All great art contains an element of self-transcendence
Arts, Culture and Imagination
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Sangharakshita was a poet, a reader and a lover of beauty. He passed on to Triratna a sense of the profound sympathy that can exist between a Buddhist spiritual life and the arts at their best.
Many artists of all sorts practice within Triratna and we encourage appreciation of the arts within our practice and the life of Triratna centres.
Traditional Buddhism is filled with the imagery of myth, and this, too, can feed the imagination. Through Buddhist practice, the world of myth, imagination and the archetypes comes alive for many people, producing a profound encounter with the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and the myth of Buddhahood.
The arts are an important part of the Buddhist culture that is alive within Triratna and, as well as the visual arts featured here, many writers and musicians practice within Triratna. This is part of a wider engagement with cultural issues that includes the sciences.
Poetry East at the London Buddhist centre invites poets and other leading writers to discuss their work, usually with Maitreyabandhu, who is a prize-winning poet himself.
Voices
Artists in Triratna
Here are a few artists working within Triratna. These images are taken from the Triratna Arts and Culture 2022 catalogue and previous editions
Mokshananda
‘Each image I make is a process of coming into a fuller relationship with experience, based around a figure, an object, a place, a moment, a memory. I generally paint on canvas in acrylic, oil, charcoal and pastels, and the creative process involves reflection, research, meditation and open, unstructured time.’
Dharmamudra
‘I’ve always been driven to create with my hands, whether that’s been through building work, art, growing a garden, or the practice of Taiji. For many years my art has been focused on sculpture using mainly clay, resin and bronze – the faces of friends, stupas, and Buddhist imagery... I am now interested in the medium of concrete – personalized meditation figures, shrines, and urns for people and animals. I’m looking for something in the dark... engaging with the principles of change and connectedness... form and formlessness... whether working alone, doing portraits of others.’
Jo Newman
‘I’m a theatre director and I love making work which is accessible, which can become a tool for social justice and brings people together in a temporary community to reflect on what it means to be human. My process is collaborative and it’s important to me that the rehearsal room feels like a safe and inspiring space for the cast and creative team, enabling me to hold and facilitate our shared vision. I’ve found the most creative rehearsal processes to be mindful ones, and I start each rehearsal with a mindful yoga practice.’
Aryadharma
‘I don’t know why I paint, but I must – it helps me make sense of things. Living with multiple sclerosis means that my body is compromised, so I’m very aware of the power and potency of the image and the mind reflected in marks and paint. It can hold opposing notions very well, and there are no other languages that say what I need to say. There is an openness to painting, a kind of hovering where the field is alive with presence, ambiguity and slippage: That’s what I look for: to create objects of meditation and beauty that ‘move in a mind’.
Sarah Guppy
‘When I trained to be a gilder I discovered a deep affection for surfaces. As a Buddhist the gilding skills inform my spiritual practice by recognising the true conditions’
Aloka
‘I work to orientate myself in the world, to overcome fear, discover new things about perception, to grapple with my limitations, to make sacrifices to the Gods of Useless Endeavours and learn the magic of being alive. Apart from my own concerns I also produce Buddhist Iconography at the request of people in the Triratna Community to help them with their practice of the Dharma and to serve the Vision of my Teacher, Urgyen Sangharakshita.’
Amitajyoti
I draw inspiration from a range of sources including the forest, mindfulness & meditation, Buddhist philosophy and the science of mind. I work with organic natural pigments foraged from plants and rocks, which have a quality of aliveness that I have not found in synthetic paints. I have come to see that working with natural materials is integral to the vision of human ecology that I explore in my work.
