The Triratna Buddhist Community considers itself a genuine Buddhist movement, which accepts the Buddhist tradition as a whole as its primary source of guidance, inspiration and instruction. In harmony with other Buddhists, Triratna practitioners simply aim to practise and make available the Buddha’s teaching in ways that are relevant and accessible today.

Consciously reconsidering how Buddhist practice is lived, fully, in the modern world is an inevitably contentious undertaking. The story of how our community has tried is one of sheer audacity – a Buddhist teacher starting from scratch, working with a group of young people who had only the vaguest ideas about the Dharma. He told them they were going to bring Buddhism to the West – in a way that had never been attempted before.

It’s the story of a circle of friends dreaming a dream, and working to make it a reality. They were, by necessity, finding out what it was they were trying to do as they went along. It’s the nitty-gritty story of how a community evolves. It’s a tale of idealism and naivety, growth and growing pains, hard work and burnout, friendship and fallout. 

It’s a celebration of how so much was achieved in so short a time, and a reflection on the mistakes made and lessons learned, especially from our early days (when we were known as the FWBO, our name until 2010).

Our community has attracted our fair share of criticism, much of it valid and useful and, with hindsight, not surprising. The development of a new community is never without trial and tribulation, and our members have sometimes made mistakes. Some of those mistakes have been quite serious, like those made at the Croydon Buddhist Centre in the late 1980s. There has also been controversy surrounding the sexual activity of our founder, Urgyen Sangharakshita, and others. Needless to say, complex matters like this are never easy to judge clearly, especially when people’s intentions are involved and the events concerned happened some time ago. You can find out more about the difficulties experienced in the past by visiting the old FWBO Discussion articles site. We would also particularly recommend Growing Pains: An Inside View Of Change In The FWBO, by Vishvapani. For an alternative perspective, see The FWBO – A Community In Transition, by Nagabodhi.

You can find a list of critical writing about the FWBO in the FWBO Academic Bibliography. (This bibliography lists texts which deal wholly or in part with the FWBO and excludes treatments by FWBO writers in non-academic contexts.)

You can also read about how the FWBO saw itself in relation to the rest of the Buddhist world in How the FWBO Presents Itself, by Vishvapani. In another article, Vishvapani tackles the Perceptions of the FWBO in British Buddhism. 

Vishvapani’s short, poignant exchange of letters with Zoketsu Norman Fischer around sex and the inherent pain of expectation between teachers and disciples is also very much worth reading.

Listen to an extended interview with Sangharakshita about his experience of the development of the FWBO through difficulties.