The Triratna Buddhist Order was founded on 7th April 1968 under the name of the Western Buddhist Order. This year is the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Order. As part of our celebration and remembering that auspicious occasion I thought it would be a good to revisit some of Bhante Sangharakshita's early lectures, which were all part of establishing and creating this Order and the teachings on which it is based. Unfortunately the two talks that Bhante gave on the day of those first Ordinations were not recorded it seems. I have decided to focus on a series of four talks that were given a few of years before the founding of the Order and another short series of talks that were given about seven years after the founding of the Order. The series of talks on The Meaning of Conversion in Buddhism were given in at the Hampstead Vihara, in London either in 1965 or 1966. In The History of My Going For Refuge Bhante says he gave the lectures in the Summer of 1965 but in the preface to the book the date given is 1966. I think 1965 is the more reliable date. That is two years before the founding of the Triratna Community- and three years before the founding of the Order.
In 1965 the population of the world was just under 3.5 billion, today it is over 7.5 billion. Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of the UK, Lyndon Johnson was president of the US, the Vietnam war and protests against it were in full swing, Martin Luther King led a famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, India and Pakistan were at war, The Rolling Stones were in the charts with Can’t Get No Satisfaction and the Beatles with Help.
In 1975 the world population was 4 billion, the Vietnam war ended, the genocide in Cambodia began, The US president was Gerald Ford, Harold Wilson was UK Prime Minister for the second time, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman to lead a political party in the UK and Britain voted yes in a referendum to remain in the European Economic Community. Fawlty Towers was on TV, Elton John, David Bowie, John Denver and the Eagles were in the record charts.
Just as an aside here, it is often difficult for those of us who have turned up later, when there are established Centres and Retreat Centres and Free Buddhist Audio and The Buddhist Centre Online and an almost worldwide Movement to really imagine what it was like in those very early days. One little detail from Bhante's diary entry about the day of the first ordinations could give us a clue. He says: “Arrived at Centre House (a hired venue, macrobiotic restaurant and yoga etc)at 10.15. Found nothing ready. Cleared and arranged room, set up shrine etc.” That little detail takes me back into a image of a Buddhist Movement that barely existed. It didn’t even have people to clear the room and set up the shrine, something we have for any class now. It was largely a vision of Bhante’s that had not yet come into existence. He had to communicate his vision and talk the Triratna Community and Order into existence.
Three years earlier he was doing some of that communicating in his series of talks on The Meaning Of Conversion in Buddhism. In those talks his approach is very pragmatic, he is trying to address the needs of his audience. He had noted that many people coming along regarded themselves as having been converted to Buddhism usually from Christianity and so he decided to give some thought to the idea of conversion and what that might mean in the context of Buddhism. His talks cover the topics of Going for Refuge, Stream Entry, the arising of the Bodhicitta and the Turning About spoken of in the Yogachara tradition. The first talk covers what it means to convert to Buddhism and the other three talks are about conversion from lower to higher mental states within Buddhism.
Some of you will have heard of William James author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. His student, Edwin Starbuck published a book called The Psychology of Religion in 1911. In that book he looks at the phenomenon of conversion in the context of various Christian groups in New England and he also goes on to talk about what is known as sanctification in that context. One of the key differences he pointed out between conversion and sanctification is that people can fall back from conversion but sanctification represents a stage of irreversibility. In the Christian context he talks about it in terms of temptation. After conversion one experiences temptation and is still susceptible to falling back into what we would call unskilfulness. After sanctification one still experiences temptation but there is no wish to respond. The tendency to unskilfulness has gone. The other element of sanctification that Starbuck mentions is altruism. He describes it as ‘intense altruism’.
In a way this corresponds to what Bhante Sangharakshita was talking about in the Buddhist context in these four lectures on The Meaning of Conversion in Buddhism. The first talk on Going for Refuge is about conversion to Buddhism, putting the Three Jewels at the Centre of our life and the other lectures cover the topics of irreversibility and intense altruism and deep transformation. Overall conversion is about turning from a lower to a higher way of life, turning from worldly values to spiritual values. It is about a change of heart and of course it is a process, a process that gradually becomes more and more established and eventually becomes irreversible and becomes who we are.
Of course for some people, perhaps many people, there are sudden changes along the way, experiences that deepen our understanding, experiences that transform us, strong experiences. These experiences, these sudden shifts to a different level are part of the process of conversion within the life of any spiritual practitioner. When I listen to people's life stories I am always interested in the point when they become a Buddhist, sometimes that can be very moving.
Usually conversion is preceded by a period of dissatisfaction. This was the finding of Edwin Starbuck too. So when the breakthrough happens it is a moving experience. As a matter of interest, later shifts in consciousness from a lower to a higher level are also often preceded by a period of dissatisfaction too. One might feel that after some years of practice no progress is being made. But it is important to know that that dissatisfaction is part and parcel of making progress. Again this was something that Edwin Starbuck noticed in the people that he studied. It is also my own experience. I can think of two occasions in particular when I had go to a point of being really dissatisfied with my Buddhist life; everything seemed to have plateaued or gone stale and then after a prolonged period of dissatisfaction I experienced a breakthrough. Incidentally in my case, on both occasions, that breakthrough happened not when I was meditating but when I was looking at paintings in an Art Gallery. I don’t think that means anything for others, except perhaps that spiritual breakthroughs can happen in situations where you are not expecting them.
The other series of talks that I mentioned is the Human Enlightenment series. These talks were given in New Zealand, at the Town Hall in Auckland. The talks were given in Feb 1975, forty three years ago. Bhante had been in NZ for a few months already and had conducted the first ordinations outside the UK. Nine or ten people were ordained. Bhante felt that NZ had ideal conditions for Dharma practice and so he wanted to try to inspire more interest in the Dharma. That is why he gave this series of public talks.
If you have ever introduced people to Buddhism you will know that one of the first questions people tend to ask, naturally enough, is, what is Enlightenment. In the first talk in this series of three talks Bhante talks in a very down to earth way about the Ideal of Human Enlightenment. But although he talks in a down to earth way the talk also has depth. It is still a very good answer to the question what is Enlightenment. The second talk is about meditation and the third talk is about Spiritual Community.
From Bhante having to clear the room and set up the shrine for the first ordinations, teaching all classes and giving all talks for many years, we have come a long way. Now there are probably thousands of talks by other Order Members and mitras, lots and lots of meditation and Dharma teachers and teams of people for every retreat and class. This a remarkable thing. The vision of one man has been communicated effectively and taken up by others and made manifest in the world in very tangible ways that allows the Dharma to touch the lives of many people on a daily basis.
When Bhante wrote the introduction to the booklet when these talks were published in 1980 he was keen to point out that they were not talks on Buddhism but Buddhist talks. He said: “The lectures I gave in Auckland were Buddhist lectures and as such they were meant not merely to convey facts about Buddhism, whether historical or doctrinal, but rather to communicate the results of one individual Buddhist’s personal experience of Buddhism over a period of more than thirty years”. This is what it means to communicate the Dharma and to communicate the vision of the Dharma as a transformational influence in the lives of many people who form together a spiritual community. In Mahayana Buddhism this is known as the Bodhisattva’s ‘act of gathering’; creating a spiritual community by sharing one’s experience of the Dharma. We are the result of a Bodhisattva’s ‘act of gathering’ and our task is to perform our own ‘act of gathering’ by contributing to the sharing of the Dharma and the creation of Sangha.
No comments:
Post a Comment