There are Buddhist centers like this all around the world where people come to meditate, study,
practice ritual and meet friends.
What are the roots of this particular movement, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order?
The early history of the FWBO can be pieced together from hearing people's experiences
from the 60s and 70s.
Nearly 30 years ago in London, Mike Rogers picked up a copy of Edwin Arnold's 1879 poem,
The Light of Asia.
And when I had gone through it, I thought to myself, well, I think I'm sort of more
or less a Buddhist from having read that book.
So I went to the Tournament Directory and looked up Buddhism, and I found the Buddhist
Society.
So I rushed off and joined the Buddhist Order.
And they used to have lectures, I think, every Wednesday night or something like this, and
a variety of people came along and gave what they thought was their view of certain aspects
of Buddhist philosophy.
The Buddhist Society of Great Britain, established in the 1920s, was an important center for the
study and practice of all schools of Buddhism.
Another person who impressed me very much was Professor Konza.
I went to one of his presentations at Saffron Walden when he was lecturing on the Haratsutra.
There were some several hundred people present, including a number of monks.
And it was really one of the most incredible performances I've ever been to.
He was so entertaining and so witty in what with his astrology and other things, he would
ask a question, and he would say, it's a typical question from a bleeding Virgo, if
I may say so.
And the questioner would almost swoon, how does he know he's a Virgo?
It's difficult for foreign Buddhist monks to communicate effectively, I find, with a
British audience, and I've been to meetings at the Thai Buddhist temple where Thai monks,
even though they've been in this country for some time, gave presentations, but their
English was generally so poor that they couldn't get nuances of meaning across and so on, didn't
get so much from the lectures.
Over the years, a handful of Westerners had gone east to gain first-hand experience of
living Buddhism.
Now one of them was returning to British shores.
Inis Lingwut, who embarked for India with the army as a youth of 19 in 1944, has returned
to London as head of the first chapter of European Buddhist monks to be established
in England.
Inis Lingwut, now 39, has become the venerable Sangharakshita Stavira, author, poet and
senior British Buddhist monk.
It wasn't very long before a new speaker, who I hadn't heard before, had been invited
to come along and I thought he presented the ideas of Buddhism in several lectures there.
So well and succinctly and clearly and logically, that my interest was rapidly growing.
I thought, well, this sounds like the real McCoy.
Sangharakshita has a lean, bespectacled face, honed and tempered by 20-year spiritual studies
and work with Indian untouchables and Tibetan refugees.
His headquarters are in a villa on Haverstock Hill, Hempstead.
Then I found he was encumbered up at the Hempstead Buddhist Vihara, so my steps headed
northwards up to Haverstock Hill where he was giving regular Sunday lectures to a crowd
of keen followers and I got more and more interested.
My life at the Hempstead Buddhist Vihara was a very busy one, consisting mainly of
taking classes, delivering lectures and seeing people individually and those activities usually
filled up my week very well.
I also visited quite regularly all the little outlying Buddhist groups.
150 people came together this weekend at a country house in Hertfordshire for the 13th
annual Buddhist Summer School.
Attending the Summer Schools quite often were people who went Buddhists, but we spent the
whole summer, you'd see, going from one summer school to another.
And as different people would get up and give their views on all sorts of different subjects,
so it wasn't a bad beginning for anybody interested in Buddhism to get different people's views
on what it was all about.
Let's say we can only judge things in the light of our own best ignorance at any one
particular time.
At the very first Summer School I asked Mr Humphries if he minded if I conducted a little
puja one evening, puja meaning an act of Buddhist devotion, and he said, well, English
Buddhists weren't into that sort of thing, but if I really wanted to, well, he supposed
I, according to a few people, might turn up.
So I announced that I'd be holding this puja in the evening and virtually everybody turned
up.
And they seemed very much to enjoy it.
So this made it clear to me that ritual and devotion were very much one of the missing
links in the Buddhism of those days.
Relations between the two Buddhist bodies, the Hampstead Vihara and the Buddhist society,
had been strained.
Added to this, the Vihara had its own internal difficulties.
The Hampstead could have had a slightly up and down history, and several Buddhist monks
had been incumbents there, but they each in turn seemed to have fallen out with the trust
or the lay organiser, shall we say, behind the place, and the other trustees.
The aim of the Hampstead Vihara was to establish an English branch of the Southeast Asian Order
of Monks, or Sangha.
The Buddhist society, on the other hand, had its broad church approach.
To heal the differences, Sangha Rakshita worked in both places and gave over 200 talks.
And in both places, my activities were really quite successful and very much appreciated,
appreciated also, I must say, by Christmas and Christmas himself.
But it did transpire later that some people, including some who didn't actually attend,
were not quite happy with a few things.
Some people weren't very happy that I'd allowed my hair to grow just a wee bit longer than
you might be considered customary.
It was only true three inches, but even so, it was longer.
But I think that's a more serious issue, which might have been fairly decisive eventually,
was the fact that I had criticised a particular form of meditation, which I did not consider
a genuinely Buddhist form of meditation, because I had seen that it led to a state of extreme
alienation and even mental disturbance, in the case of some of the people who had practised
it.
Some of them, indeed, had to be hospitalised.
So I gradually phased out that kind of meditation from the Vihara.
And that, of course, did upset some people.
But not everyone was put off.
He was real.
I had met one or two remarkable people in my life, but nobody who was quite so incontrovertibly,
ineluctably real.
By the end of my two years at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, it was clear that a new Buddhism,
or at least a new presentation of Buddhism, was needed in the West, and I decided to stay
on in Britain.
Sangarakshetta's four-month invitation to the UK had already grown to a couple of years.
But before he could settle, he needed to bid farewell to friends in India.
During his tour, he stayed at his old Vihara, met up with the Dalai Lama, and addressed
a meeting of a quarter of a million ex-antakas.
I went back to India for, I think it was a four-month period, I toured around.
I visited my ex-antakashevo, Buddhist friends in Bombay, Burkuna, Nagpur and other places.
I visited my teachers.
I visited Jagdish Kasha.
I visited the Dilbur Kinsir Rinpoche.
I visited, of course, Dharudra Rinpoche in Kalimpong, and Mr Chen in Kalimpong.
And later on, I visited also the Dalai Lama Gravinda, though technically he wasn't one
of my teachers, but I always admired him in his work.
Whilst the Indian tour continued, at London Airport, Soviet Premier Kasegin was saying
goodbye.
The monkeys were saying hello.
The Tori Canyon was shedding offshore oil, Prince Charles was inspecting his new college,
and the Observer newspaper enlightened readers on the deepening crisis in Hampstead.
A major row is likely to develop among Britain's 3,000 Buddhists over the sacking of the venerable
Stavira Sangha Akshita. His supporters claim that he criticised Buddhism as interpreted
in Britain, and that this provoked the resentment which led to his dismissal.
My teachers were all very supportive, and even when I told them that the English Sangha
Trust had decided not to renew my invitation, they told me not to bother. They seemed to
think that of no significance or importance, whatever, and just urged me to carry on with
my work in England.
When I opened their letter, I said to someone who was with me, do you know what this means?
This means a new Buddhist movement. I knew that instantly. I saw that, well, there as
it were, was an opening.
Though he realised 95% of the Sangha Association were campaigning on his behalf, Sangha Akshita
had other plans.
Horrified by the prospect of a return to spiritual starvation, I became a fervent activist in
the pro-Banti faction. The first meeting of the Friends of the Western Sangha was held
in a flat in Coptic Street, near the British Museum, orally in 1967. There were nine people
present, including Banti, who had just arrived back in England.
They produced a document called Ames and Objects, of which two were to study all strands of
Buddhism and to get classes up and running. First, they needed some premises.
Emil Boing, one of our number, ran a shop in Monmouth Street specialising in the sale
of Buddhist objects. It was called Sakura.
We decided to rent a small, unoccupied room in the basement and convert it into a meditation
centre, and the Tree Ratna Meditation and Shrine Room was publicly dedicated on the evening
of the 6th of April. The small room was crowded out. Banti compared it to the catacombs.
At this time, most travellers to the east were unaware of any Buddhism going on in a
London basement. In Asia, though, the glorious legacy of Buddhism was clearly visible, as
was a storehouse of literature called the Pali Canon.
Yes, it gave a very direct feeling of the Buddha and his disciples, because the Pali
Canon is about the Buddha and his disciples, and him going around and talking and teaching
and the little incidents that happened. I discovered that puzzling over words like
dukkha and enlightenment, and so on, I began to feel that this is a possible thing. Enlightenment
is possible in this life.
I think it was very simple things that sparked me off, like seeing the mudras of the Buddha
figures. I mean, just seeing a hand in the mudra of fearlessness or giving evoked some
quite deep feelings within me that urged me towards finding out what was behind it.
I'd come across some Lop Seng Rempo books, and they'd give me sort of an introduction
to Tibet and Tibetan things in general, and sort of teachings of Tibet.
Coming upon Christmas Humphrey's book was an eye-opener for a reader who then had a chance
meeting at Sakura with the friendly Emil Boyan.
In one of my wanderings, I just happened to encounter this Buddhist information shop,
as it was called, Sakura in Monma Street, which was a very kind of fly-blown shop, very
mysterious, full of Japanese things, and very inviting in a sort of way. It was very warm
and mysterious, which is one of the kind of things I was looking for anyway. I was needing
warmth and mystery in my life, which was dominated by the BBC so much.
I'd met a guy at Monty Chike in Portugal, and we'd sat at the beach and had talked
for three days, and he'd just been recently practicing meditation in America, and talked
about it in terms of self-truth. But that impressed me quite a lot, and I wanted to
find out about meditation when I came back to England. I didn't know where or how.
Then I met again one of the people I'd been to Thailand with, and he said, did you know
there's a guy teaching meditation at a place in Monma Street? It's great, he said. You
know, so I went. He told me about this monk who was giving a lecture in Keynesington, about
to bend the book of the dead, and he'd come to that, and they was giving other lectures
each week, and that's when I first went along with Saul Pentley for the first time.
One of my trips to this shop, for a free cup of tea, was this monk was sitting in the corner,
sitting in a very strange sort of fuzzy garb, a gabardine sort of thing. I thought, hello,
who's this? Joker in the corner. But he seemed to get on well with Emil, so I thought, you
know, he must be all right. These were some of the people who were drawn to sakura and
meditation. He started every meditation class by reciting the hot sutra in a Sanskrit, which
I found very, very moving. And then we would do the mindfulness of breathing, all the metabhogany,
and afterwards have a cup of tea, and then go home and come back next week.
I remember when the puja and the chanting of the refuges and precepts in particular
started. I found the rest of the language very flowery, but that bit, which was in a
foreign language, just made my hair stand on me. The meaning for me wasn't important.
It was something strange and mysterious and different from English. That was the important
thing for me. For most people, what happened next was just as mysterious, though it was
an historic step for Western Buddhism. At our second or third meeting, he outlined the
plan that had been in his mind for some time, the establishment of the Western Buddhist
order. It evoked a lot of incomprehension and little enthusiasm. Ordination had no
personal meaning for us, and it seemed that the Western Buddhist order was without any
exact parallel, east or west. One thing I was very clear and very certain about, I didn't
want to start another Buddhist society. Society with a small s. I wanted to start an order.
I wanted to have a movement of committed Buddhists. So the order came into existence a year after
the foundation of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, when a dozen people actually
committed themselves to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and became us, as we say, contained
into the Western Buddhist order, which they thereby helped to found.
There was no build-up to the occasion, just Monmouth Street in the long dusk of a spring
evening, discarded newspapers blowing in the breeze and taxis honking outside the window
as we waited our turn in the shop. Finally, I was alone with Bante in the
shrine room, adding my offering to those already on the altar, taking the refuges and precepts,
given a mantra and a rosary and a name. Looking back, I can only say that a seed was
planted that evening, which later began to flower.
The following evening, we had our public ordination at center house at the end of a Sunday seminar.
In addition to Bante, the Sangha was represented by two Thai bikkus, a Zen monk and a member
of the Arya Maitreya Mandala. It was perhaps the most significant occasion in the history
of Buddhism for centuries, as in my own case, a seed had been planted, the first seed of
the Sangha in the West.
Roy Brewer is 43 years old, but last night he was reborn. Kneeling before a statue of
the Buddha in an atmosphere thick with incense, Roy also changed his name.
Mrs Sarah Boyne, a 30-year-old London housewife, was ordained a Buddhist yesterday. The ceremony
was performed by the venerable Stavira Sandratchata, head of Britain's Buddhists. Mrs Boyne, of
Coptic Street, Bloomsbury, is believed to be the first British woman ordained into Western
Buddhism.
Recepts, which you have taken, observed thoroughly and perfectly, and with mindful nest-stripe
on them.
I didn't think anybody shared my vision at that time. I think that was quite impossible
for them to do. A few of them might very occasionally have had a glimpse of it, but no more than
that.
I really hadn't the slightest idea of what ordination was. It was a club, it was a nice
friendly, warm social club, really, which seemed to be based on something a bit different
from English culture.
Freshly ordained, Arnander went back to work at the BBC, where one day he made a new connection.
At one tea break, I was actually asked if Arnander knew where I could buy an incense,
and he told me of Sakura, and he said, why don't you go along and learn to meditate?
And they never crossed my mind to do so before, but I could see no good reason why not to.
Soon afterwards, and without having been to any classes, she went on a retreat at a rented
school in Surrey called Kefauz.
It was a whole sort of atmosphere of trust and security, of sort of sanity, and yet at
the same time it was very magical, very light.
I think the first retreat one goes on is quite an experience. Communication access, silence,
days, and the build-up of the meditation.
Everybody went on sort of on cloud nine by the end of it.
People started saying, we don't just want to have a retreat every few months, we want
this to go on in between.
What do we do in between?
We don't want to go back to the old lifestyle, we want to keep the energy and inspiration
and the magic going.
People said, why don't we get a house together?
I remember Brenda, who became go-to-me, later, saying, we've got this house in Perlia,
south of London, and there's a few people who wanted to get together, you know, would
you like to come and join it?
I said, oh, we could eat together every day.
Another candidate for this proposed community was Marlene, still only on her first retreat,
18 years old, and called Hazel.
So, I left home, and moved into the first ever Buddhist community, which later became
Ariatara, but which at that time was still called Sarenhouse.
So, with our hearts and our mouths, we moved out to Perlia, and three of us sat on the
floor there, put our sleeping bags on the floor and thought, well, here we are.
Go-to-me's ordination brought the order up to 18 members.
The community at Sarenhouse was growing.
Besides herself, Ananda and Marlene, Chanda joined it, followed by Dharmapala.
I decided that I was just going to move in, you know, I asked if I could come in there,
and within a month, I was actually living in this house with these people.
So I made that sort of connection that I felt was missing, and I just found go-to-me very,
very encouraging, and the other order was very encouraging.
And in the evenings, we had to do, I'm just sitting there trying to have a child.
So those were sort of beginnings of a sort of ice centre thing, happening there, other
than Sakura.
A fire at Sakura meant classes had to be cancelled for a while.
When they started back, there were five of them a week.
Teachers from various schools came and taught, though when some of the disciples started
living at Sarenhouse, life there became unwieldy.
We got to a point where we had some of Dewey Roshu's disciples there, people from Soshu,
Suzuki, Samuet Tibetan teachers, Samuet Sri Lankan teachers, all living in the same house.
After some of the confusion had been sorted, Sarenhouse became the Aryatara community under
the first Croydon Buddhist centre.
So I'd been living at Sarenhouse for about a year.
Go-to-me just told me one day that Bante wanted to ordain me on the next retreat, which rather
surprised me.
I didn't actually know what that meant, so I had to ask Go-to-me, what does this mean?
You know, that I'm going to be ordained, or he wants to ordain me, what does it mean?
And she explained about the refugees, the three jewels to me, and I just said, well,
OK, it seems right to me.
While I was on retreat, Bante asked me if I'd like to go for a walk.
So I went for a walk with him, and he asked me if I would like to get ordained.
And I simply asked him what that entailed.
I mean, I didn't really have much of a clue about what it meant.
And my memory was that he just said that ordination was that I had made, that I wanted
to make a commitment to leading a Buddhist life.
And that's what I was thinking of doing for the rest of my life.
And to me, that seemed, well, yes, that was what I intended doing.
And so I agreed.
I said, yes, I would like to go for refuge to be ordained.
In 1969, with the ordinations of Dharmapala and Malini, the order had 25 members.
But it was a fragile affair, and only a handful of them would turn up for weekly order meetings
at Sangha Ratchita's flat.
And I think many, many Friday afternoons, Friday evenings, which is when we had them,
I don't think Bante really believed people would turn up at all, you know.
It was quite a shock to me when NATO order members started taking classes.
I mean, it never occurred to me that that is what an order member would be expected
to do.
At that time, I still thought Bante would be doing everything forever.
There were more people wanting to go to meditation classes than Bante could take, so he decided
that one or two people should be taking them instead.
And we all felt dithery, and he said, well, you know the mind for us, everything.
You know the metabarbony, you know the stages, you know what to say.
So we did.
Turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Dr. Timothy Leary, a high priest of youth culture, did know what to say.
We should go back a couple of years to 1967, the year of love, and trace another route
of the FWBO.
For those young enough to appreciate it, there was a dawn in a new age.
Reading Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums when he was 13, deeply influenced the future Manjoo
Vengeance.
And the things that impressed me with that thought were the sexual experimentation which
was going on, which I was keen to try, the drugs, and the levels of consciousness that
it opened up, and Buddhism, and travel.
I went to America in 1967, you remember 1967 when we all wore flowers in our hair, and
that was a big turning point for me, hung around in Hade Ashbury, talking to people, smoking
to, et cetera, just sort of experiencing the atmosphere, which was quite extraordinary.
I mean, I felt like committing myself to the world of drugs.
What I meant was to say, okay, let's just go for this level of consciousness.
Not worry about the ordinary world, but really pursue that particular level, no matter whether
it turns me to a wreck or whatever.
The good experiences were that, you know, I felt there was more to life than science
and more to life than being rational.
I was working at the BBC at the time, and I couldn't quite take it seriously, and I
felt I'd have to take it seriously in order to get the satisfaction I wanted, but I couldn't
make that shift, so I was looking for something.
And I thought, I've got to get out of this.
This is, you know, I could end up like my parents, you know, got their gold watch in
the Shekelsford chain when they retired, and I didn't want it.
And, you know, there was exciting things to do, like, you know, to the cosmos.
Are you experiencing the subtler state of thought at this moment?
No, I'm out in the grots speaking.
Having experienced altered states of consciousness with drugs, I became interested in doing that
without drugs.
In fact, I thought that was quite necessary and, you know, desirable.
And so I sat around and said about looking for somebody to teach me meditation.
We always used to listen to the programmes while we were doing other things, and I heard
it mentioned on the Today programme, and so I tracked down the tape, and it had said what
I thought, which was that there was a class on Monmouth Street that evening.
And I couldn't go, so I sent my boyfriend, Sabuti, along.
I mean, there was a very, very uncomfortable sort of atmosphere, I suppose, what we would
now call blocked, and at the end there was a strange figure dressed in an orange robe.
And he seemed to be completely unconcerned and quite a disease, which I think actually
sort of made everybody else even more uneasy.
Yeah, I found the meditation very, very good, very effective.
I'm quite glad of the tea break, and we had sandwiches, which I'm always under the impression
that Banty had made, but nobody else seems to have ever mentioned this, so I don't know
if I...you know, he just seemed particularly benevolent and likely to produce sandwiches.
What a man!
There was just such a mind on him, and at the same time so human, and sort of wild, dangerous,
very self-confident he appeared.
So he made a very, very strong impact on me, a very strong impression.
I realised I was a Buddhist within just a few weeks of coming along through those meditation
classes, and I knew that this is what I wanted to devote the rest of my life to.
I didn't have any great sort of sense of conversion, it was just quite a matter of fact thing.
It was great, I booked for two days, I thought that was really brave, and stayed for four,
and I liked it, I learnt to meditate, which I really wanted, and I could see that was
going to be helpful for me.
Well, they're sitting there for ten minutes or so, and then another bell went, and I said
oh thank goodness for that, it's deep.
But nobody moved, and they stayed there for, oh, another ten minutes, and then another bell
went, and I'm sure this was going to be the end, but it wasn't, and this went on five
times until we actually got to the end of the practice, and I didn't know what I was doing.
I'd just gone there and sat there for nearly fifty minutes, excruciating pain.
I like the people, there was a lot of young people, but there were all ages actually,
there were little old ladies and people in middle age, so I like the range of people.
I met Sabuti on that retreat, and various other people that I've been friends with
since.
So Sabuti, in the course of just four days that we went for that retreat, we've built
some really good friendships that have lasted actually until now.
I remember arriving back at Waterloo station at the end of it, and how everything just seemed
so strange, just sitting on the platform with a few friends before we went our different
ways, and just watching people walk past, you know, like especially women, you know,
they come walking past in these high heels shoes and short skirts and all this ridiculous
make-up and just things so absurd, you know, out of what you've been used to on these
retreats, just what on earth are they doing, you know, what type of world are they living
in?
Some painters of the sixties plundered the wealth of consumerist images in their culture,
and drew out a potent mythology.
That was, for me, what Conscious's expansion meant, it meant that like in my house we didn't
have pictures, I had a picture of my great-aunt Rose and my grandfather on the camel in front
of the sphinx in his Royal Engineers uniform.
We didn't have books, we had the Daily Mirror and the News of the World, you know.
And the friend I was living with said, we ought to try meditation, so we went to Monmouth
Street Central, and there I met Banti, quite liked him, you know, he's sort of interested
in Guy, and in the end invited me to go and live with him and another guy up at St James's
Lane.
Banti and I would usually take a stroll on Sunday morning, we'd go to the Jewish Patisserie
and buy a breakfast.
He would go to his little room, which was next to mine, and he would, you know, work
away at the Eightfold Pass series, or the Higher Evolution series, one and two, and
then lunchtime, one of us would cook lunch, and we'd sit around and just sort of chat
about D.H. Lawrence, so it was very, very intellectual, really good.
And then in the evening, we might go to a movie, because Kevin used to support himself
by being a cleaner at local ABC, so we always, you know, we could get all of us in there
for free.
Tomorrow he learns what's true and what's not.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted, right?
Or we go for a walk, or we have visitors, quite a lot of visitors.
How did you find that?
I thought I was pretty smart in those days, rather than a cocky, young art student, you
know, with sort of intellectual pretensions.
And so obviously we had a lot of discussion with all sorts of things, and it soon became
clear like, who was the intellectual and who wasn't.
And I remember sort of leaving one afternoon after a sort of a weekend session, as it were.
And just going away, not quite knowing what I'd learnt, but knowing that I'd learnt something,
but not knowing what it was really, you know, but just something had happened.
Dinner at Sanger Akshita's, with its painfully shy guests, could be very testing.
So I'd run down to the office, I'd buy a bottle of wine, you know, and calm every
one of them, loosen everybody up. And some people were fine, you know, some people just
come in and chat, and it was all very nice, and other people would sit there and you'd
grown through this meal with absolute silence.
What we ate was supposedly macrobiotic brown rice and some egg and instant whip for pudding
and tomato ketchup, I seem to remember, I haven't seen very macrobiotic to me.
But I don't think I said very much, probably, that was how I was.
The FWBO had always celebrated traditional Buddhist festivals, and in 1971 a large hall
was hired for WESAC.
About 150 people turned up, which gave me the impression that here was quite a big movement,
and the place was packed, and there was this chanting filling the room.
It was extraordinary, I mean, it was not something that I would have wanted to go to, but being
there in this lovely, friendly, you know, atmosphere in a room with incense, smoke and flowers,
it was something like I'd never experienced, and I loved it.
The vanishing crowd syndrome was reflected in order gatherings. This 1972 picture can
be misleading. Many members turned up for the photograph and then disappeared. No new
ordinations were to take place for another two years.
There was certainly nothing like the friendship that we find in the order today existing then.
And it took me a little while to realise, in fact, that there wasn't really much of an
order as we were operating behind Bantu.
I used to go on in the classes about the FWBO, about this organisation called the FWBO that
produced to produce this great newsletter to which I subscribed, but actually it didn't.
You know, there was nothing really there. In a way, what he needed was a few people
that could get behind him more as full-time boots and all. And when I saw the need I tried
to respond to it.
There had been a regular FWBO newsletter since 1968.
I virtually did write the newsletter, absolutely, from beginning to end, and typed it and printed
it and sent it out to the post. You know, it was a one-man operation.
Most of Sengar Akrita's talks had been tape-recorded, so the archive was soon a valuable resource.
I remember copying tapes for some peculiar people in New Zealand, you know, and they,
I posted these tapes out and I didn't know where they were going, I didn't know on earth,
so I'd sort of rush up to my bedroom and sort of start these copying and send them out and
they'd end up being the foundation of another group. So the tapes actually were actually
seminal, instrumental in getting the FWBO going in other parts of the world.
We know, I'm sure, that it's very difficult to develop spiritually entirely on one's
own. The support, at least at the beginning, of a spiritual community that is of other
individuals similarly interested is very, very helpful.
I was not impressed when I just saw him and met him, but the talk he gave was extraordinary
because it was a very kind of scholarly talk in some ways, but at the same time it was
quite magically enchanting. And it made quite an impact on me. First of all, Band His Very
Presence had a strange impact on me in that I felt I was about to faint during the first
few minutes of the talk. And had I been near the door, I would have left because I felt
convinced I was about to keel over in my chair.
And the hush was total, you know, very few people coughed. It was like one of those
musical performances you go to at the end, you know, no one claps for five minutes. They
just, that's it. It was like that, very, very strongly.
Don't think any of us had ever heard anything like that.
Banti would answer questions. They were all kind of religious, spiritual questions, actually.
You know, what's the nature of enlightenment, or what's the nature of shunyata, or what
is the one mind? As far as I can remember, there were very few psychological type questions.
You know, people didn't seem to focus on their psychological problems at that time.
And we'd have a discussion, you know, on the basis of those kinds of questions. And then
a lot of us would go upstairs and go next door to a sort of theatrical type café.
British Buddhism had been tied to classes and summer schools. It was respectable, but
lacked the freedom and energy that young people wanted. The new generation of mind explorers
were going to go deeper in trusting themselves and each other. The path of friendship was
another route, perhaps the most valuable one, for Western Buddhists to take.
Sabuti invited us back to his parents' place after the retreat. We were going to stay there
for a couple of days. And one day I remember we dropped some acid and we sort of were meandering
around the house during the course of the day. And it was a fantastic experience, especially
after the retreat. But anyway, we formed what we called the League of Court Lodge. I think
we signed some sort of paper, you know, that we would form this sort of secret league and
that we'd do something with this Buddhism. I very quickly learnt to trust Buddhists. We
were understanding we were in similar states of mind and looking for similar things. And
I think that was quite marked, that the people I met at the centre, or at Sakura, were the
people who became my internals. I think the development of the spirit of
Sangha proceeded hand in hand with the development of the movement itself. We started with centres,
rather with a centre, and people used to come along to the centre, attend classes, used
to attend lectures, but they didn't have very much personal contact. They all went home
afterwards. But as we began to hold retreats and people started spending perhaps a week
or even two weeks together, and then subsequently as people themselves started setting up residential
spiritual communities, in this way the spirit of Sangha developed more and more.
By 1971 the typical features of the FWBO were there in Outline. Its survival though was
not at all certain. It had one teacher, one community and one centre. But Sakura's lease
was about to expire, and the search for a new home was going to be a long one. Was there
enough inspiration and energy to survive on, or was the Friends of the Western Buddhist
Order going to be a footnote to history?
Sabuti and I went off to see some kind of hippie character who was organising a big
festival on Parliament Hill Fields, and we decided we'd do something as part of this
festival. And then Mangala, who was the artist amongst us, he thought we could make a big
Papiameshi Buddha.
I was with a bunch of friends, and we came across this bunch of people all with face
paints out of their heads on acid, with a big golden Papiameshi Buddha on top of a van.
And then we had a fun jumble sale with everybody in fancy dress. Pavan Raja was dressed as
a parrot, and Dover Raja was dressed as a ballerina. It was very fetching. And it was
just fun.
Lots of people came, and people got interested in the Friends. Even Banti came and Manda
store ones at the jumble sale. He managed to sell a lot of bric-a-brac to the old ladies.
So it was a beginning of a more collective participation.
There was a very positive experience of actually working together. There wasn't just that five
of us. There were lots of other people involved by that time. And just that day, and we all
went off to the restaurant afterwards and shared a meal together.
For the very first time, I started to feel that I had found some friends who I could
relate to in a dharmic way. And this was actually what I had been looking for.
I didn't want to live life like my parents or anyone else I knew, so I thought this was
at least alternative.
You know, there wasn't any sort of big structure, you know, which was out there. It was just
us and what we kind of did where it was getting a jumble sale together or going on a retreat
or whatever.
Once a courier sort of went down the drain, we realised it was up to us if anything was
going to happen. And I think that's when we began to feel that actually we're an awful
lot could be done. But it was sort of quite a woolly vision.
Thank you.
You're gonna turn it out and burn it out and turn it out the same
So put me on a highway and show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time
You can spend all your time making money You can spend all your love making time
