Crossing the Stream Reflections on the Buddhist Spiritual Path

Abstract

The essays gathered here were written between 1949 and 1952 and made their first appearance in the pages of several important journals: The Aryan Path, The Middle Way, The Maha Bodhi Journal, The Buddhist, and Stepping-Stones. For Sangharakshita, this was an extraordinary time, vivid with discovery and inspiration. He began the period as a homeless wanderer in southern and central India; he made his first pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy places; he fulfilled his desire to take ordination as a Buddhist monk; he spent a year studying Abhidhamma and Buddhist logic with Jagdish Kashyap at the Hindu University of Benares. The end of this time saw him installed in the hill-town of Kalimpong, just a few miles from the Tibetan border, where he would remain for fourteen years. A decade or so later the journey to the East was to become fashionable; an almost commonplace rite of passage for young Westerners thirsty for adventure. In the late forties and early fifties, however, things were very different, and Sangharakshita was very much a lone pioneer. To this remarkable Englishman, who had somehow known himself to be a Buddhist since his teens, India was something more than a reservoir of exotic experience and spiritual (or not-sospiritual) illuminati, more even than a place of pilgrimage: it was the base from which he would begin his life’s work for the future of Buddhism. His own meditation, study, and insights, as well as some bracing encounters with the Buddhism of Nepal and Tibet, had already convinced him that much of the Buddhism he had encountered in India and Sri Lanka was in a tender state, sadly lacking in spiritual vitality. Ensnared by the conventions of formalistic monasticism, or immersed in the detailed arguments of over-literalistic scholasticism, many people seemed to have forgotten that Buddhism is a living force, a personal communication from an Enlightened being intended to help those who were eager to ‘cross the stream’, to make the journey from the treacherous quicksands of mundane life to the sure ground of transcendental attainment. ‘When he said these words, what was the Buddha really trying to say about the spiritual life?’ Meditating in derelict temples and in caves, or pacing the garden of his Kalimpong hermitage, Sangharakshita would bring his mind back again and again to this essential question, pursuing a concentrated search for the practical heart of the Buddha’s message. Why did the Buddha choose to speak of duhkha (‘suffering’ or ‘unsatisfactoriness’) in his very first sermon? Indeed, why was duhkha the first of his ‘four noble truths’? How and why should Buddhists practise tolerance? What does it mean to have no ‘self’, to overcome the ego, to enter the ‘Void’? Composing issues of his journal, Stepping-Stones, he enlisted the vision and committed scholarship of new, and relatively new, names on the Buddhist scene, kindred spirits such as Lama Govinda, Edward Conze, Herbert Guenther, I.B. Horner.… It was time to find a new approach, paradoxically, perhaps, by going back to the heart of things. The future of Buddhism was in the melting pot, and there was so much work to be done. Soon he would compose his acclaimed overview of Buddhist tradition and practice: A Survey of Buddhism, and establish the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, the first ever inter-denominational Buddhist centre. In time he would return to the West to found the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, a new kind of Buddhist movement with the aim of making Buddhism relevant and accessible to people in the modern world. It was in such a mood of heightened idealism, aware that he had crossed the brink of a dazzling spiritual adventure, that he wrote the essays before you now. Sangharakshita’s literary style has changed over the years. But this edition of early writings is willingly offered once again, in the belief that the insights and ideas expressed in these brief passages are as necessary, as vibrant, and as enlightening today as they were when they were first committed to paper.