All of Sangharakshita's words preserved for everyone, forever.

I am fully immersed at the moment in the £100k campaign to publish Sangharakshita's Collected Works, as his 90th birthday present. I don't think that I have ever felt so emotionally engaged to an appeal in my 16 year fundraising 'career'. It is very present in most of my morning meditations! I personally guaranteed to Bhante that I would raise this money, and I have also gradually come to see the historic importance for modern Buddhists of the project. This Collected Works will be the first and definitive collection of everything Bhante has ever written, including key edited seminars and talks, articles and short stories that have never been published in book form. So it is about much more than keeping Bhante's key works in print. It will be a mammoth five year project which Vidyadevi and Kalyanaprabha - two of Bhante's literary executors and longtime editors - have already begun.

Even after allowing for sales revenue, which will be ploughed back into the project, a subsidy of £85,000 is needed, which we need to raise between us (together with another £15,000 that Bhante would like to donate to translations projects). When I first heard of this undertaking I wondered, as you may be, whether we really need to republish much of these writings, especially at such cost. Couldn’t Windhorse simply keep reproducing the most popular texts, and offer the rest as online PDFs or print-on-demand books? That’s possible, assuming that Windhorse can manage even that cost, however now I feel strongly we would not be doing justice to our teacher, whom history may judge to be one of the great Western Buddhist teachers. I expect people in cultures and times very different to ours will be very grateful indeed that we preserved and collated all of Sangharakshita’s vast writings, and whilst he and his editors are still with us to make the thousand-and-one judgements that the task requires.

In the last few days thanks to some generous donations from Order Members in the £000s we are now halfway to the £100,000 that we’d like to give to Bhante on 22nd August at Adhisthana at the Order weekend celebrating his birthday. This is just a few weeks away. So please give now, and at a level commensurate with the transformation that Bhante’s life has effected in yours...

Give here now: www.justgiving.com/Bhante90th