Taste of Freedom Approaches to the Buddhist Path

Abstract

A quaint memory still haunts me from the mid-nineteen-seventies. I am attending a Buddhist `summer school' somewhere in the English countryside just outside London. Our days are filled with study groups, talks, chance meetings in the landscaped grounds, and demonstrations of yoga, flower arranging, and karate. There is also just a little meditation practice. The talks and study groups run from Theravada to Zen, through Zoroastrianism and Vedanta, to a sort of bizarre synthesis of ancient and modern teachings, whose pundit encourages his disciples to spend substantial periods of time with paper bags over their heads. Each evening we are treated to a formal lecture. For an hour or so our minds are crammed with scholarly detail, dazzled by koans, or titillated by the intimate reminiscences of those who have sat at the feet of Great Masters. This is the climactic event of the day: dress is formal and the air in the lecture room hangs heavy with the scent, not of incense, but of ladies' perfume. A handful of monks have graced our gathering with their presence, and as they enter the room – always at the last moment – to take their place at the front, the assembly rises and, in the awkward unison of people who left school more years ago than they care to recall, bows rigidly. On one particular evening the monks are later than usual; the atmosphere is growing discreetly restive. The door then opens to reveal an informally dressed, and rather abashed, sixteen-year-old. This young man, I have already discovered, is with us because he is spending his school holidays with some Buddhistically-inclined friends of his parents, and has tagged along as a matter of course. He shows little interest in the programme, and spends most of his time out on the estate's miniature golf-course. Nevertheless, his sudden and unavoidably prominent entry into the room provokes a tangible tremor of confusion in our ranks. Uncertainly at first, a few people rise to their feet – followed a little raggedly by the rest – join their hands at the palms, and offer the boy a salutation. He tries to smile away his embarrassment, and scurries for the first seat he can find. You see, he comes from Thailand, and in this setting nobody seems to be quite sure what is and what is not deserving of reverence. For me that memory characterizes an era of Western Buddhism that was, even then, mercifully coming to an end. A year later that same summer school was revamped so as to attract people more interested in Buddhism as a set of practical teachings than as a chaotic jumble of exciting and exotic mental games. But it was into this earlier Western Buddhist scene, this heady if fruitless mix of shunyababble, do-talk, arguments about the relative `orthodoxy' of the most superficially understood views, small-group politics, and generalized confusion, that the Venerable Sangharakshita had fairly recently arrived from the East. And it was during this transitional era in the development of Western Buddhism that he gave the talks which, in lightly edited form, make up this book. By that time Sangharakshita's greatest contribution to the transformation of the Buddhist world had been his founding of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in 1967, and of the Western Buddhist Order itself in 1968. His original intention had been to make a brief contribution through existing channels. However, led to some extent by circumstances, he had found himself abandoning his life in India where he had friends, literary projects, a vihara to run, and a crucial part to play in Dr Ambedkar's Buddhist `conversion' movement, to create an entirely new Buddhist community – indeed a new kind of Buddhist community – among his fellow Westerners. By the mid-seventies that community could be described as a movement, and involved, perhaps, a thousand people at its periphery, and a couple of hundred at its core. There were public Dharma centres in London, Glasgow, Brighton, Manchester, and Norwich in the UK, and burgeoning outposts in Finland and New Zealand, all run by members of the Order. It was also becoming increasingly multidimensional as people discovered that their involvement with the movement, and thus with Buddhism, could extend beyond attendance at evening classes and occasional retreats to include community living, cooperative business ventures, indeed an entire way of life based on Buddhist values and practice. Suddenly it was becoming possible to commit not just one's mind, but one's life, to Buddhism. For those of us involved at the time, life lived as a Buddhist was exciting. But it was also lovely. The real key to the FWBO's gathering momentum and relative success was not so much the tribal enthusiasm of a tightly-knit group of mainly young people – though that element cannot be ignored (nor was it by the movement's critics) – but the almost tangible connection we felt with a coherent vision of the Buddhist ideal and the Buddhist path. We knew what we were doing: we could see how the Buddhist teachings fitted together and how they could be used to power and direct the affairs of everyday life. Certainly, Buddhism came alive in the meditation hall and on the country retreat; it always had. But now we were bringing it into our business meetings, on to the building sites of our new centres, tossing it around the breakfast table, and ushering it into the work environment, not as a set of platitudinous safety valves for warding off boredom, frustration, anger, or over-worldliness, but as an increasingly implicit guiding force that could saturate every action, every debate, and, if necessary, every argument. We were really doing it.