its leadership role, and assumed it was still in some way ‘running the movement’.

Conversely, the Order has continued to grow, and new Order members often kept centres going. In general, activities were doing well, at least at the larger centre. Interest in Buddhism was growing in society at large; teaching was improving, especially where more experiential methods were being used; the web was an effective new means of publicity; and classes were better structured, with more attention being given to continuity.

Practising outside the FWBO

The FWBO draws on all the major Buddhist traditions, and yet there has been a stress on practising within it rather than attending non-FWBO teachings or retreats. This was perhaps natural in the FWBO’s early days when the movement was forming its identity, and the Buddhist world in the West was relatively undeveloped. It was also reinforced by the history of mistrust between the FWBO and some other Buddhists, especially in the UK. But there was always something artificial about this situation, and sooner or later people within the FWBO were bound to discover the wider Buddhist world and explore its many alternative possibilities for practice. (Dharma Life had been intended, inter alia, as a way of helping to effect this meeting).

As the FWBO slowly ‘opened up’ some people made connections outside the FWBO with individual teachers or approaches to Dharma practice. This seemed potentially positive, but it was often connected with a loss of confidence in the FWBO itself, as well as its founder and the approach he had taught. Most popular were practices that had not been prominent in the standard FWBO curriculum, especially those emphasising acceptance and dwelling in the present moment. Teaching of these practices was sometimes accompanied by disparagement of the ‘developmental’ model, which was said to characterize Sangharakshita’s approach to the Dharma and reveal its limitations. The ‘new’ practices were sometimes presented as alternatives to the FWBO’s system of meditation rather than as positive additions or corrective, and they were not related to the FWBO’s `indirect practices’ such as community living, collective working and spiritual friendship.

Beyond this trend was a more fundamental question: is the FWBO necessary? Is there a need for a western Buddhist movement, as distinct from western adaptations of Asian forms of Buddhism, at all? Was such a movement bound to be artificial, and consequently superficial, and overly tied up with the necessarily eccentric personality of the founder? These are perennial questions for the FWBO, and how people involved in it answer them is, to a large extent, a matter of confidence. In the period I am discussing the FWBO’s falling confidence raised the prospect of a further precipitous and unlimited drop.

A personal perspective

As I looked around the movement in 2004 and tried to understand what was needed I was affected by my own situation. I had no real colleagues any more, Madhyamaloka community was ceasing to be focused on such work. Dharma Life magazine, which I had founded in 1996 and continued to edit, was in danger of closing as its financial and organisational basis was eroded, and it eventually did close in early 2005. I felt deeply engaged with the movement’s transition, cared about its success and was worried by its cost. I knew that the sources of renewal may well lie outside the existing structures, and to that end I had formed working groups and started various initiatives. But I found myself being drawn more and more into the problems of these institutions, and this tended to make my view of the movement quite pessimistic.

Even taking this personal bias into account, there was cause for concern. By summer 2004 it seemed to me that the morale of Order members and confidence in the FWBO had fallen drastically amid declining confidence in the FWBO’s approach and legitimacy, and many of its institutions were in trouble. The question I was asking was not how I could help the movement’s institutions to develop, but whether they would survive.

Subhuti’s role and an attempt to respond

An element that is missing from the picture I have given so far is Subhuti. His thought, energy and initiative lay behind the 2003 changes and he had more influence in the movement than anyone else. But for the first half of 2004, Subhuti had largely withdrawn from organisational issues. His mother had died the previous year, he had been deeply involved in a series of crises and changes in the FWBO and he had received a lot of criticism. Furthermore, his gifts for inspirational leadership and organisational vision were at odds with the movement’s current stress on consensus and consultation. He understandably spoke of withdrawing for a while and focusing on meditation and reflection.

Subhuti’s withdrawal and the ending of the PCC led to a rapid dissolution of the group who had been maintaining an overview. The presidents said they did not want to meet as a group because they felt ineffective and the Madhyamaloka Meeting came to an end. This was not what we had planned. The Madhyamaloka Meeting had anticipated the need for a transition period and thought that we would be involved in managing it.

In mid-2004, however, Subhuti told me that he wanted to reconnect with the movement, and we returned to the idea of managing the transition to more sustainable ways of working. We gathered some people with whom we could discuss the state of the movement and ways forward for it. Achara, Jnanavaca, Vajrasadhu and later Jnanasiddhi joined Subhuti, Dhammarati and I for another round of meetings at Madhyamaloka (we somehow acquired the name, the ‘New Directions Group’ or NDG), and this prompted a bid to respond to the movement’s crisis of confidence.

Subhuti’s talks, November 2004

In November 2004 Subhuti gave two high-profile talks entitled `Where I am Now’ and `Where I want to go’. He wanted to address underlying issues, and express his own confidence that potentially the FWBO had a viable future in which it could make a real difference to the world. His aim was to focus attention on the sources of the movement’s cohesion to balance the attention that had already been given to its diversity. He argued that without efforts to safeguard cohesion the Order and movement would `simply disintegrate into a huge number of individual pathways and trajectories.’ The talks were an argument against complacency because, he thought: `If we let it go beyond two or three years the coherence that we have built up from the past will not carry us forward.’

A key to future cohesion was healing the breach with Sangharakshita, and that meant addressing his sexual history. As Sangharakshita was not going to do this himself, Subhuti felt, rightly, I think, that he alone could make a statement with sufficient weight to affect the Order’s collective stance on the subject. This time, he did not pull his punches.

`I have come to think that there are severe problems with Sangharakshita's sexual activity in the past … in a sense he did not know what he was doing altogether and … some big mistakes were made … Wearing robes and having sex is just not on … As a spiritual teacher you carry a weight that does not allow you to simply be one human being with another human being. That sexual activity was bound to lead to problems.’

Subhuti explained that acknowledging these problems had enabled him also to appreciate Sangharakshita’s qualities. He argued that without such appreciation the Order could not survive.

In the second talk Subhuti outlined the kind of Order he wanted to inhabit and identified key areas in which the Order was drifting. He wanted the WBO to be:

‘an Order in which people go for Refuge to the Three Jewels and put that at the heart of their lives [and] see themselves as living the Bodhisattva life … which honours Sangharakshita as its founder and point of unity and appreciates everything that he has given us … which accepts each other's ordinations and accepts broadly and has trust in the system by which that happens … in which Order members work to keep the Order alive as a vital spiritual community … that maintains a common system of spiritual discipline as a way of unifying [the Order] and gives that system power and vigour … [and] that is cooperating in a common altruistic endeavour to spread the Dharma and provide conditions for its practice.

Subhuti outlined a programme that he hoped to undertake in 2005, including clarifying the role of the College, renewing the movement’s ‘system of spiritual discipline’, working with the chairs to find new ways of unifying the movement’s activities and encouraging confidence among those following a ‘semi-monastic’ lifestyle. He saw these steps as necessary for a smooth transition in which past achievements were not lost.

Responses to Subhuti

The initial response to Subhuti’s talks was positive, but as things settled dissenting voices were heard. A number of people suggested that just when things seemed to be opening up Subhuti was making a bid to reassert his leadership and therefore closing down opportunities for others. I had discussed the content of the talks with Subhuti before he gave them, and I do not see his motivation that way: the critics ignored his stress that his programme was a way of making a transition, not a permanent arrangement. But his talks were more directive and assertive than I had anticipated, and I think the movement was not ready for what he offered. In the atmosphere of decentralisation and exploration many felt wary of activities being ‘managed’ at all, even transitionally. Longstanding frustrations at Subhuti’s capacity to seize the initiative started to emerge, and some members of the College were unhappy that he had outlined a vision for its development (including a yearlong moratorium on conducting ordinations) without first consulting them.

The criticisms that followed Subhuti’s talks rekindled in him the weariness he had felt a year before with meetings, controversy, criticism and organisational work. By the time he returned from his biannual trip to India in spring 2005, his perspective on the renewal programme had changed. He wrote in Shabda that some of these changes no longer seemed possible, some seemed well underway without him, and some he felt disinclined to engage with. Subhuti did not stand for re-election as Chairman of the College in summer 2005, and decided to concentrate on specific projects rather than the movement as a whole. My own feeling is that Subhuti’s impulse at the start of 2004 to withdraw from movement-wide work and focus on meditation was more deep-seated than he had realised in middle of that year. It was bound up with his changing relation to a movement that could no longer allow him to operate in his preferred ways, however well intentioned his wish to do so.

The fact that Subhuti did not implement his programme raises a serious question. If he was right that these steps were necessary for the movement’s survival, did that mean disintegration was inevitable?

2005: Returning confidence

The first part of this history focused on the need for change to the FWBO’s central institutions to free up energy and initiative. In the second part I have identified some of the trends that seemed to be untouched by these changes and attempts, emanating again from the centre, to address them. But if our earlier analysis was correct renewal might well not come in recognizable institutional forms. It would be more diffused and might take many years to manifest. As I have said, my own focus on institutional issues in 2004-5 distanced me from these unplanned sources of renewal, but by 2005 I could see signs of change for the better.

Before considering these trends it is worth noting that Subhuti’s programme was not entirely dropped. The talks themselves were the first initiative, and the painful irony for Subhuti is that they may well have succeeded in reminding people of the importance of the FWBO’s cohesion, even while they attracted criticism to the speaker. Two other tangible developments that are worth mentioning are the FWBO Development Team and the Dhammapala College.

The FWBO Development team

The withdrawal of the Madhyamaloka leadership had created a conundrum. They needed to get out of the way if others were to take new initiatives, but if no one was working centrally there would be no levers for change. The New Directions Group proposed that new people be appointed by the European Chairs to work for the movement. We identified four areas: keeping an overview of the FWBO’s human and economic resources (especially the central resources) and making suggestions for how these could best be used; helping centres to work more effectively and cooperatively; developing resources for Dharma teaching and focusing discussion about practice; and managing communications (which were already covered by several people). I worked hard to prepare briefs, gather support from the Chairs and recruit suitable candidates, and by the end of 2005 two people had been recruited with responsibility for coordination and supporting centres while a third person was due to be appointed in 2006 to support Dharma teaching work. Together they comprise the FWBO Development Team.

The initial idea was that these people would take over the presidents’ former role of maintaining an overview of the movement and offering guidance at the level of principles and policy. Gradually the Team’s remit became less ambitious, and its main work will probably be in networking and taking small-scale initiatives.

Dhammapala College

Another pressing issue was what to do with Madhyamaloka and the central resources that had gathered around it in Birmingham. As former members of the PCC moved away it was ceasing to be a spiritual and organisational hub but it still received almost £50,000 a year for its running costs from W:E and the Chairs. For some time Sangharakshita had planned to buy a new property, probably in the country, to house his library as well as a vihara for senior Order members and a retreat centre. A considerable sum had been put by for the purchase, but it would only be possible if the Birmingham properties were sold as well; and this was ruled out because Sangharakshita said he was too old to move.

Subhuti proposed that the Birmingham properties should house a new, two-year intensive training programme for new Dharma teachers, called the Dharmaduta Course. While some of us others in the NDG were concerned that the Course would only be available to a small number of people, it was clear that something needed to happen quickly at Madhyamaloka. We agreed to support this idea, and leave Subhuti to address the many unknowns. The Course started in January 2006 with a strong academic staff and eight full-time students in the context of a larger institution named Dhammapala College that also hosted a programme of seminars and public lectures.

Worthy though the Dhammapala College is, its establishment did not settle how FWBO Central’s resources should be used. Responses to Madhyamaloka were freighted by responses to its past and the unclarity of its finances. In an attempt to address the latter issue, in the first half of 2005 I reviewed all the FWBO’s centrally funded activities, focusing especially on Madhyamaloka, and made proposals for making reforming financial arrangements. All the same, W:E, faced with lower profits and new calls on their money, stopped its grant to FWBO Central (the charity that owns Madhyamaloka) reducing its income by £30,000. The course and seminars are reportedly going well, but the whole institution including the Dhammapala College is running at a loss. Decisions about its future need to be part of a wider discussion about the best use of the FWBO’s central resources.

Transition or Collapse?

The future of the FWBO does not depend on administrative structures or individual projects. It depends on the practice of Order members, their willingness to share the Dharma with others, and their ability to do so within a shared framework. I believe that the FWBO’s institutions make a very considerable contribution to the health of the Order, but they are not the same thing, and whatever difficulties the institutions may undergo, the Order needs to be considered in its own right. In 2005 there were many signs of returning health.

The strength of the Order

When over 500 Order members gathered in August 2005 for their biennial convention the atmosphere was very different from two years earlier. The Order’s soul-searching and confrontation with difficulties reached a peak in the open forum on the 2003 Convention. Sangharakshita was ill then, but by August 2005 he was well enough to attend a celebration of his 80th birthday. By the end the atmosphere was of exhilaration touched by relief that the breach in communication could be left behind. That may not have been the whole story and presumably the concerns that had been expressed were more deep-seated than could be removed in an evening. But perhaps again, Subhuti’s words of the previous autumn had had an effect and Order members were coming to terms with the complexity of their teacher.

The Convention seemed to mark the end of a period of crisis for the Order. For all the turmoil just half a dozen people had resigned between 2003 and 2005, and 220 had joined. There were now 1315 Order members, and the number who had asked to join was nearly 2000. Any view of the FWBO in this period needs to take account of the considerable resources of experience and depth of practice within the Order and the stability this affords. Many who do not want to take responsibility for institutions are nonetheless devoted to practising the Dharma, apply it in their own sphere and they contribute where they can. Even those people who are critical of Sangharakshita or the College or aspects of the FWBO usually believe that the Order is an effective sangha and that the FWBO offers access to the genuine Dharma. The question the Order faces is not so much whether it will survive or whether its members will continue to practice, but whether it will thrive.

Debate over the legitimacy of the College has not stopped, but the reformed College has settled into its work. The retreat centres of Padmaloka and Tiratanaloka, which had managed a relatively centralised ‘system’ of ordination training, are now free to run retreats that express the practice and inspiration of the Order members leading them; and responsibility for assessing candidates for ordination has mostly been transferred to the individuals (the ‘public’ and ‘private’ preceptors) who will ordain them. There are certainly cumbersome aspects to the new arrangements, but they seem to have relieved a good deal of the strain that existed previously.

One of the indications that change was needed prior to 2003 was the declining number of requests for ordination from men at a time when those from women were increasing. The argument was made that men were put off by systems that were overly structured. From a high of over 90 in 1996 ordination requests declined steadily, reaching a low of 32 in 2003. More men did request ordination in the next two years (57 and 51 respectively) but their numbers remained lower than those for women (73 and 70). By this measure the fruits of those changes are not yet manifest.

This foray into statistics shows the strength of the women’s ‘wing’ of the Order, whose development has been relatively unaffected by the movement’s ups and downs. This is currently growing at around fifteen percent a year, while the growth of the men’s wing in the West is around five percent. The number of women who have asked for ordination means that such growth is likely to continue. This success is the fruit of many years of hard and focused work on the part of the senior women Order members, as is the opening in 2007 of Akashavana, the venue for long women’s ordination retreats in the mountains of northern Spain. The majority of new ordinations in the West are of women, and the optimism and dynamism of women’s activities contrasts with those for men.

Windhorse:Evolution

The fortunes of W:E inevitably seem an indication of the health, even the viability of the institutional aspect of the movement as a whole. A number of changes were already in train in 2003, but the NDG agreed that the W:E management team needed help and proposed that Ratnaghosha, the highly capable former chair of the London Buddhist Centre, should join the management team with a brief to help develop its cultural, as opposed to its business side. He has made a significant contribution and helped create the space for change.

Alongside higher support levels the business introduced the option for workers to take a regular salary, and this enabled it to fill key job vacancies. Some non-Buddhist workers joined the warehouse team proving themselves enthusiastic about its ethos; and the experiment of running shops with wholly non-Buddhist teams has also been successful. Working arrangements became more flexible as some teams became mixed and more options arose for non-community living. In the past, supporting the FWBO may have been cause enough to motivate the staff. Now it moved towards fair trade, developing partnerships with the communities in developing countries that made their products, and reducing its environmental impact.
The result of these changes is that there is a waiting list of Buddhists wanting to join the warehouse staff. Its troubles are not yet past: the new salary and support arrangements have cost the business £400,000 a year and its contributions to the rest of the FWBO have fallen by the same amount; and business conditions themselves have been getting harder, hitting profits further. But, crucially, morale has returned.

Centres

It is harder to tell if a similar transition is under way at FWBO centres. There are always places that are doing well and others that are struggling, and the life of each is often so multi-faceted that even those involved locally find it hard to sum up their fortunes. I do not feel qualified to sum up on how the FWBO centres are doing, but I can make a few observations. Most centres have a core of dedicated people for whom it is an important part of their life. That gives them considerable strength if they are financially stable, so their survival is usually not under threat. However, there is a great deal of change going on. Many experienced people have stopped working for centres, though replacements have usually been found. This seems a time of consolidation rather than expansion, but FWBO centres are at least surviving.

Part III. Reflections on the future

The FWBO is inherently unstable. It set out to re-express Buddhism in ways that are effective in the conditions of the modern world, and yet those conditions are always changing. So questioning of its institutions is inevitable and potentially creative because they demand to be continually reinvented. It was also inevitable that Sangharakshita’s questioning of established forms of Buddhism would educate Order members in a questioning attitude and that this would eventually turn back on him and the movement he founded. And it was inevitable that there would be increasing tension around his views. On the one hand he wished to renew Buddhism, and this appealed to many who valued the cultural heritage of the modern west, while on the other he tends to be antipathetic to modernity and some of his attitudes are culturally and politically conservative. Finally, he has urged his students to be emotionally open and ethically transparent, and this led to an expectation that he would show the same openness not just in private, but in the public arena of his relations with the Order. Such openness would be hard for anyone, and especially so for a man of his generation and temperament.

A further contradiction is between Sangharakshita’s stress on individuality and his desire for certain views approaches to be central in the FWBO. This desire produced the web of views on social and cultural and gender issues, as well as attitudes to lifestyle, hierarchy and sexuality that originated with him and came to form an ‘FWBO position’. Many Order members, myself included, disagreed with some or all of these views and that compromised us if we complied with them, or marginalised if we did not. And yet we felt ourselves to be wholehearted Order members because of the commitment we made at ordination to the Order’s real ideals: the Three Jewels.

With hindsight it is becoming clear that these contradictory impulses were held together by the force of Sangharakshita’s influence and the natural cohesion of a relatively small movement. Our cohesion always came at the cost of internal tensions and external animosities, and the internal tensions grew once Sangharakshita’s disciples held the key role. I am relieved to see the end of the attempt to hold them all together, and I don’t think another collective ideology will emerge. There is no longer a commonly accepted source of authority on doctrine or practice. The College, while influential, is not such an authority and is itself becoming more diverse.

I feel split between a hope that we will find a new source of collectivity at a deeper level than ideology, and a fear that we will lose a sense of our common project, changing the world in the light of the Dharma as elucidated by Sangharakshita, and fragment, going our separate ways as we pursue individual interests influenced by sources outside the movement. From one perspective it would not matter if the FWBO were to disintegrate: it is not an end in itself. But I find that it does matter to me. The FWBO is my sangha and I love it. I love the Order and I feel strongly connected with the efforts of others in our community to change the world through the Dharma.

Having said this, I reflect that the confidence that can sustain our community in the long term is not that we are being looked after by capable leaders, that we have a viable collective future, or even that our institutions have a positive effect on the world. Because membership of the Order involves commitment to the Three Jewels, the essential ingredient is confidence that our involvement with it can lead to Dharma realisation. Enthusiasm for a collective enterprise can motivate people for quite a number of years, but eventually they need a sense that it offers a way to Insight. If they lack that, their energies will probably be directed elsewhere.

Conversely, these institutions have helped bring intensity to Dharma practice for many people. The example of W:E is encouraging because it suggests that when the ideology is taken away, something of value is left. In future our institutions will survive not because they herald a wonderful future or because someone else has said that they are a good idea, but because people know from their own experience that they are effective. W:E’s workers value it because it offers opportunities for Dharma practice, teamwork, and making a positive social and environmental impact. The same needs to be true of other FWBO businesses and even centres if they are to endure.

It is natural that many people outgrow these institutions, but the shift to more freelance involvement and varied living situations raises the question of how individuals are to maintain the intensity in their Dharma practice. The compromise most of us reach is to undertake bursts of intensity when we go on retreat, but this raises the very difficulties that communities etc. were developed to address. This is something for people to address individually, but meanwhile it is important that we don’t take the survival and health of FWBO organisations for granted. I think Order members need to offer much more help, appreciation and encouragement to those who are currently working for the FWBO’s institutions, especially centres. This may seem strange to those who have felt excluded from or marginalised, but the FWBO cannot survive if our view of it is overly coloured by the problems of our organisational history.

I agree with Subhuti’s views on the need for cohesion. While increasing diversity seems inevitable, cohesion needs to be consciously sustained. It requires boundaries, and the criteria applied at ordination are the most important of these. I think we need a cohesive group of spiritually mature individuals to oversee ordinations if they are to remain meaningful. That’s why I support the College. Some people clearly feel that its exclusive character undermines their sense of fully participating in the life of the Order. I hope that feeling will fade, but if doesn’t the College’s legitimacy will need to be reviewed by the Order as a whole, perhaps in time for the fifth anniversary of the changes in 2008/9. In the meantime the College needs to get much better at communicating its workings to the wider Order.

Another area where cohesion is needed is in praxis and teaching. Growing diversity is only sustainable if it grows from a more fundamental unity. I don’t think the Order can accommodate individuals who want to teach and practice only non-dual approaches, or tantra, or vipassana-style mindfulness, and feel no connection with the FWBO’s framework of practice. However, I also want us to be evolving and changing as a collective and to be open to new influences. Above all, I want us to be living, practising and teaching from our actual experience of what works, rather than from what we think we ought to be doing or saying.

Ours will largely be a collectivity without central organisation or leadership, and we have to think carefully about the conditions we need to support that. Some of these conditions will doubtless be organisational, some to do with practising together and some to do with fostering a sense of inclusion and participation. Most activities in which it is meaningful to participate occur at the level of local activities and centres, and we need to find new ways to involve Order members and others in their activities. We also need to find ways to do this movement-wide, though it is harder to see how.

As a whole the FWBO is not leadable. But a large question remains over whether there is a place for the qualities associated with leadership. I was working with Subhuti in 2004 when he made his offer to lead the movement through its transition and I saw the flak he received as a result. If all changes have to be arrived at consensually through numerous meetings there will be little room for the entrepreneurial initiative of the most dynamic and talented Order members. I believe that the right sort of leadership can inspire energy and enthusiasm, and I would like to see those who have led in the past re-engage. This includes Subhuti, but he can only do that by working with ‘coalitions of the willing’ rather than leading the Order as a whole.
The Order seems destined to grow more lay-based, older and to attract more women than men. Women will take a more leading role in relation to both men and women. There is, of course, a considerable irony in the greater health of women’s activities given our past emphasis on men which still disposes some men to regard the FWBO’s growing ‘feminization’ as a sign of weakness. I hope that idea will fall away along with our sense that if we are not attracting many young people we are decaying. While I appreciate the contribution that young people and men can make, I think we undermine ourselves if we make this an overriding goal.

Two connected developments that seem destined to have a lasting effect are the growing awareness of social and especially environmental action, and increasing involvement in mindfulness based approaches to pain, stress depression etc. These are giving FWBO centres a more outward-looking orientation and are free of the FWBO’s past. They also offer scope for increasing interaction between the FWBO and other Buddhists. It may be that a Buddhist world will grow up in the UK, as it has to some extent in the US, where Buddhists from different traditions mingle and share common concerns. Because the FWBO draws on all traditions and yet has a coherent approach to the Dharma it is potentially well-suited to contributing to such a world. But this hope is still far from being a reality.

Conclusion

It is far too soon to assess the effects of the changes we have been through, but we can say that, for all the turbulence, few of us have left and many more have joined. Many of us have a deep involvement in the FWBO that survives whatever difficulties we experience because we are convinced that it offers a sound context for our spiritual lives. This strength seems to be reasserting itself gradually and organically. In 2004 and 2005 my impressions of the movement were not positive: I felt we were in trouble because we had lost confidence, on a number of levels. However, as I look around the movement in 2006 and speak to people who have a more current involvement in organisational issues, a considerable change is apparent. Confidence is returning. Some older Order members feel disconcerted, or anxious, but often the more recently ordained are excited, optimistic, and appreciate the considerable resources of the FWBO that others can take for granted. Many older Order members have grown weary the difficulties thrown up by sangha and organisations, or at least the endless discussions they throw up. But for the unwearied we are a viable and effective Buddhist community that contains considerable depth and breadth and many opportunities to contribute.

The FWBO’s structures and practices developed pragmatically as responses to particular needs. How can we live and work in ways that support Dharma practice? How can we draw on the Buddhist tradition without falling into either eclecticism or sectarianism? How can we allow for diversity while remaining a cohesive sangha? Whether or not particular institutional forms survive, the needs articulated by these questions will remain. The spirit in the Madhyamaloka meeting when we instigated those changes was confidence in the underlying spiritual integrity of the Order, the commitment of Order members to embodying the Dharma, and the capacity of Sangharakshita’s teaching to offer a framework for approaching and manifesting it. I believe that faith was justified, and that fresh answers to these perennial questions will emerge.

© Vishvapani, 2006

The Order’s Relation to Bhante

2007-02-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

Talk to the Men’s UK National Order Weekend, August 2000

by Vishvapani

This article is a transcript of a talk to members of the Western Buddhist Order. For that, reason I refer to Sangharakshita as ‘Bhante’, the term by which he is affectionately known is known within the FWBO.
Introduction

On WBO Day 1990 Bhante delivered a paper entitled My Relation to the Order. In this paper he remarks:

‘The first thing that occurred to me when I started preparing this paper is that besides the question of my relation to the Order there was the question of the Order’s relation to me… My relation to the Order and the Order’s relation to me are two sides of a single coin… In sharing with you some of my current thinking concerning our mutual relation I shall, however, be speaking mainly in terms of my relation to the Order, leaving it to you to work out for yourselves what this implies in terms of your relation to me.’(p. 16

I wasn’t ordained in 1990, but 10 years on, in August 2000, I find myself speaking to a Men’s National Order weekend on the subject of ‘Our Relation to Bhante’. So, rather belatedly, I shall be trying to work out some of these implications. I shall also be adding some thoughts of my own, as it seems to me that Bhante cannot fully be expected to see himself from our perspective any more than we can see ourselves from his. That could be a motto for this talk. In an important sense our relation with Bhante is something we have to create, each of us for him or herself, even if we never exchange two words with Bhante personally.

The points I want to make about our relationship with Bhante grow from reflections on his comments in My Relation to the Order, but do not follow the structure of that book. First, to put things in context, I want to discuss how our relation to him is changing. Then I want to consider from our side the first point that Bhante makes about his relation with us – that it is important. Then I want to discuss some of the ways in which this relationship is inherently difficult at least in some respects and for some people. I want to talk about actual difficulties that have arisen in the light of the experience of western Buddhists in traditions other than the FWBO. And then I will discuss our own difficulties under the headings, Authority and Influence. Then I will conclude by suggesting how we can develop this relationship positively.

1. A Changing Relationship

Bhante does not say why he chose to deliver his paper at this time, but he does make a number of comments about the state of the Order at that time. In April 1990 there were 384 Order members, and the Order was 22 years old. It had therefore recently passed its ‘majority’, when it turned 21. A mark of this coming of age, of which Bhante makes a great deal, was his ‘handing on’ of the responsibility of conferring ordinations to Subhuti and Suvajra, the first two Order members to become fully-fledged Public Preceptors, who made decisions regarding readiness for ordination and conducted ordinations themselves. Bhante was clearly delighted by this development, and also by the way in which Subhuti had undertaken his role in running the ordination process for men. At the time of Bhante’s paper, Subhuti was in the throes of revising, not to say rejuvenating this ordination process. I was then involved in the ordination process as a mitra, and I remember the excitement of the time, when Subhuti applied the rhetoric of glasnost and perestroika to the Order as a whole. Through his work on the ordination process Subhuti waged a campaign to revitalise the Order as a whole by re-emphasising Bhante’s basic teachings, especially the centrality of going for Refuge to the Three Jewels.

Ten years on the Order is 32 years old and it has changed considerably – I am sure the developments are familiar to us all. There are 870 Order members, and by the end of the year there will be around 900. The Order has changed in others ways too. The process of ‘handing on’ resulted in the appointment of more Public Preceptors (of whom there are currently eight in addition to Bhante) who have come to comprise the College of Public Preceptors. 1993 saw the establishment of the Preceptors College Council, initially including seven, and now ten other senior Order members. The acquisition of Madhyamaloka in late 1994 created a base for the College and the PCC. This process will reach a culmination and, it seems, a conclusion in just three weeks time when Bhante hands on the Headship of the Order on his 75th birthday.

So the first point that can be made about our relation to Bhante is that is evolving. In retrospect is clear that the appointment of Public Preceptors in the late 1980s marked not only the start of Bhante’s handing on of his major responsibilities, but also the start of a major change in the Order’s relation to him. The effectiveness with which Subhuti took on the ordination process meant that he was, in effect, taking responsibility for the spiritual needs of the Order as a whole, and in that sense picking up a responsibility that only Bhante had hitherto been able to exercise.

The consequences have been far reaching. Almost all of the 500 Order members who have joined been ordained since 1990 have been ordained by people other than Bhante. For these people, who are now the majority of the Order and include myself, Bhante is not our preceptor, but our preceptor’s preceptor. So although this talk is entitled The Order’s Relation to Bhante, even the formal aspects of this relationship differ between us. So far as personal connections are concerned, we have moved from a time in the early days when Bhante was the movement, for many people, to a time many Order members have no direct connection with him. He seems a distant figure for many people, seen only occasionally and usually at a distance. It is unusual that members of my generation of Order members have the chance to spend a great deal of time with Bhante, and to make a personal connection with him. My own experience since moving to Madhyamaloka in March last year shows that this is still possible, but it is rare, and I am very grateful for it.

With the emergence of this third generation of Order members, new kinds of relationships have emerged, and the Order has therefore become more complex. We are still in the process of working out how the relation of the Preceptors College and Council to the Order as a whole – and probably it will never be possible to define it. They cannot replace Bhante’s relation to the Order, but for those whom they have ordained, the College has, quite naturally, taken on one very important aspect of his role. To accommodate this new configuration we have had to re-emphasise ways of thinking of the Order’s hierarchies other than simply relating to a teacher. That is one reason why there has been more and more emphasis on the cascade of kalyana mitrata, in which we look to Order members who are more experienced than ourselves for friendship, guidance and inspiration.

Thinking about how this new configuration affects my own relation to Bhante, I have been starting to wonder if, precisely because Bhante isn’t my preceptor, my connection with him can be somehow freer and more relaxed than that of Order members whose connection goes back further. He is a kind of spiritual grandfather to me and to others in my generation of Order members. In considering the benefits of this relationship, I am not just thinking of the saying, ‘grandparents and children have a common enemy: parents.’ My generation in the Order are not exactly Bhante’s charges, but he takes a benign, yet distant interest in our development. And perhaps because our personal engagement with him is less intense, we can appreciate him more simply.

So Bhante’s role as a preceptor is changing, and his role as Head of the Order is changing, but there still remains his role as our teacher. But we may not have paused to reflect that this relationship, too, is changing. Although Bhante’s teaching continues to be central to the FWBO, often we encounter it in mediated form through the talks and books of Bhante’s disciples. The mitra study course still revolves around Bhante’s lectures expounding aspects of the Dharma. But the ordination retreats mostly focus on study of talks by Subhuti and others. These talks relate Bhante’s teachings to the issues that arise for people asking for ordination, and they fill in gaps in Bhante’s written output, covering areas about which Bhante has spoken, but never written. Is it not extraordinary that the importance of kalyana mitrata is one of Bhante’s principal teachings, and yet he has hardly written on the subject at all? Instead we have Subhuti’s excellent lectures on the subject.

Subhuti, indeed, has emerged as Bhante’s principal expositor. Sometimes, as in Women, Men and Angels, he has been an apologist for Bhante, seeking to explain his views to critics (though not everyone seems to understand that this is what he is doing). At other times, particularly in his most important book, Sangharakshita: a New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition, Subhuti has presented Bhante’s disparate teachings as a coherent and systematic account of the spiritual life, the Buddhist path, and the practice of the FWBO. This book, rather than anything Bhante has himself written, forms the core of the Order study course.

In a way it is curious that this has been necessary. Bhante’s role was itself to apply the Dharma to the West, making it comprehensible and relevant. In My Relation to the Order he describes his role as that of an ‘elucidator’, one who ‘throws light upon’ the Dharma ‘in certain fundamental respects’ (p.22). He also describes himself as a translator, and invokes the figure of St Jerome as an image of the archetypal translator. He quotes his essay Saint Jerome Revisited in which he described his response to St Jerome in the 1960s when he was founding the FWBO:

‘I was living in the desert. I had left the “Rome” of collective, official, even establishment Buddhism, and was seeking to return to the origins of Buddhism in the actual life and experience of the Buddha and his immediate disciples. Not only that, I was trying to teach Buddhism in the West, which meant I was trying to communicate the Dharma in terms of western rather than eastern culture. I was thus a translator with all that implies in terms of trying to fathom the uttermost depths of what one is trying to translate, so that one may translate it faithfully, i.e. bring its meaning to the surface, or from darkness into the light.’

Bhante translates the Dharma into the language of the West, yet as time passes it is becoming clearer that Bhante’s teaching itself needs translation. That is to say firstly that the Dharma needs further elucidation in terms of Bhante’s teaching, secondly that his teaching needs elucidating itself, if its relevance is to be clear to us. And thirdly that Bhante’s teaching will sometimes need to be corrected where it seems that it has failed to elucidate the Dharma adequately.

But none of this means that the elucidations of a Subhuti are themselves definitive. It is open, in principal at least, to any of Bhante’s students (or, indeed, to anyone else who cares to do so) to trawl through his writing as Subhuti has done, and present their own synopsese of his thought. This is not to say that all such expositions will be equally accurate, interesting, or helpful – and some may be downright pernicious. But none of them can be final. The point is that to be a disciple is not just to learn, but also to apply, expound, explain and interpret. In due course Subhuti’s elucidations will require elucidation themselves, and so it will continue. As Bhante comments in My Relation to the Order, ‘This is the way a tradition – a lineage – develops’. (p. 22)

It is right that our relationship with Bhante should change – this is a sign that the Order is alive, but the changes we have seen and are continuing to see are also a preparation for Bhante’s death, which, as Wallace Stevens says, ‘ is the final form of change.’ We should feel grateful that Bhante has himself given so much thought to the impact of his death on the Order, and prepared the way for it by handing on his responsibilities. But we won’t know the effect of Bhante’s death until he has died, and we probably won’t fully understand his influence as a living presence until then either. Buddhism corrects Stevens sense of death’s finality, and should instruct us that there can be no definitive understanding of our teachers role in life or death. We shall continue to review and remake it in our own lives, in our own deaths.

2. An Important Relationship

Even starting to think of the Order without Bhante brings one to the next point, which is the first point that Bhante makes in My Relation to the Order. He says that the Order is important to him, and who among us will not agree with the corollary from our side, that Bhante is important to Order members. However there is a difference. When Bhante says that the Order is important to him he is not doing much more than stating a simple fact. He describes how he takes an interest in the lives of Order members, reads all their letters, goes through Shabda from cover to cover each month as soon as it is published, and so on. In short, he cares. We probably do not put an equal amount of interest, care, attention and energy into our relation to Bhante, though some of us might.

Nevertheless Bhante is important to all Order members, whether we think about that importance or not. Even if Bhante is not our preceptor, even if we have never spoken to him, or perhaps never seen him, and even if the relationship is changing, Bhante is still out teacher. Tibetans speak of one teacher being one’s root guru. This person may not be the first to teach us meditation, but they have a special place in our hearts, because they have enabled us to see the Dharma. In some sense similar to this, Bhante is a teacher to us all. His elucidation has made the Dharma accessible to us, so everything we have gained from practising the Dharma is traceable back to – or perhaps I should say through – him. That is why, as Bhante explained in his talk on Wesak last year, Buddhist tradition stresses that we should feel gratitude towards our teachers. Gratitude is a natural and healthy response if we value what we have received.

Furthermore, in our ordination ceremonies each of us recites a set of ‘ordination vows’, the first line of which is ‘with loyalty to my teachers … I accept this ordination.’ I must confess that I have no recollection whatsoever of taking doing this at my own ordination, but I am confident enough in Subhuti to assume that he did not forget, and that these lines were lost in a haze of euphoria. Be that as it may, now that I know this is what I vowed I am happy to restate this affirmation. Not only have I vowed loyalty to my teachers, but I feel it, simply because they are my teachers, and because of everything I have gained from them.

In other words we need teachers, mentors, guides on the path. The Buddha is our ultimate teacher, and our kalyana mitras are our immediate mentors. But Bhante has a crucial place between these distant and proximate objects I won’t dwell now on why we need people to fulfil these roles – let me take that as read. More pertinent is that we consider our own responsibilities in this regard – consider, that is, what it is to be a disciple. We don’t have a word for this in the FWBO. We don’t even have a word for the junior party in a kalyana mitra relationship. But in Sanskrit there is the word shaiksha, one who offers him or herself for training – specifically the three trainings of sila, samadhi, and prajna. Then there is the word shishya, a contemplator, one who observes or ‘takes in’ his teacher’s character and qualities. And finally there is the word bhajana, meaning a receptacle or pot into which the Dharma may be poured. According to a Tibetan analogy some pots are upturned, unreceptive to the Dharma. Some are holed and whatever is poured in drains away, just as the Dharma pours from our unretentive minds when we forget what we have been taught. And some pots are filled with poisonous herbs which contaminate the water just as our own negative states of mind may taint what we have been taught. So to the extent that we wish to commit ourselves to the Dharma our responsibility is to become a pure vessel, a true disciple.

Not only is Bhante our teacher, he is the founder of our Order, and the chief elucidator of what Buddhism means for us. In my
dealings with other Buddhists, I am often struck that aspects of Bhante’s role which Order members usually take for granted, can seem extraordinary or even outrageous to outsiders. It is no commonplace thing to found a Buddhist Order, as opposed to establishing an existing one in a new context. Buddhist history does not readily offer precedents for consciously establishing a new Order outside the categories of monks and lay people. For our critics this is a knock-down argument that demonstrates that the Western Buddhist order lacks legitimacy, and on its own terms this argument cannot be countered. I won’t rehearse the arguments concerning legitimacy of our Order and movement now – I feel I have spent quite enough time doing so over the last three years. Today I want to rejoice in the benefits of Bhante’s approach.

The great creative endeavour that is the FWBO was only possible because of Bhante’s fresh start. Following his example we, too, are neither monks nor lay people. We can live lives wholeheartedly devoted to the Dharma without either the encumberance of the vinaya, or the subordinate status of lay-people. We have a clear sense of what is central to the Buddhist path – going for Refuge to the Three Jewels. And this affords the freedom to question and explore the Buddhist tradition confident that in questioning peripheral aspects of the Dharma we will not be undermining its basis in our lives. We can dispense with the medieval nonsense and feudal hierarchies of Tibetan Buddhism, for example, and still derive inspiration from its spiritual teachings. Perhaps we tend to take this for granted, but Bhante consciously made a decisive break with the past, at the risk of incurring the accusation that he was making it all up. We may be sure that Bhante had at least some sense how much poison he might have to swallow as a result.

All this is due to the thought and practice of Bhante, without which I very much doubt I would be a Buddhist at all. In addition in my time living with Bhante for a little more than a year I have personally benefited from Bhante’s example, and I have had a glimpse of some of what my own preceptor and his peers have themselves gained from Bhante over so many more years. Who can quantify all of this? Who can say how much we have all gained in so many ways?

3. Issues and Difficulties

This brings me to a second observation that arises from comparing the position in 1990 with that in 2000. Not only is our relation to Bhante changing, it also contains difficulties. I shall have a fair bit to say on this topic, though I am well aware that the things I shall be discussing are not issues for everyone. Some people are complex, and some are simple. Some people are faith followers, happy to walk the path Bhante has cleared; others are doctrine followers, for whom asking questions is a quality of their being. Not everyone experiences difficulties in having a teacher, but from what I have seen over the years I suspect that at some point in their Order lives, most people do.

As Bhante says in My Relation to the Order, the two years before the paper was delivered was a period of some turbulence in the Order, if not exactly turmoil. In 1988 Stephen Barnham, the ex-Padmaraja, resigned as Chairman of the Croydon Buddhist Centre, which was then probably the second largest public FWBO centre, and left the Order amid acrimony and soul-searching. And also in 1988 Mark Dunlop, the ex-Vajrakumara, was dropped from the Order register after he had commenced a campaign against Bhante and the FWBO. He had then gone on to contact the press and to publish potentially damaging material from Shabda.

As in 1990, in 2000 we are emerging (at least I hope we are emerging) from a period of turbulence. In India the movement has experienced not only turbulence but turmoil provoked, in part, by the bad publicity that appeared in the West, and this brought to a head various personal, cultural and ideological tensions within TBMSG. So far as the West is concerned I think it is hard to say how we have been affected by recent difficulties. In part this is because it is too soon to say, but I think it is also significant that whereas the problems of the late 1980s, like our recent problems in India, were internal, the attacks in the West came from without, and our responses to them were secondary phenomena.

None the less the recent spate of criticisms has had an effect on some of us individually. Some people have had many questions and doubts about Bhante, some of which were prompted by the public criticisms, while others were reinforced. These doubts have created a wedge which has eventually led to their drifting further and further from close engagement with the Order, and sometimes from practising the Dharma. Each case needs to be understood separately, and in some cases issues around Bhante provided a hook or justification, or even a rationalisation for other forces. But what is most sad to me is where issues in relation to Bhante have come to comprise a barrier between those people and the Dharma, and undermining their spiritual lives.

I have thought a good deal about these issues because I have found myself in the position of having to respond to the criticisms of Bhante. For one thing I needed to understand the criticisms in order to know how to respond, but as a matter of integrity, I also needed to be confident in my own mind that I was not acting merely as an apologist, or even a ‘spin doctor’. I always saw my role in the FWBO Communications Office as spreading the Dharma through the mass media, not as being Buddhism’s answer to Alistair Campbell.

Leaving aside for now what others think of us, I have come to think that there will always be some degree of difficulty in our relation to Bhante. Beneath the particular criticisms I think there lie deeper tensions which can only be worked with, never resolved to the satisfaction of all. The first area in which these issues are found is that of authority. The second is the area of ethics; and the third issue relates to what one could call ‘the psychology of discipleship, the issue of ‘influence’.

The Teacher Student Relationship in Western Buddhism

Before looking at these issues I want to put them in a wider context. They arise from the fact that Bhante is our teacher, and this is a problem-prone role. A relationship with a spiritual teacher is not a one for which much else in our culture has helped us prepare. It is not like that between a parishioner and a priest or a synagogue member and a rabbi. It is not – at one end of the spectrum of relationships with which we might compare it – like a Catholic’s relationship to the Pope; and it is not, at the other end, like a client’s relationship with a therapist.

Furthermore, many of the models of what has been termed ‘the teacher-student relationship’ that obtain in the East are problematic when applied to the West. Accounts of the history of Buddhism in the West, and particularly in America over the last 30 years routinely focus on the scandals concerning teachers’ ‘abuse’ of sex, money or power. The wave of ‘revelations’ concerning these and other Buddhist teachers in the 1980s led to widespread questioning of the deferential attitude with which roshis, lamas and so on had previously been regarded. Some argued that the forms of deference that had applied in Asia were inherently authoritarian or even ‘patriarchal’, and were of no value even in Asia. Others argued that they had become dangerous only in the West in the absence of a cultural context for the teacher’s role. So a crisis of confidence ensued. In response some people have advocated non-hierarchical, democratised structures for Dharma organisation. There have been many casualties, people who have become disillusioned not only with teachers, but with Dharma organisations, and even with Buddhism.

Recently more thoughtful responses to the teacher-student issue have started to appear among western Buddhists, which have grown from experience of these difficulties, and seek to safeguard the autonomy of the student, while remaining open to the wisdom of the teacher. My own thoughts have been influenced by these responses. I would particularly mention Pema Chodron, and Rita Gross (it is interesting that these women are both students of Trungpa Rimpoche, whom they both consider to have been brilliant, yet flawed). I also recommend a new book entitled Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a Healthy Relationship, by Alex Berzin, who comments:

‘Resolution of the problems and healing of the wounds are desperately needed so that sincere seekers may get on with their work of spiritual development. The teacher-student relationship as understood in the West needs re-examination and perhaps revision.’

Returning to our relation to Bhante and the criticisms that have been levelled at him, there are some similarities with these American experiences, and some differences. Bhante too has been accused of having abused his position in the area of sex, and of being unaccountable to any outside body. His name is, I am afraid, likely to be added to the list of controversial teachers, and Order members and others are likely to continue to find this difficult or disillusioning.

However, the principal difference between our relation with Bhante and others experiences with traditional style teachers is that the way in which he has seen his role is itself a revision of traditional understandings. In particular Bhante does not invoke what Dayamati, in Land of No Buddha calls ‘the mythology of enlightenment’ – the notion that a person occupying the role of a Zen roshi or a Tibetan lama is necessarily a realised spiritual being whose words carry the authority of that attainment. Bhante has been called many things over the years, including being called ‘the Enlightened Englishman’ by a television documentary. But he has never himself made any claims to a particular attainment himself, and he has certainly not claimed an authority deriving from this. What, then, is Bhante’s authority?

Bhante’s Authority

This question can be put another way. If Bhante isn’t a traditional-style guru, what is his role? My Relation to the Order was, perhaps, written as an attempt to answer that question, but I am not sure that it fully succeeds. The closest Bhante comes is saying that, in addition to being the founder and teacher of the Order, he sees himself simply as a friend. This definition is helpful in that it removes the relationship from a formal context and sees it as a matter of personal connections. But while this may answer some questions it raises others.

One problem with thinking of Bhante as a friend is that most Order members do not spend time with him personally. Even in the 1970s and 1980s when many Order members did spend time with Bhante and were ordained by him, they did not necessarily form a personal friendship. One reason is Bhante’s personality. Although Bhante is very eloquent about many aspects of his life – such as his thinking, his reading, his observations, and his perceptions – he is quite reserved in talking about his feelings, his emotions and areas such as his sexuality. This seems odd to the generations who comprise the majority of Order members, reared as we are on the virtues of self-disclosure.

So if Bhante is our friend, it is quite an impersonal kind of friendship. In Mahayana traditions Kalyana Mitra refers to a teacher or even a Bodhisattva, who is a friend to us in the sense that he gives us the Dharma, not in the sense that we have an intimate personal relationship with him. Such a friend is defined as one who feels love, or maitri for us, and in relation to whom we feel apatraya or fear of blame if we act unethically, but not necessarily a personal intimacy. Berzin comments that in most Asian contexts it would be considered inappropriate, or even impertinent to expect tell teacher about one’s personal life and its difficulties. So if we are to feel a connection with Bhante we need to learn this way of relating. As time passes and Bhante grows more distant this impersonality becomes increasingly predominant. At some point Bhante will die, and the impersonal relationship will be all that is left.

So Bhante’s friendship is not of the usual sort. Perhaps what is useful about this way of designating the relationship is not what it tells us, but what it repudiates. Bhante’s description of himself as a friend of the Order is a repudiation of an ‘ecclesiastical’ kind of authority. He does not expect us to defer to him because of his position, only that we should be respectful because of our relationship with him. Similarly he doesn’t expect us to agree with everything he says. And yet, reading the discussion of Women, Men and Angels in Shabda, it seems that some Order members feel oppressed and pressurised (or perhaps they feel embarrassed) by the fact that Bhante holds particular views on the subject of gender. They treat him as an authority and consequently feel trapped.

In an interview with Bhante that will appear in the forthcoming issue of Dharma Life, which will be published to coincide with Bhante’s birthday, Jamie Cresswell, an interviewer from outside the FWBO, asked Bhante directly about the question of his authority in the Order. Bhante replied:

‘I don't think of myself as possessing authority. As a result of my own studies and practices I have a certain understanding of the Dharma, and a certain ability to communicate that, and that's what I've been doing. If people find what I say to be reasonable and if, when they put it into practice, they find that it works, they may choose to accept it. That was the Buddha's approach, and on my own level I do the same.

‘My appeal is to people's reason and experience; ultimately that is the authority. If there are conflicting authorities, you can only decide between them in the light of your own reason and experience, especially spiritual experience.’

This last point is pertinent to followers of Tibetan Buddhism who have made commitments to lamas on opposite sides of a dispute concerning the authenticity of a Dharma protector or support rival candidates as the rebirths of a particular tulku. Who should they both believe if the words of each side are spiritually authoritative? Bhante explicitly disavows such authority, and in the Dharma Life interview he adds that he does not consider his words to be sacrosanct, quoting the Buddha’s own approach as a model: ‘Even the Buddha did not consider his word sacrosanct. He said 'Test my words as gold is tested in the fire.' How can one say more than that?’

This approach throws the responsibility back on the individual, each with his or her own reason and experience. How we do this – how we ascertain the truth – is another, much larger question, which touches on the perennial issues of the claims of reason as against those of faith, and the nature of knowledge in a religious context.

I won’t attempt to engage with these issues here beyond pointing out the relevance and importance of two Buddhist teachings that offer a ‘guide for the perplexed’. The first, the Kalama Sutta, is very well known . But it is easy to forget just how subversive is the Buddha’s insistence that we should not accept a teaching on the basis of hearsay, lineage, scripture, expertise, or respect for one’s teacher to most of the authority claims made by figures in the Buddhist traditions. However, as Bhante himself has frequently observed, we are also wrong to read the Sutta as a charter for sceptical rationalism, because it balances the authority of personal experience with that of the testimony of the wise. It indicates a middle path between unthinking acquiescence, and a scepticism that can never be satisfied. To place this in terms familiar from Bhante’s won teaching, it indicates a middle path between conformity and individualism.

The Kalama Sutta is important and intriguing, but it is brief. More guidance on issues of authority is supplied by a second teaching: the four patisaranas, the matters relating to refuge, or else the Four Reliances. These spell out what we can rely on and what we can’t, stating that we should rely on the meaning of a teaching , not the letter, on sutras if clear meaning, not of interpretable meaning, and on jnana or wisdom, not on vijnana or intellectual discrimination. There is clearly much to reflect on in these distinctions, and a chapter of Bhante’s The Inconceivable Emancipation discusses them.

Most relevant here is the first of these Four Reliances: that we should rely on the Dharma, and not on the pudgala, that is, not on any particular person. This is a Mahayana teaching, found for instance in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa, and given the Mahayana’s stress on the importance of having a teacher it would be wrong to understand this teaching as implying that we do not need teachers, or that we can understand the Dharma other than in a the context of human beings. The point seems to be that the teacher is there to help the disciple get to the truth, and to develop qualities that will enable them to see the truth. The ideal relationship with a teacher, then, is one in which both parties join together in a mutual exploration of truth, in which the teacher’s greater experience naturally places them in the role of the one who has most to say.

I am reminded of some comments that Bhante made in a question and answer session at a colloquium for scholars in the Order which I organised at Madhyamaloka earlier this year. Saramati asked Bhante whether we are better regarding him as a ‘repository of answers’ or alternatively a ‘model for behaviour’. Bhante responded by saying that he thought there might be another alternative. He suggested that he might be seen as ‘a repository of perceptions’ and that we could learn from him as one learns from a novelist or a poet. I found this intriguing, and it reminded me of Bhante’s suggestion in My Relation to the Order that if we want to get to know him we should read his poetry. More broadly it returns one to the question, how can we gain from another’s wisdom? Bhante’s suggestion implied that we must learn from his way of looking, by contemplating what he has seen. Perhaps this is one reason why he writes memoirs. It is as if he is interested in communicating a sensibility as much as expounding a philosophy. A perception isn’t definitive, as an argument may claim to be – you can’t gainsay someone else’s experience, and you can’t really argue with it. It may be that it differs from your own experience, but then that should be a starting point for communication, rather than the occasion of a rift.

Nowadays I have little trouble disagreeing with Bhante. As discussion roams freely across the Madhyamaloka dinner table from religion to literature to history and politics I find myself consistently engaged, challenged and stimulated, the spur of Bhante’s mind means that I have frequent glimpses of the shallowness of my understanding, the limits of my knowledge, and the casualness of my thinking. But sometimes Bhante’s views seem based on a partial knowledge, on premises I don’t accept, or opinions I don’t share. I try to bring humility to these disagreements, but I see no reason to shy away from them when they arise. When such discussion flows freely and creatively the issue is not who is right, but what is the truth.

A couple more points about disagreeing with Bhante. First, if Bhante’s place as our teacher is to mean anything then we cannot regard his views in the same way that we regard other people’s. Especially in relation to views such as Bhante’s on gender, which raise such strong feelings, we need to be prepared to set aside our reactions, trust that the motivation behind them is one of kindness and wisdom, and consider the possibility that we may be wrong. We need to accord due weight to the fact that these particular views have been expressed by someone to whom we look for guidance.

Secondly, we need to be clear whether the disagreement concerns an area that is so fundamental that our discipleship is undermined. I think this means asking whether it prevents us from going for Refuge to the Three Jewels in the context of the WBO, and in the light of Sangharakshita’s exposition of the Dharma. So, for example, Bhante’s views on gender seem to me peripheral to his teachings as a whole, and I can’t see why disagreement with these should undermine more fundamental agreement.

Thirdly, the manner of our disagreement with our teacher is important. If we are to disagree we should do so politely, without making a rousing declaration of our intellectual autonomy, or an oedipal triumph. And I think that our disagreements should be regretful, and made with humility. And they must take place within the context of a broader assent, and spiritual harmony.

And finally, as Bhante stressed at the colloquium, when people disagree with him they need to take the risk of that disagreement. That is, they risk possibly falling into ‘wrong views’. The responsibility is ours.

Bhante’s Influence

So far as it goes this account of Bhante’s authority seems fair and accurate. Yet there is something lacking from it. This way of putting things expresses our relation to Bhante from his perspective, suggesting the claims he does and does not make on us through his role as our teacher. But what does it feel like for us to be in this relationship? I want to move on now from considering the dynamics of our relationship with Bhante, which I have discussed in relation to the question of authority, to a more subjective dimension, and reflect a little on the psychology of discipleship. If Bhante is not an authority he is none the less an influence, and I want to ponder what it is to be influenced by another, or even to be ‘under their influence’. I want to reflect a little on the phenomenon of ‘the anxiety of influence’, which is the title of a book by Harold Bloom who, some of you may have noticed, is a considerable influence on me.

Bloom is an English Professor at Yale, but he is rather more than a critic: he is a brooding meditator on poetry who tracks the spiritual life of the post-Renaissance West through his readings of its literature. The Anxiety of Influence is his key work, written in 1973, a ‘poetic myth of the origins of poetry’, that turns on the paradoxical relationship between a poet and his or her precursors. A poet in the romantic and post romantic traditions of modern poetry seeks fresh or direct utterance. Yet the imagination of every poet is wakened into song by the poetry others have written before him. A poet learns to write, think, imagine through his encounter with the imagination of an earlier writer. As Bloom says:

‘the poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves. The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendour of being found by poems – great poems – outside him.’ (p. 26)

In this view the precursor initiates the student into his own experience, but this is a problematic phenomenon for someone who wants to find their own voice. I have pondered Blooms theories for a number of years, and wondered how much they can tell us about our own relations with our teacher’s. I think the parallel can easily be over-stretched because the ‘strong poets’ Bloom is discussing are exceptional individuals, each of them a great mind straining after originality. Such a mind needs to struggle against influences in order to find the creative space for fresh utterance, and Bloom charts the twisting path along which poets travel, rereading and misreading their predecessors in the interests of this search.

We aren’t like that, or at least I am not like that. But on my own level I have often felt the need to ‘think for myself.’ Yet this approach has dangers. As Bhante commented at the colloquium ‘very few people think for themselves’, and he warned against ‘a pseudo thinking for oneself, which is really just raising objections.’ Indeed we may ask, what is it to think for oneself? On that colloquium I reflected that my concern to protect myself from influences had in the past taken the form of a scrupulous scepticism, a concern to rest only on what I knew to be true. Others there had a similar approach, indeed, academics guard closely their intellectual autonomy, and incline towards asking questions rather than settling on answers. Bhante responded to our questions by commenting that ‘there is no limit to scepticism, and where one stops is a subjective matter.’ As an alternative he invoked Keats’ negative capability, the capacity to dwell in a state of ‘not knowing’, without any ‘irritable searching after fact of reason’.

Erecting a barrier of doubt and questioning to ward of influence is, according to Bloom’s categories, a ‘weak misreading’ of our precursor, that fails in its aim of protecting a creative space that is safe from the precursor’s influence. But ‘nothing is got for nothing’ in the psychic economy, and we shall find that the space we have made – in this case the fortress of reason – is a lonely citadel, whose walls isolate it from the very creativity we originally craved. This is just one variety of defence against influence, and there are as many others as there are temperaments. But if our defence is simply a warding off it will make us weak because it is defensive and unconscious. Bloom insists that the history of individuality show that it is never achieved without the active presence of a strong influences. To do so is to remain trapped within our limitations – that is why in his later book The Western Canon Bloom so bewails the deconstruction of the values of the western literary tradition on political rather than aesthetic grounds. In turning away from the giants of the past we avoid confronting their strength, but also lose the opportunity to find ourselves in relation to it.

We, too, can live in ways that minimise our contact with strong presences such as those of senior Order members, let alone Bhante. Are we afraid of Bhante? Afraid that our budding individualities will be overwhelmed by the force of his mind? The individualist’s fear is above all that he will fall into conformity, but the paradox is that his own aversion to influence is itself a testament to its strength. It is exceptionally difficult to find a third way, between individualism and conformity, a strong response which is both a full engagement with out teachers, and yet is our own.. Before I moved to Madhyamaloka this concerned me too. Would I subtly lose the initiative in my own mental life, or even in my life as a whole. My anxiety concerned not just Bhante, but Subhuti, and in fact the weighty beings of Madhyamaloka as a whole, by whom I would be surrounded. Would there be space for me to flourish?

Having lived there for over a year I still think that the anxiety of influence is real and challenging. Among guests to the community dinner table a frequent problem is the influence of anxiety, which is rather different. The problems of influence concern the nature of one’s life as a whole and the forces that shape it, and this is perhaps particularly an issue for those who have spent a long time around Bhante. But it is also clear that this very phenomenon of influence has helped produce the strong personalities, developed minds that I see around me.

Engaging with an influence is not easy and not without its cost. Three years I interviewed Robert Thurman on the subject of future of Tibetan Buddhism, and asked him about the role of teachers. Perhaps responding to the over-emphasis on teachers among American students of Tibetan Buddhism Thurman recounted a Tibetan saying that ‘the best teacher is the one that lives three valleys away.’ And he added, ‘You have to remember that in Tibet three valleys means, like, from here to Switzerland.’ Sometimes a space is needed so that we may find the strength in ourselves with which we can confront the strength of our precursor.

Bloom’s great point is that we have to make our own sense of the precursor’s perspective if we are to achieve a vision of our own. This is the way to strength. Throughout this article I have stressed the ways in which we need to make Bhante’s teachings our own, and more broadly still, to make the Dharma our own. A true teacher does not want mere followers, so much as successors, and those who will surpass him. As Bloom says, ‘”Be me but not me” is the paradox of the precursor’s implicit charge.’(p.70)

A Buddhist teacher differs from a poetic mentor in that he want to induct the disciple into a third thing, the Dharma, which he, too, aspires to realise. Etymologically ‘influence’ means ‘in-flux’ or inflow and perhaps the closest word that Buddhism has for influence is adistana or blessings, which also refers to the light that emanates form the yidam or the guru in a sadhana practice. Most simply, we shall find our own space most truly in relation to Bhante by making our own connections with the Dharma, and coming ultimately to own realisations of its truths. If we do so in the light of Bhante’s teaching, perhaps we shall feel more fully that we have chosen our teacher, out of what Goethe calls ‘elective affinity’, rather than merely waiting to be chosen.

So let us not turn away from the strength of others, and let us not avoid Bhante’s influence. Now that he is not a personal presence in many of our lives, we can still relate to him through reading his books, and reflecting on his many teachings. His output is formidable, in its extent, range and depth, but we can regard that as an intellectual and spiritual challenge, and we shall have to become greater if we are to encompass it. We should read them, and read the books by Subhuti and others as spurs to practice and gateways to the open secrets of that Dharma, so that its own vast influence may also enter our lives.

These reflections on the anxiety of influence point to a broader issue in relating to Bhante. Very simply, we each need to consider how our psychology conditions how we approach him. If we have problems with authority in general, we will certainly experience these in the sangha, and some people at least will experience them strongly in relation to our teacher.
Many of the same issues come up, of course, in relation to kalyana mitras other than Bhante, and if we can work through issues of anxiety, idealisation, transference, and projection with them, then we will have gone a long way to developing our relationship with Bhante. But, I have one final thought. Perhaps the best way to understand Bhante is to become a kalyana mitra oneself, and experience the pleasures and perils of influencing others.

Conclusion: Relating to Bhante as a Practice

If my talk has a single message it is that we should consciously take responsibility for developing our relationship with Bhante – and by extension with other senior Order members. We should regard it as a practice, seeking to understand the forces at work and addressing difficulties as an aspect of our commitment to Dharma practice.

In Berzin’s Relating to a Spiritual Teacher having considered the many difficulties and misunderstandings that arise in such a relationship, he concludes that students must take responsibility for it. Even if our teacher has both faults and virtues, it is open to us to choose where we focus our attention. After all our closest friends also have a mixture of qualities, but friendship is impossible if we dwell on their faults. Tibetan tradition sees the relationship with the guru as a practice, and says that it can develop as we progress along the path. This ‘Sutra Level guru meditation’ which is derived from Tsongkhapa is different from the tantric practice of regarding the guru as a Buddha. It means cultivating a skilful response to a teacher as a way of seeking to discern the Dharma, the truth they have been teaching us, and which we aspire to become.

First of all we imagine our teacher by looking at a photo or visualising their image, and we direct a puja towards them. The difference between the form of this puja and our own is simply that it does not include going for Refuge. The teacher is an object of devotion, but is not a refuge, and does not, as they would in a tantric practice, stand in for the Three Jewels. We entreat the teacher not to die, and ask them for teaching – as in the ‘Entreaty and Supplication’ section of our puja.

Next we remind ourselves of the benefits of dwelling on our teacher’s good qualities and the disadvantages of dwelling on their faults. In brief we engage with our teacher as a source of inspiration because, however complex our relationship with him may be, he is the conduit through which the Dharma has come to us. It is a process of seeing the Dharma through our teacher by seeing the Dharma in our teacher.

Next we may bring to mind what we believe to be the teacher’s faults and consider that these are impermanent, and illusory when set against his virtues. We then bring those virtues to mind, dwell on them and rejoice in them. We may consider the extraordinary achievements of Bhante’s life: his deep connection with the Dharma; his intuitive grasp of the essentials at an extraordinarily early age; his immense learning; the breadth of his outlook, which enables him to be a kalyana mitra to so many people from so many backgrounds. We may think of his mindfulness – which seems to be unfailing – his devotion to friendship, his perceptiveness, and his mystery.

We move on to reflect on how these virtues came into being. For sixty years Bhante has worked on himself with unfailing persistence, energy and resolve. His life is evidence of his deep faith in the Dharma, and his willingness to do whatever is necessary to serve and to practice it – whether that meant leaving his culture to devote himself to the life of a monk; risking unpopularity through refusing to confine himself to the teachings of a single school; or leaving behind his life of writing and reflection to respond to the aspirations of Dr Ambedkar and his followers. Then Bhante came to the West to engage in the vast task not only bringing Buddhism to the West, but translating it for the West. He survived rejection by his critics in Britain, and had the courage and vision to found a new movement. And then he patiently worked to develop the Order and movement, unperturbed by the many, many difficulties along the way.

Bhante may not regale us with stories of his experiences in meditation but these biographical details themselves tell us much about Bhante’s practice. He became what he is through these efforts. So, in the next stage we consider that we, too, can develop such qualities if we commit ourselves to practice. This is Bhante’s message to us. Through his hundreds of lectures, dozens of books, his lifetime of teaching, and his personal example he is showing us what we can become if we apply ourselves with love, respect and faith to Dharma practice.

This brings us to a reflection on our teacher’s kindness, and a sense of what we have gained from him. What would our lives be like if the Dharma had not been taught in a way we can understand? What would our minds be like if it were not for meditation? What worlds would we inhabit? We feel our hearts appreciation and respect for everything he has done for us.
And finally we request inspiration – the adistana or blessing – which enters our hearts as white or golden light, emanating from our teacher’s heart. An image of our teacher comes to the crown of our head and they sit there for the remainder of the day as a witness to our behaviour and thoughts, and a continuing source of inspiration. Before going to sleep at night, Berzin suggests, we may imagine that this image dissolves into our hearts, or that we fall asleep with our head in our teacher’s lap.
I don’t know if I am capable of such unselfconscious devotion to Bhante. But I am moved by the reminder in this meditation and our own Kalyana Mitra Yoga, of everything I owe to him, and the depth of our connection.

The culmination of My Relation to the Order is the following passage, which is one of Bhante’s most striking testimonies and finest pieces of writing. Having described what he sees as his own limitations he expresses his amazement at what he has resulted:

‘Now hundreds of lotuses are blooming, some of the bigger and more resplendent flowers being surrounded by clusters of half opened buds. During the last 22 years a whole lotus lake has come into existence, or rather a whole series of lotus lakes. Alternatively, during the last 22 years the original lotus plant has grown into an enormous lotus tree not unlike the great four-branched Refuge Tree – has in fact grown into a whole forest of lotus trees. Contemplating the series of lotus laes, contemplating the forest of lotus trees, and rejoicing in the strength and beauty of the lotus flowers, I find it difficult to believe that they really did all originate from that small and inadequate pot, which some people wanted to smash to bits, or put in the dustbin, or bury as deep as possible in the ground. In brief, dropping the metaphor and speaking quite plainly, when I see what a great and glorious achievement the Order represents, despite its manifest imperfections, I find it difficult to believe hat I could have been its founder. Not long ago, in connection with the dropping of names from the Order register, I spoke of my having taken on the onerous responsibility of founding the Western Buddhist order. I indeed took that responsibility on myself, and it was indeed an onerous one. None the less there are times when, far from feeling that it was I that took on the responsibility, I feel it was the responsibility that took on me. There are times when I am dimly aware if a vast, overshadowing Consciousness that has, through me, founded the Order and set in motion our whole movement.

What then do we relate to when we relate to Bhante. A 75 year old Englishman of regular habits and literary tastes, or something much greater? The man, or this mysterious force, which we too may dimly perceive as we contemplate his life and its effects? Bhante has made himself a powerful conduit for this force. Our little lives are rounded by a sleep, yet we have each felt its impression, and it has disturbed our dreams, even if our slumbers continue.

In The Words of My Perfect Teacher Patral Rimpoche uses the analogy of lighting a fire. The Dharma is like the sun, which shines on all equally, but its rays are defused. A kalyana mitra, in the fullest sense is like a lens which focuses the sun’s rays, so that we may feel their intensity applied to our little selves, and like a bundle of twigs, we may be set afire.

May we be burned up by the Dharma, consumed in the flames kindled by our kind, flawed complex, brilliant teacher, Urgyen Sangharakshita, and may the conflagration spread. Berzin finishes his meditation with a prayer, and with that I conclude:
‘May the legacy of my mentor’s good qualities and kindness integrate with my own qualities so that I may pass on this legacy to others and help them feel happiness, well being, liberation and eventually enlightenment for the benefit of all.’ (p.255)

© Vishvapani, 2006