Triratna News

'A Supra-personal Force or Energy Working Through Me': the Triratna Buddhist Community and the Stream of the Dharma

On Mon, 24 December, 2012 - 23:30
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa
Subhuti has just published the final instalment of his round of articles based on discussions with Sangharakshita, clarifying and exploring further aspects of Sangharakshita’s teaching, which is the foundation of the Triratna Buddhist Community’s system of practice.

Read it online now or download along with the rest of the series

Sangharakshita himself writes:
I am glad to see that Subhuti has now completed ‘A Supra-Personal Force: The Triratna Buddhist Community and the Stream of the Dharma’, the fourth and last of the series that began with ‘Revering and Relying Upon the Dharma’ and continued with ‘Re-Imagining the Buddha’ and ‘Initiation Into a New Life’. Like its three predecessors, this paper grew out of Subhuti’s discussions with me, and I commend it to the attention of all Order members, and urge them to make it the object of careful study.

And here’s the opening by Subhuti:
“This article, in Sangharakshita’s phrase, ‘rounds off the cycle of teachings’ that began with Revering and Relying upon the Dharma, proceeding then to Re-imagining the Buddha, and Initiation into a New Life. Each of these attempts to follow through the implications of Sangharakshita’s statement, in What is the Western Buddhist Order?,1 that the Order is the community of his disciples and disciples of his disciples, practising according to his ‘particular presentation of the Dharma’. Like them, this paper emerges out of my conversations with him, exploring especially his understanding of the five niyamas, and is published with Sangharakshita’s approval. This present paper explores the Dharma niyama at work in Sangharakshita’s own life and experience and thereby shaping the institutions of the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community.Whilst it seems that this cycle may now be complete, the conversations continue…”

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