Sangharakshita: Triratna's Founder

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Sangharakshita, Triratna’s founder who died in 2018, was one of the most significant figures in bringing Buddhism to western countries and the modern world. 

Born in London in 1925, he discovered Buddhism aged 16 when he read Buddhist scriptures and was overwhelmed by their vision of reality. Throughout his life, Sangharakshita maintained a sense of being in touch with the spirit that animates Buddhism.

To me the truth taught by the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra was not new. I had known and believed and realised it ages before and the reading of the Sutra as it were awoke me to the existence of something I had forgotten.
Sangharakshita

Posted to Asia by the British army in WW2, he stayed on and became a Buddhist monk. From the outset, he was inspired by the whole Buddhist tradition and brought together Buddhists in India of different schools. At the same time, he was developing his own understanding of Buddhism and sharing it through a series of influential books. 

Sangharakshita played an important role in the Buddhist Revival in India when he became involved in the mass movement of conversion to Buddhism among the Dalit followers of Dr Ambedkar, who were considered untouchable under the Hindu caste system – some of the most persecuted people on earth. He became a legendary figure in this community and in later years Triratna activities in India grew into a substantial movement. Sangharakshita learned from this work that Buddhism must engage with people’s social conditions as well as their minds. 

Sangharakshita returned to England in 1964 and, having fallen out with the British Buddhist establishment, founded a new Buddhist movement in 1967. He conducted ordinations into the Western Buddhist Order the following year and led the FWBO/Triratna for many years. He continued to offer guidance and friendship, even as he entered old age. 

When Sangharakshita died in 2018, aged 93, many people from across the Buddhist world expressed appreciation for his contribution his life. 

Modern Buddhism, east and west, has produced few genuinely innovative thinkers, but Sangharakshita is definitely one of them. I was taking my first hesitant steps into Buddhism in 1969 when I read A Survey of Buddhism and it opened my eyes to what the Dharma could offer me if I went deeper. Since then I have read almost everything Sangharakshita has written and I have never done so without being inspired, forced to reconsider something I have taken for granted, or seen some aspect of the Dharma from a new angle.
Ven S. Dhammika

For all Sangharakshita’s learning and intellect, the core of his presentation of the Dharma is his sense of the transcendent wisdom that the Buddha embodies, and he was willing to challenge established ways of understanding or practising Buddhism when he believed they obscured that. An inspired practitioner, he spent his life passing on that inspiration to everyone he encountered. 

I believe that it is possible for any human being to communicate with any other human being, to feel for any other human being, to be friends with any other human being. This belief is part of my own experience. It is part of my own life. It is part of me. I cannot live without this belief, and I would rather die than give it up. To me, to live means to practise this belief.
Sangharakshita

Sangharakshita was a controversial figure in some ways. Some criticisms concerned his innovations, while others concerned aspects of his personal behaviour, and his legacy within Triratna has included a lengthy process of learning from our experience.

However, this should not obscure his exceptional contribution. In all his teachings, Sangharakshita looked for what is at the heart of the Buddhist tradition and wanted to bring it to life in modern conditions. If he was an innovator, he was also steeped in an ancient way of perceiving the world as an expansive, spiritual reality; and, for him, immersing himself in meditation, beauty and the world of the Buddhist scriptures was also an immersion in that transcendent reality. 

You begin to sense something which you cannot describe or define. It is intensely vivid, intensely real, like the perfume of some unknown flower and we can only perceive it because we possess within us something that has an affinity with the transcendental.
Sangharakshita

Sangharakshita was a poet and a lover of the arts, confident of the affinity between the domains of beauty and spiritual life, and he passed on that love to his students.

this great rhythm of joy that, having given birth to millions of stars in the sky, 
Now pours down into my heart and ecstatically begets there the unending mystery of my love.
Sangharakshita

Resources

Read a fuller account of Sangharakshita’s life

Listen to Sangharakshita, aged 92, speaking about his life in a series of interviews:

Books

Sangharakshita published over seventy books of Buddhist teaching, memoirs and poetry, and his Complete Works are currently being published in 27 volumes.

Audio

A prolific speaker, hundreds of Sangharakshita’s talks are available to hear or read at Free Buddhist Audio

Video

Watch videos of many of Sangharakshita’s talks from 1980 and later years

Criticism

Some aspects of Sangharakshita’s life and behaviour attracted criticism prompting reflection within our community in a process of Learning from the Past

next page: The six emphases of Triratna Buddhism