The Fifty Years, Fifty Voices Project
The Triratna Buddhist Order turned 50 on the 7th of April 2018. The Dharma is alive amongst our 2,000+ Order Members across the globe, in many forms.
Triratna is founded on a radically traditional vision – what does that mean in practice? What does that really look like, feel like, ‘taste like’? This fiftieth birthday is an ideal time to bring together a diversity of voices to reflect on the often messy, vibrant reality of living a Dharma-life and co-creating a new Buddhist tradition. Fifty Years, Fifty Voices has recorded conversations with a range of Order Members for an exhibition, on-line and at Adhisthana in 2018.
We hope, like the songs of the early followers of the Buddha, this gathering of voices will be an inspiration to practitioners in future times. This project presents short excerpts from each ‘voice’ but over time the interviews will be released as full-length podcasts.
The Fifty Years, Fifty Voices Project
The Triratna Buddhist Order turned 50 on the 7th of April 2018. The Dharma is alive amongst our 2,000+ Order Members across the globe, in many forms.
Triratna is founded on a radically traditional vision – what does that mean in practice? What does that really look like, feel like, ‘taste like’? This fiftieth birthday is an ideal time to bring together a diversity of voices to reflect on the often messy, vibrant reality of living a Dharma-life and co-creating a new Buddhist tradition. Fifty Years, Fifty Voices has recorded conversations with a range of Order Members for an exhibition, on-line and at Adhisthana in 2018.
We hope, like the songs of the early followers of the Buddha, this gathering of voices will be an inspiration to practitioners in future times. This project presents short excerpts from each ‘voice’ but over time the interviews will be released as full-length podcasts.
How the project came about & who’s involved
The idea for Fifty Years, Fifty Voices crystallised in the Colwall Coffee lounge when Satyalila and Lokeshvara met in February 2017. Since then the Triratna (Order Office) Trust and Adhisthana Trustees have decided to support the project. Part of the money is from a legacy by Dhivati. There’s an Editorial Board of Lokeshvara, Nagabodhi and Vidyamala. Satyalila was supported for about 4 months to coordinate the project, record, gather and edit the interviews. Candradasa is the Technical Director.
Candradasa & Sanghadhara heroically organized and recorded seven interviews in the midst of all their other work at the Bodh Gaya convention. Amalavajra/Jayararaja and Aryavacin self-recorded interviews. Dhiramani, Emma Sohlgren, Itir Binay, Malini, Moksanandi, Simone Moore and Upeksapriya carried out interviews. Steph Delany and Zoe Lim helped with transcribing interviews. Rijupatha designed this website. Dhammarati designed the library exhibition, with design assistance from Simhanada, and Yashodeva helped to hang it at Adhisthana.
Fifty years of Testing Sangharakshita’s Teachings in the ‘Fire’ of our Experience
For the last 50 years, members of the Order have been testing Sangharakshita’s teachings, just as the Buddha taught – ‘as a goldsmith tests gold in the fire’ – in their lived experience. Sangharakshita’s understanding of the Dharma is profound, multi-dimensional and, from some perspectives, simple. This doesn’t make it easy to fully understand or to practise. While the Sangharakshita Complete Works will ensure that what he actually said is preserved and contextualised, the ‘Fifty Years, Fifty Voices’ project offers the start of a kind of ‘living analogue’ or counterpart to that. It records (and can enable reflection upon) some of the lived experience of those who have devoted their lives to putting Sangharakshita’s teachings into practice.
A ‘hologram’ of the Order: The ‘Centrality of Going for Refuge’ is a distinctive emphasis of Triratna and pivotal for the Order. In practice, Order Members approach this ‘centre’ as if from a 360 degree circumference, starting from very different places, with different conditioning and different strengths. As we gather a range of ‘voices’ from around that circumference, we aim to evoke a kind-of ‘living-hologram’ of the Order in the middle.
Reflecting on conditionality in our collective experience: As Vessantara noted in his ‘Fifty Years, Fifty Voices’ interview: “…the more of people’s early experiences of Triratna we gather, the more we’ll understand the conditioning forces which have formed Triratna which are still playing out in different ways.” ‘Reflecting on conditioned co-production in our experience,’ is a practice Sangharakshita has recommended many times.
A Crucial Time
We’re living at a precious time when we have the majority of the founding members of the Order still alive. They’ve had substantial direct contact with Sangharakshita and have been practising for decades. And they won’t be around forever. We’ve lost Anjali, Vajragita, Alaya, Mallika, Surana and Jinananda, to name a few. We can’t afford to hang about! If we want to capture the experiences and perspectives of our first generation of ‘elders’, we need to act.
We also need to record the voices of the younger generations of the Order and the ‘not so well known voices’ as well. Satyalila crowdsourced suggestions for the 50 voices for this project and a repeated request was to hear those of ‘quiet unsung Order Members just getting on with their practice’. You may know some of those…
Fifty Voices is just the start…
This project is just a beginning. The longer-term aspiration is to set in motion a new ‘habit’ in the Order. A positive habit of recording and reflecting collectively on the years (and decades) of Dharma practice we have done. And what we’ve learned. So if you’d like to help ensure more voices are ‘captured’ please see our “Introduction, Invitation & Kit”. We have the potential to archive such recordings, so that they can be edited and shared as resources permit – like a living analogue of Bhante’s many recorded Dharma teachings.