From toads in drains to the northern lights, from a soiree to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, read about what has been going on at Adhisthana https://adhisthana.org/news/2024/october-at-adhisthana/

On Saturday 9 November, during the international meeting of the Preceptors’ College at Adhisthana, we will be celebrating the completion of Sangharakshita’s Complete Works. 

With the publication of the final three volumes, including a remarkable concordance (which you can hear more about here in a beautiful talk, ‘Worlds within Worlds' by Vidyadevi, given at Adhisthana on the August Order weekend), we now have a collection of twenty-seven volumes of all of Sangharakshita's previously published work, as well as talks, seminars and writings published for the first time in book form, representing the definitive edition of his life’s work. 

This immense project has been undertaken with the skill, generosity, faith and commitment of so many people, and we want to rejoice in all of those who have contributed over the last decade and celebrate the culmination of this great work.

The Public Preceptors and the Adhisthana Communities will be joined at Adhisthana by 26 of the wider Complete Works team for a programme of short talks, expressions of gratitude, and a ritual dedicating the work to fulfilling Bhante’s Bodhisattva Vow and lifelong mission to spread the Dharma for the benefit of many.

Please join us online!

Meeting ID: 890 0431 2642
Passcode: 456671

Saturday 9 November 19.30 – 21.15 GMT [105m]

USA PST 11.30 | Mexico 13.30 | USA EST 14.30 | UK 19.30 | Central Europe 20.30 | India 01.00 (next day) | Australia AEDT 06.30 (next day) | New Zealand NZDT 08.30 (next day)

The Maltese sangha, who joined us for the combined sanghas retreat on Living with Kindness, have made a beautiful new contribution to the alcoves in the main shrine. The atmosphere on-site was as warm as you'd expect from an international gathering of sanghas practicing metta bhavana.

We were also delighted to welcome Shubhavyuha back after her six-month sabbatical in Australia, where among other things, she helped run an ordination retreat. The women’s community is enjoying her positivity and kalyana mitrata, and celebrated her return and birthday with a breakfast feast towards the end of the month.

It’s been a quieter month for retreats, giving us room for some creativity in the kitchen. Jayadhi has been sharing her skills and experience with Annika, one of our newest community members. Those on-site have been treated to delicious dishes, from focaccia to summer rolls. The fruit trees are heavy with plums, damsons, and apples, which we’ve been turning into crumbles, tarts, hoisin sauce, stewed apples, and plum jam.

We celebrated Padmasambhava Day one evening with the local sangha. Lalitanaga and Maitriyogini led an inspiring evocation of the vajra guru, followed by a puja led by Prakasha. Our Monday night drop-in class continues to grow, with impressive numbers attending, even braving flooded roads after one of this month's epic storms.

The new DharmaLife course participants are settling in well. They’ve been studying with various members of the men’s community and helping out around the site during work periods, often guided by Jennie, who has been volunteering here this month. Jennie has expertly managed housekeeping while Maria has been on retreat, for which the team is very grateful. We’ve also benefitted from the warmth, generosity and practical support of volunteers Robyn, Annette, and Iulia (a DLC alumna), who have been invaluable. Later in the month, we were joined by Vimalabandhu, whose culinary skills delighted us with creations like a ‘banana wellington.’

The operations team has been busy planting bulbs in the wildflower meadow, and Sanghadeva and Kerianna have been creating new beds in the cut flower garden. Hopefully, next year all the flowers for our shrines will be grown right here at Adhisthana!

To read more about Adhisthana, visit our blog.

Friday 30 August - Friday 6 September

A retreat led by Saddhanandi, Jvalamalini, Manjuvajra + Ratnaghosha

The natural tendency of the mind is to set limits and settle down, but positive emotion goes against this tendency.

We have all been taught the Metta Bhavana, and it is tempting to imagine we know what we will get with a retreat on kindness. But do we consistently act to nurture the seeds of metta in our hearts and minds? It's possible to live our everyday lives in a way that aligns with one of the most powerful qualities a human can possess, and it starts by facing the obstacles to kindness.

With practical exploration of the theme through meditation, talks, and group discussion, this retreat will draw together Sangharakshita’s teachings on metta to equip those attending to return to their sanghas with greater confidence and connection with their practice and others.

If you have been taught to meditate in Triratna then this retreat is for you. Book now under the 'Open' category and join us for a week of transformative practice.

In May we welcomed 80 retreatants for our second ever People of Colour retreat and had the largest Philosophy Symposium yet, on Liberty, Nietzsche and Buddhism. We also had our yearly Blake retreat drawing on our retreatants’ wilder sides, and were delighted to host the York/Scarborough and Manchester sanghas. Towards the end of the month, we also had the honour of hosting the funeral for Srisambhava, with 90 guests paying their respects in the Main Shrine room.

The Operations team has been well supported this month by Karolina, a volunteer who was with us for two weeks working all around the site. Vidyaruchi has also been staying, and we celebrated his birthday while he was here. Other birthdays gave the communities the opportunity to rejoice in Prakashamitra, Lalitanaga and Dhammarati. There was further celebration on Buddha Day when the communities, volunteers and guests were joined by local friends, Mitras and Order Members. We were led in meditation by Saddhanandi recollecting the Buddha, and there were personal talks by Harry and Taylor.

Read the full post here

Only the walker who sets out toward ultimate things is a pilgrim. The pilgrim resolves that the one who returns will not be the same person as the one who set out. Pilgrimage is a passage for the reckless and subtle. The pilgrim—and the metaphor comes to us from distant times—must be prepared to shed the husk of personality or even the body like a worn-out coat.

- Andrew Schelling

Pilgrims week is back, with the same epic ambitions. A continuous 108 hours of circumambulation, talks from Vidyamala and Lokeshvara, and an optional programme that allows you to enjoy being at Adhisthana in the way that feels right for you.

Over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend Adhisthana welcomed sangha members from all over the world as well as from Centres and Groups in the UK, both in person and online, to reflect on the teaching of the Taste of Freedom. Retreatants speaking Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish and French joined the Adhisthana community and retreatants from Birmingham, Bristol, Colchester, Cork, Essen, Glasgow, Hereford, Ledbury, Leeds, London, Norwich, Oxford, Sydney, Warwick, Worcester and Worthing.

The Polish sangha group arrived early and stayed for an extra day, along with three Turkish women who attended the international retreat and then stayed on for a few days to connect with Dharmacharinis involved with the Turkish sangha. Both sanghas added to the international atmosphere of Adhisthana and brought much joy.

Read the full post here

The first few months of every year are usually a bit quieter. With fewer people on site this means the cooks have a chance to get more creative; Jayadhi made a great Pad Thai, Bodhiketu created a spicy Lasagne, and Harry has been mastering a variety of recipes that you’ll get a chance to taste when you’re next here.

There are changes afoot again as Prajnanita hands over being manager to Prakashamitra. She will now be the Director – a new role which hasn’t existed at Adhisthana before. This will enable her to offer her many skills in serving the Women’s Dharma Life Courses and supporting Khemabandhu as Chair, as well as Prakashamitra as Manager. Vilasamuni will be Prakashamitra’s deputy, so there is always someone on hand to help the other members of the Operations Team.

Read the full post here

From 4 March - 22 April we are running an online course on the Heart Sutra for Order Members. Each week you will receive videos via email, and there will be two live sessions with Vessantara, 25 March and 22 April.

You can register for this course here.

We are also holding a retreat on the Diamond Sutra at Adhisthana 24 April - 3 May - available in person and online. More information here.

It has been a lovely start to the year already. The European Chairs Assembly came for their winter meeting, and it was a great way to kick off 2024; their clear up left the place spotless and you can usually find Maitridevi and a few others playing Bananagrams after dinner (and learn some new words; atavist and quinquereme anyone?).

In community news, Caroline will be going to Akasavana this year and will be ordained by Aryajaya – we look forward to seeing who she becomes! Harry has moved into the dorm and is working as our new main cook, and Kaj is back for a few weeks helping out – it’s great to see him and hear about his adventures since he left.

We’ve also had several European volunteers; Onni from Finland, Hannes from Germany, and Joris from the Netherlands. Joris was with us for a couple of weeks and offered two workshops for the communities which everyone who attended seemed to find inspiring and stimulating.

Twenty mud-stained bodhisattvas planted over 500 trees, mostly in the vicinity of the solitary huts on our first public working retreat. They also cleared some of the brush from the new woodland that Adhisthana assumed custody of when Jasmine Cottage was purchased. Planting new trees along the boundary and spread woodchips along the path through the forest; in a few years time their work will have really changed the landscape of Adhisthana.

After a large young person's weekend where Ksantikara handed on his responsibility for co-ordinating the Young Buddhist Project to the Steering Group, we began our At Home days on the theme of Building Amitabha's Buddha Land. The communities installed the Amitabha thangka in it's new home in the Padmasambhava Shrine in the Library. So much hard work has gone into this project it's wonderful to see it come to fruition - the painting was done by Chintamani and the commissioning and then fundraising was done by Maitripa with the help of Suvajra.

There were also some fun collective work periods, study and lots of good food, company and conversation. One of the highlights were hearing life stories from Liv, Harry and Saddhaloka - what a good bunch of people to live with!

One day a devotee asked why it was that, while so many embarked on the spiritual life, so few seemed to make real progress. Ramdas's reply was unequivocal. They failed to make any real progress for two reasons, he said. Firstly, because they have no clear idea of the
goal they wished to reach. Secondly, because they have no clear idea of how to get there.

From the young Sangharakshita's account of his visit to Ramdas at Anandashram in South India during his time as a homeless wanderer.

The Buddhist tradition has always emphasised the importance of having a clear understanding of the path and goal. Bhante, in accord with the tradition, and taking Ramdas's advice very much to heart, has opened up the path in a way that is very clear and accessible, and made an effective, and still unfolding, spiritual life possible for many of us. However, it is all too easy to take for granted the innovative richness and the depth of what we have been given. If we want to ensure that the stream of spiritual energy that we are part of will continue as a living force in the world, we need to be going back to these teachings and exploring them deeply so that we can hand them on in a truly meaningful way to future generations.

A number of very experienced Order members, who studied personally with Bhante, have come together in the Adhisthana Teaching Community to bring focus to this task. As well as leading small seminars, teams drawn from the ATC are also leading retreats together.

Join Parami, Nagabodhi, Maitreyi, Ratnaprabha, Saddhaloka, Sona and Khemabandhu in March, or join Vidyamala, Dhivan, Dhammarati, Paramartha, Parami and Saddhaloka in June.

It is quite something to bring together such a wealth of experience in the Dharma life, and we are hoping that many Order members will want to join us, both in person and online. Join us, and share in the project of carrying the Dharma into the future for the benefit of our suffering world.

27 August – 17 December 2024
Applications due Friday 1 March 2024

A four-month residential course providing you with an opportunity to live an intensive dharma life: living, practising, studying, and working together within the context of Adhisthana. 

Over 16 weeks you’ll receive a grounding in the principles and practice of Triratna Buddhism through retreats, study with experienced teachers and communal living. You’ll also participate in the life of the wider Adhisthana sangha: meditating together, performing ritual, developing kalyana mitrata and joining in with regular work periods as a spiritual practice. 

The course is aimed at men under the age of 35. In previous courses, half of the participants have come from outside the UK, and we remain really keen to receive applications from those outside of Great Britain.

Click here for more info and to apply

And you can email mensdlc@adhisthana.org with any questions.

It can effect your dream life, it can effect your meditation, it can effect your life. If you really enter into the imaginative, dream world of the Lotus Sutra, it starts to affect how you experience the world around you.

Ratnaghosha on the White Lotus Sutra.

A practice-focused retreat at Adhisthana, available in person and online.

Read more

It's been a significant year at Adhisthana, and as it draws to a close we are taking the opportunity to cast a backward glance over what has happened.

Read more

Starting from January 2024, we are introducing a slight adjustment to our wifi accessibility during retreats. We want to create a more retreat-like atmosphere for those coming here, and so will be restricting general access to the wifi for retreatants.

Anyone attending a meeting here will still have access, as well as guests who are not here on a specific retreat. If you have a specific need for internet access during a retreat you are attending here, you can discuss it with your retreat leader. In case of emergencies, the landline phone in the reception building remains the most reliable way to get in touch with emergency services.

If you need to give someone an emergency contact number, there are two options. The office phone number is 01531 641726. This number is checked daily but is not covered 24/7. There is also a phone number in reception (which is open all the time) and you can check throughout your stay. The number for this phone is 01531 640972.

We are making this change to support those attending retreats here to be able to fully immerse themselves in their experience. In an increasingly connected world, opportunities to go offline are becoming rare, and we want to protect the atmosphere that is created through practitioners coming together and being present with each other.

We look forward to having you here and to co-creating an environment together that continues to support practice.

How do you find out what is the case? Consider the criteria of the Kalama Sutta in which the Buddha provides a list of what he regards as unreliable sources of knowledge or advice:

• something asserted repeatedly
• tradition
• hearsay
• scriptural texts
• sophistical reasoning
• logical inference
• prolonged consideration
• getting carried away by a view that you identify with
• indulgence in the pleasure of speculation
• a person who makes a plausible impression
• your respect for a spiritual teacher

None of these are reliable sources of knowledge. Instead, he says, ‘when you know of yourselves that these teachings are skilful, blameless, recommended by sensible people [viññugarahitā], and that followed through and practised they lead to welfare and happiness, then practise them and stick to them.’

Read the rest of the article here or on Ratnaprabha's website.

How are you reading this?

Forgive me for being so forward. Of course, you haven’t really got going yet. It’s probably too open a question anyway: the how of reading could mean lots of different things. First, there’s the medium – are you on your phone, a tablet, a laptop or desktop (though of course you might have printed this out, or be asking a text-to-voice AI to read it to you)? Then there’s the speed – are you scanning, skimming, skipping; or planning to stop and mull
over my word choice or points of interest as you go along? And how is the how of your reading influenced by your assumptions of what kind of writing this is, and even what the act of reading really is? Would you have even thought about it if I hadn’t asked?

Read the full post here.

https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0031774.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-30): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cpxnthrw CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36048938">Image credit

For several years now, during each international Preceptors' College meeting, time is dedicated to hearing from the kula of Public Preceptors in India. This was a special year, with all ten of them able to travel over, making up more than 20% of those gathered for the meeting. 

One morning was spent hearing about the work of the ordination teams and public preceptors in India, including the establishment of a new retreat centre dedicated to ordination training, Sudarshan Bhumi, named in memory of Sudarshan. During a free afternoon, the India Kula cooked a celebratory dinner for the Adhisthana Community and College, and then led us all in a very special evening during which Subhuti was invited to unveil a bust of Dr Ambedkar. The India Kula commissioned the bust to be made especially for Adhisthana following a conversation with Bhante in 2018, and it has now taken up it’s place in the room above the shrine room, rededicated as ‘Bhim Smrti’.

Following a Pali Puja recited by Ratnashil and Abhayavati, we processed via the burial mound to ‘Bhim Smrti’, where the bust was unveiled and garlanded. Amrutdeep, Amoghasiddhi and Subhuti invoked the deep connection between Sangharakshita and Dr. Ambedkar, their shared vision of the dharma and it’s transformative potential for society, affirming Babasaheb’s relevance to the whole world. There was traditional Ambedkarite song and chanting, and we ended with the Dhammapalam Gatha. It was a powerful and affecting event – a highlight of the meeting for many present.

“As I worked on my description of that historic ceremony, and tried to bring out the significance of some of the things Ambedkar had done, I became more than ever aware how much there was in common between his approach to Buddhism and mine. Though the saying itself may not have been current in his day, for him, too, commitment was primary, lifestyle secondary, as his contemptuous dismissal of pseudo- monasticism in `The Buddha and the Future of His Religion' abundantly testified. His assertion, in effect, of the fundamental unity of the Buddhist spiritual community, corresponded to my own insistence on the central importance of Going for Refuge…”

– Sangharakshita, from ‘The History of my Going for Refuge'

You can see a fuller version of the three talks at the dedication of Bhim Smrti, here.

Scientists themselves have increasingly seen the importance of ‘the observer’. Science is for human beings, so it needs to understand what it is to be human, what self-awareness is, and what the range of human needs are (scientists tend to stop at the survival (medicine), and material (technology) needs.) But above all because immediate experience is all we have! All else is inferred, models, theories, assumptions, attempts at communication etc.

So take mental processes seriously. And take seriously the mental processes of others — there is a real possibility of empathy. (Note how primitive Western philosophy and psychology can be here, without ‘contemplative’ disciplines.)

Can consciousness be studied scientifically (i.e. objectively)?

Read the rest of the article here or on Ratnaprabha's website.

“It has been said that the renaissance that would be brought about by the discovery, in the nineteenth century, of the treasures of oriental literature, would be incomparably more glorious than that which had been ushered in during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the recovery of the classics of Greece and Rome.”

So begins Sangharakshita’s lecture ‘The Glory of the Literary World’, delivered at the launch of Tharpa Publications and his book The Eternal Legacy, on the 29 th of August 1985, some six weeks before I was born. Sangharakshita acknowledges at the time that this second renaissance “… has in a sense already begun, even though it has begun on a very small scale, and to a very limited extent, and though we cannot be sure whether the process will ever be completed.” As this blogger now teeters on the brink of middle age, perhaps it’s as good a time as any to review the progress we’ve made.

The signs so far are mixed. On the one hand, the translators have been hard at work. Many ‘occidental’ languages now have more translations than a non-scholar could expect to read in their lifetime, some languages even boasting many dozens of translations of particular works. And Buddhism’s profile (not to mention those of yoga, Taoism, and Tibet) has grown massively, especially in digital spaces. A second renaissance, though, it is not. Yet.

Read the full blog here.