on retreat

off on retreat with prakasha till may 20

a joined up meeting

bluebells in north wales

a visit to tiratanaloka on sunday, to talk about my proposal for a 'joined up meeting'. 

in the last few years, there have been a lot of structural changes in the order and movement. the general direction of them has been towards decentralisation and local autonomy, of centres and of ordination training. this was something we set in motion in the early 2000s, the intention of which subhuti summed up as 'broadening the movement; deepening the order'.  

a lot of the more central, co-ordinating structures were revised or removed: the preceptors college drew its brief more narrowly, the preceptors' college council was dissolved, and the mitra study programme shared by all centres allowed for more variation and adaptation to local circumstances.

but on top of that planned opening up, came the period of questioning and soul searching of the last few years, and the result was that this necessary decentralisation was never balanced by new ways of co-ordinating, to replace the job that bodies like the pcc had done.

one modest step that i've suggested is a meeting that brings together people from the preceptors college, the chairs meeting, the order convenors and the men and women mitra convenors. most of those have already agreed to take part in the meeting, and i've been waiting for the women mitra convenors to meet, to invite them to participate. on sunday they agreed, and i'll now go ahead and try to set up the first meeting.

we're planning to meet for three or four days twice in the next year. 

the idea is to share the experience and perspectives of each body, first of all to try to get a bigger perspective on the order and movement, and to get a higher level of agreement about what the next spiritual and organisational steps might be.

the brecon beacons, where tiratanaloka is, is glorious in this early spring weather. one hillside was covered in the most bluebells i have ever seen in one place. 

click the pictures to enlarge them...

system of training 2: going for refuge

asanga and vasubandhu

Though the talk is about the system of training, I’ve been talking so far mainly about the system of meditation, because it’s the most structured, I guess the most systematic, part of our teaching. It’s important to remember, however, that our system of training is not just limited to meditation. I want to return to meditation, but first of all, I want to broaden out a bit. I want to take this idea that Bhante has made so much of, the centrality of going for refuge. Going for refuge, and it’s place in Bhante’s thinking and teaching is something that I come back to again and again, and ask myself ‘have I really understood this? Do I understand why Bhante gives this quite the emphasis that he does?’. I’m not at all sure that I’ve grasped all the implications of the ‘centrality of going for refuge, in fact I’m sure I have not.

When I became a preceptor, I went back and read a lot of what Bhante had written about going for refuge. I was very struck by a particular passage in The History of my Going for Refuge. Talking about the first ordinations into the WBO in 1968, he says:
Though I had realized that Going for Refuge was the central act of the Buddhist life, and that it meant organizing one's existence round the Three Jewels, that realization had so far found expression only in my personal life....
But now the situation was entirely changed. The twelve people who made up the Western Buddhist Order had ‘taken' the Three Refuges and Ten Precepts from me… and their understanding of the meaning of Going for Refuge coincided with mine, at least partly. Like one lamp lighting a dozen others, I had been able to share with them my realization of the absolute centrality of the act of Going for Refuge and henceforth that realization would find expression not in my life only but also in theirs.

So, in the book, Bhante describes ordination in terms of twelve other people sharing his understanding of going for refuge. In the book, he had given a step by step account of how his own thinking about going for refuge had developed over the last twenty or thirty years. Now there’s almost this ‘Kondanya knows’ moment.
Twelve other people have understood, at least to some extent, what he understood as central in spiritual practice. Then he goes on:
Not that the realization in question was something fixed and final. It could continue to grow and develop, and find expression in a hundred ways as yet unthought of …

That idea, of a shared realization; something that was not fixed but that was developing in twelve other lives; a realisation that was deepening and being supported by their spiritual friendship with each other: I’ve found that a moving description of what happened at the first ordinations, and of what our spiritual community is in it’s essence. It’s our own realization deepening, and coming into relationship with other people whose experience is deepening. And out of that communication, something of significance happens, an understanding and an expression of that understanding, that couldn’t have been anticipated or foreseen. The point I want to make is that for Bhante, this theme of going for refuge, and a shared understanding of going for refuge, is definitive of the nature of the order.

I got a letter recently from someone who has asked for ordination. In effect he was saying that for him his meditation practice was centrally important, and a way of supporting insight: he wanted to know how this related to going for refuge, why was going for refuge centrally important? This might not have been quite what he intended, but for me he was raising the whole question of how best to think about the spiritual life and what we were trying to do. Wasn’t it sufficient for him to be getting on with an effective meditation practice? Why is going for refuge centrally important? Wasn’t it sufficient to think in terms of meditation leading to insight? Why do we put quite the emphasis that we do on going for refuge, and on ordination, in our spiritual training?

Now I certainly want to support anyone with a serious meditation practice and a serious commitment to Insight. was doing some study recently on the Bodhisattvabhumi, a text by Asanga, which threw some more light for me on the centrality of going for refuge and the connection between meditation and going for refuge, in fact between any spiritual practice and going for refuge. In the Bodhisattvabhumi, in a section on the Essence of Ethics, Asanga describes the factors essential to successful practice. In the text, Asanga is talking about the Bodhisattva’s practice, but what he says, I think, is true of any living practice. Two things that you need, central to any practice, is what Asanga calls ‘purified intention’, and secondly ‘making correction after failure’. What Asanga means by ‘purified intention’, as I understand it, is that the mark of real practice is that more and more of the ‘stream’ of our being is moving towards the arising of the bodhicitta. 

His second point about making correction after failure, I loved. What he’s saying is that a lot of the time we won’t be acting out of purified intention. He takes it for granted that most of us will ‘fail’. The important thing then is that we make correction: we recognise that we’ve moved away from that pure intention, and intentionally come back. I really liked the idea that losing touch with your going for refuge is part of the nature of practice, for many of us it’s a given. It’s not that we’ve done something dreadfully wrong. What you have to do, our practice, is what subhuti described as ‘committing to re-commit’. Every time you lose connection with that intention to move towards awakening, and we act out of aversion, or craving, or confusion, you notice and make correction

And that clarifying, deepening stream of our being moving towards awakening is what is essential. All the specific practices support that move in our own minds, in our own being. The thing that unifies meditation practice, ethical practice, ritual, is that all of it supports this movement. 

Spiritual practice is a move from a mind within which one strand among many is moving towards awareness and kindness, to a mind where that strand is the central, defining current of our lives. That’s what going for refuge is. And according to Asanga, that ‘purification of purpose’, and that sustained intention to make correction after failure is of the essence of practice. For me the Asanga text clarified how going for refuge underlies and unifies every other practice.

a system of training

empress theodora, san vitale, ravenna

i've gradually been transcribing the talk i gave on the recent order weekend: here's the first installment:

Yesterday, Vishvapani was talking about significant birthdays, and remembering our sixteenth birthday. I think that was the occasion of Bhante giving the paper on ‘the ten pillars of Buddhism’, with most of the Order sitting, I think, in York Hall, listening to the first reading of the text. It was a seminal moment.

A fortieth birthday is a more problematic beast, isn’t it. If the sixteenth birthday is the Indian coming of age, the association I have with fortieth birthdays is mid-life crisis. Assuming that we’re not all going to go out and buy a red sports car at the end of this weekend, what happens at age forty? Traditionally, there’s a taking stock. It’s a time where our youthful idealism,even, may I say, our naïveté, meets the complexities of real experience, and we have to figure out what is of real, central value to us.

I was talking to Subhuti recently, and he was reminding me about his time as order convenor. He became order convenor, he told me, just before the Guardian article came out, and stopped being Order convenor just after Yashomitra’s letter. He was making the point that he was Order convenor during what was probably the most turbulent period of self questioning that we’ve ever been through as a community. So at age forty, maybe it’s apposite to be taking stock, and thinking well, where have we got to? What is of central importance to us?

I wanted to give this talk on our system of training for two reasons, which follow on from that idea of taking stock. Subhuti recently wrote about the cetokhila sutta, One of the points the buddha makes in that sutta is that to make spiritual progress, you need to have confidence in the spiritual training you’re engaging with. That confidence is not a sectarian thing, it’s a practical necessity. You have to be able engage confidently with the practices you’re using. So first of all, I wanted to engage with this idea of a system of training: for some of us I think confidence in our training has been an issue in the last few years, and I want to try to spell out the grounds for confidence in our training.

Secondly, over the last few years we had more inflows from other sources and traditions than ever before. On the whole I’ve found that a stimulating thing. One of the ways we become clearer about who we are is to be in open dialogue with others, and the dialogue we’ve been involved in has been a healthy thing. But I think it’s also true that it has raised questions that need clarification. So I want to come on to the whole issue of ‘lineage’ that was raised yesterday. I think we’re already at a point, as a community, where now that we’re forty, we’ve been handed a responsibility by our teacher to hand on to the generation coming behind us, what he has handed to us. To do this we need to be clear as a practice community: what is it that we’ve been given, what is it that we’re passing on?
So I want to try to address both of those issues; confidence in our own training as a condition for successful practice; and clarity about what our system of practice is, so we can hand it on faithfully.

The title I was asked to speak about is ‘What do we mean by our system of training?’. The first thing I want to say is personal`; talking about a ‘system’ at all makes me uneasy. I like my freedom. I was visiting Vassika in Paris recently. Vassika makes mosaics, and she was telling me about how they made mosaics in Ravenna. Ravenna, if you don’t know it, is a town in the North of Italy, with some extraordinary Byzantine mosaics dating from the sixth century. She was showing me a pice she had done in the style of modern mosaics, and a piece she had done in the style of mosaics from Ravenna. The thing about modern mosaic, if I understood Vassika, is that the tiles are regularly cut, and laid flat in the grouting; the mosaics from Ravenna are cut irreguarly, in fact they’re sometimes broken, and are laid into the cement at more irregular angles. And the effect of that is that the way light catches the surface is completely unpredicatable, the surface is scintillating, much more interesting than the more uniform, more modern method. In the pice that Vassika showed me, those irregular tiles mae up this beautiful, luminous halo of a saint. That image struck me. The whole thing held together, but it was unpredictable, alive,. At least when it comes to mosaic, I like a little irregularity, something that’s not too tight.

So when I talk about a system, I want to allow for a bit of iregularity in the pattern. I’m uneasy with a system that ‘s too tight. Luckily, it seems, so has Bhante. As part of the preparation for this talk, I was listening to a series of question and answer sessions that Bhante did recently at madhyamaloka, on a seminar organised by Subhuti on ‘sangharakshita as teacher’. Some of the things Bhante said on those sessions about our system of meditation really struck me. I’m assuming that most people are familiar with the main categories of what Bhante has called ‘a system of meditation’: the stages of integration; positive emotion; spiritual death, or vision; and spiritual rebirth, or transformation. In the seminar Bhante had this to say about these stages:
The system is not meant to be a rigid system, with carefully defined boundaries. Each stage is meant to cover a vast range of experience and practices… For example in the second stage, the stage of positive emotion, there can be joy, ecstacy, bliss, compassion: everything that’s of an emotionally positive nature, from ordinary positivity to sublime spiritual experience. One shouldn’t think of these stages in too narrow a sense...

So that was the first point I wanted to make: when Bhante talks about the stages of a system, he’s talking about something that covers ‘a vast range of experience and practices’.

So what, in that case, is the value of a system at all? In the first lecture that Bhante gave on ‘A System of Meditation’ he spelled out his reasons:
‘I want to take up the different methods of meditation current in the order, and see in what way they link into what I have called (and at this point he puts in the qualifier) a trifle ambitiously, a system.

So the first thing Bhante wanted to do was to show the relationship between different practices. He then went on to explain why:
‘it needs to be clear how the practices are related. What we need is an arrangement of practice that takes us forward, step by step, and stage by stage… to make clear the progressive, cumulative nature of spiritual practice.

So these are central points that I want to underline in this talk. That the ‘system’ covers a wide range of experience and practice: how the range of practices hang together and support each other; and how they become a progressive, cumulative series, that takes us from the first steps into awareness, to a transformative spiritual experience...

to be continued.

mahamudra

the third karmapa, jetsun rangjung dorje

just finished an event with lama lhundrup and lama djangchub, from dagpo kagyu mandala in the auvergne. 

i know lhundrup from the european buddhist union, enjoy his company, and been very interested in the experience of his community.

in particular i've been impressed by their three year retreats. at the minute they have something like 80 men and women, mostly between the ages of 25-35 on three year retreat, training in a full, traditional introduction to vajrayana practice in the kagyu tradition. i've been interested in what we can learn from this, both the practicalities of longer retreats, and the possibilities of way of training in meditation and the dharma.

lhundrup and djangchub spent a week at madhyamaloka with a small group of us, including manjuvajra and kulaprabha, who have a specialist responsibility for retreats: vessantara and prakasha who are involved in  meditation teaching; scholars like saramati and sagaramati; and ratnadharini, parami and me, with responsibilities for ordination training.

the week was structured around lhundrup presenting a short text, The Path of Aspiration of the Mahamudra of Definite Meaning, by the third Karmapa, which let us understand in more depth their approach to meditation, and something of how they would present it in the context of their retreats.

most of the interbuddhist dialogue that i'm involved in tends to be organisational, and it is very satisfying to be able to have an exchange about things of central spiritual significance. lhundrup spends nine months of his year on retreat overseeing the three year trainings, and his time is short and in demand, so we were very pleased that he was able to make the time to visit us.

at a time when dzogchen and mahamudra are influencing the practice of people in our own community, it was very helpful to have such a full, traditional account of that approach to practice, and to have it put so clearly in the context of pali and mahayana buddhism. i found particularly helpful the deep connections betwen mahamudra and pali formulations, like the lakshanas and the satipatthana sutta, while one verse gave a succint and evocative summary of yogachara teaching:

10.
Spontaneous appearances without any existence 

are mistaken to be objects,
And by the power of ignorance, spontaneous cognizance 

is mistaken to be a ‘self.’
This dualistic grasping has made us wander 

in the sphere of samsaric existence.
May we cut the confused projections of ignorance 

directly at their very root.

on a similar theme of the links between mahamudra and mahayana teaching, dhammadinna led  some study recently on a milarepa song, the grey rock vajra enclosure. 

after a discourse to a yogi on mahamudra pratice, milarepa gave another teaching on the paramitas:

Wealth and property are like dew on a grass blade,
Give generously, don’t be small-minded.

This life you have is full of potential,
Guard your ethics like your own eyes.

Lower rebirths are the result of anger,
Learn patience, even if it takes your whole life.

If you’re lazy, you won’t benefit others,
Be diligent in your good practice.

If you’re confused, you won’t realise the essence of Mahayana
Meditate with one-pointed mind on the ultimate meaning.

You can search all you want, you won’t find a Buddha,
Look at the true nature of your own mind.

Faith is like fog in the fall,
If it dissipates, you must persevere.

 translation by Nicole Riggs from her book,

 Milarepa: Songs on the Spot

in a teaching like mahamudra, which, when it is divorced from its traditional context, can sometimes sound like it is saying that disciplined pratice is not helpful, i find it reassuring to hear milarepa saying:

This life you have is full of potential,
Guard your ethics like your own eyes.

putting meditation into its traditional place in the threefold path, and the paramitas

'If you care about world hunger, eat less meat...'

quoted from george monbiot in today's guardian. the full article can be read here.

'Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people...

But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat...

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet produced by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half Britain's current total). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks...

The Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible...'

a system of training

6th century mosaic, San Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. 

a good order weekend at wymondham college, marking the fortieth birthday of the order.

a series of talks looked at the order, our practices, our relation with the world around us and the buddhist world.

my talk was on ‘a system of training’, looks at the system of practices current in the western buddhist order, how they relate to going for refuge, and, through the relationship to the five spiritual faculties, how the system of practice relates to the the nature of the awakening mind itself

along with the other talks from the weekend it should be available for download soon from FreeBudhistAudio. meantime it's available to listen to online here.

the talk referred to a seminar extract by the ven sangharakshita, where he describes what he calls the '5 great stages of the spiritual life'. a numberof people have asked me for the reference, and you can read the full text of that seminar extract here.

meantime, here is bhante summing up the significance of the five great stages:

So what does this mean? It means that everyday
one has got five things to practice as best you can.
i
one has too keep up the effort to be mindful and aware and to be as integrated as possible;
ii
one remains in as positive a mental state as one possibly can;
iii
one does not loose sight of one's ultimate goal at any time;
iv
one tries to apply at every level whatever you've realised or discovered on the highest level of your being;
v
and you do your best for other people, you do what you can to help people.

This is your spiritual life and this is your spiritual practice. These are the things with which you are basically concerned... 

On the practical side, this is all that you really need or all that you really need to think in terms of. What so ever has been said by all the different Buddhist teachers in the course of several hundred years of development is all really contained in this in principle.... this is essentially, this is basically what it is all about.

You can also think of these if you like in terms of the Five Spiritual faculties which are both successive and linear. the first stage correspond to the faculty of mindfulness. The second corresponds to the faculty of faith. The third corresponds to the faculty of wisdom. Fourth to the faculty of meditation. The fifth to the faculty of virya.

So if you just try to do these five things all the time you can forget all about making progress or where exactly you are along the path. One just intensifies one's effort in those five directions as it were, all the time. One simply can't go wrong then, (pause).
Now is that reasonably clear?

meditation seems to work

...according to the guardian:

Neuroscientist Shanida Nataraja has proved meditation does more than clear your head, it can put both halves of your brain to work, improving your concentration, memory and decision-making. She tells Andy Darling how it works here.

whitehall and westminster

statues outside westminster abbey, of 'modern martyrs' including dietrich bonhoeffer, martin luther king and george romero.  click to enlarge.

inclusion and exclusion

a few days in london.  

first of all assisting vajrasara, who was leading two days of nvc training at the british government's department of international development.  the training was organised by zoe stevens, who works with dfid, and had 'a particular emphasis on issues around inclusion /exclusion'. 

it was instructive and moving seeing this inclusive approach to communication being brought to people with a direct experience of being excluded, whether through disability, like the two women on the training who were deaf, or in their professional work, like the women who worked with prisoners or with communities excluded from access to water. 

and moving to see it being hosted by the government.  as we reflected on issues of social inclusion, we could look around at the rooms we were in, part of the old colonial office, or we could look through the window, as liveried footmen drove a carriage to buckingham palace, just across the road.

it's striking how far the british 'establishment' is willing to engage with ideas that would once have seemed pretty fringe. the day after the training i attended a meeting of the faith communities forum, one of the forums that brings british faith communities together, and brings them into dialogue with the government. 

social cohesion

the british government seem to believe that faith communities can play a significant part in 'social cohesion', and are engaging in a dialogue and consultation at a level that is becoming hard to sustain for some of the smaller communities. one of the urgent reasons for this is explained in the forthcoming government paper on Preventing Violent Extremism. 

but the consultation extends to more mundane matters. this meeting touched on changes to british charity law, the report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion and the government's review on citizenship, the faith strand of the new commission for equality and human rights. more topically, members of the meeting from the church of england and the association of muslim scholars commented on the archbishop of canterbury's recent remarks on sharia law (both felt the archbishop had been misrepresented). 

blasphemy

the government also intends to abolish the anachronisitic blasphemy law. The archbishop , dr rowan williams, has said that the church of england now  “would not resist repeal” of the laws given their “awkward and not very workable character”.

these discussions were a good segue into the afternoons activities, a visit to the general synod of the church of england. we were hosted over lunch by a number of the church's bishops, from the dignified and formal, to the very informal bishop of willesden, in tapestry waistcoat and jeans  worn with his episcopal purple shirt.

the synod's afternoon discussion was a well informed and very liberal debate opposing the goverment's intention to extend the period of 'detention without charge'. the speakers overwhelmingly opposed the motion, and the briefing document produced by the church's policy unit would not have been out of place in the guardian, though perhaps it had rather more biblical quotes.

seeing the future

loch lubnaig, near dhanakosa. click to enlarge

this is a paper I prepared for the fwbo chairs at their meeting at dhanakosa this january.
it outlines the history of madhyamaloka, and gives some idea of the proposed new sangharakshita library. I thought it might be of wider interest.

In March 06, fwbo Central recruited some new trustees; Parami, Ratnadharini and Ratnagosha joined Cittapala, Srimala, Sona and me. After the organisational changes of the last few years, one of the first things the new trustees had to do (after trying to balance the books) was to clarify the responsibilities of fwbo Central, and the role of Madhyamaloka in the future. Fwbo Central is essentially the organisational structure for the Madhyamaloka ‘project’. To plan the future, we realised that first we needed to understand our past: how Madhyamaloka had started, and what its intentions had been. That history lesson was instructive. It will be easier to understand our plans if I recap some of the history first.

Madhyamaloka
In 1993, Bhante appointed a group of thirteen senior order members, who made up the Preceptor’s College and Council. They had a wide range of responsibilities, which can perhaps be understood most simply as Bhante handing on his responsibilities to this group, to create a structure that would replace his distinctive role. A key element in Bhante's initial vision was that College and Council members would deepen their connection by living together. In 1995 Madhyamaloka was purchased. Along with its sister community in Park Hill, it brought a core group of public preceptors and college council members into day to day contact with Bhante. It provided Bhante with a home, and the College and Council with a meeting place. It housed the Order Office, the Order convenors, the overall Mitra convenors, Bhante’s library and archive, the Order library, and later became home to the Communications and Liaison offices.

Phase 2
From early in the project, a second phase to Madhyamaloka was planned: a library and ‘vihara’. This would be a home for Bhante’s archive, and would house a residential community with a more ‘spiritual’ emphasis on practice and teaching, and less on organisation. The closest we got to purchasing a property was around 2001/2, when we made an offer on a farm in the Welsh borders, which would have had space for Bhante and his library, and a men’s and a women’s community. The offer was declined, and we decided it was too big a financial stretch at that time to pursue this.

The college, the order and the movement.
In 2000 Bhante handed the last of his formal responsibilities to the preceptors’ college and council. Subhuti, as chairman, began a review of the College’s role. This resulted in the important clarifications of responsibility in 2003, put most succinctly as: ‘the order runs the order; the movement runs the movement’. This left the primary responsibilities of the college defined more clearly as training for ordination, the support of new order members after ordination, and training the growing number of preceptors. Madhyamaloka began to shed some of it’s movement focussed responsibilities. In particular, the College Council was dissolved, and responsibility for the appointment of presidents was passed over to the centres.

We suggested at the time that these changes, re-emphasising the autonomy of the Order, Centres and the College, would need to be balanced by other factors that supported unity, in our organisation and in our shared practice. For example, it was intended to create a meeting to bring the College, the movement and the order into dialogue with each other. In the atmosphere of the last few years, it was easy to decentralise; it was harder to take initiatives that supported coherence. I think we’re only now emerging from this period, and the rebuilding of coherence is an unfinished part of the changes set in motion in 03.

Tasks for the future
With the clarification of the College’s role, fwbo Central let go of its movement related responsibilities. At the same time, many of the first generation of residents moved on. However after the March 06 review, it seemed that some main responsibilities remained the same. We saw these as our distincitve responsibilities:

to support the work of the Preceptors College.

We had a responsibility for the unity and coherence of the movement, particularly to make sure that it was rooted in, and an expression of, Bhante’s approach to the Dharma.

We felt a strong responsibility to Bhante:
to house him, and for the ‘lineage’ of his teachings: to help ‘preserve, communicate and extend’ Bhante’s teaching.

Arising from those, we had some more specific tasks:

To house a community of experienced order members.
We saw this as integral to the initial vision of Madhyamaloka, ‘the coincidence of wills’ made possible by that intense engagement with each other.

To build the Sangharakshita Library.
Bhante had specifically asked us to set up the library, and had given us £600,000 specifically to do that.

From this discussion, some clear next steps began to emerge.

The Library and Vihara
Given that we must use those funds to build the library, we want to make sure that we do it in a way that is as useful as possible to the movement. Since we will have an expensive building, let’s use it as much as we can.

The most ambitious next step is a proposal to build the library and an associated ‘vihara’ This is close to the original intention for Madhyamaloka to have more of a practice and teaching role than an organisational one.

The library, as Bhante explained in a recent session with the chairs at Madhyamaloka is something that he thinks is important, and we want to honour his wish. The library project itself is modest; a home primarily for Bhante’s archives, for his books and artefacts. Bhante has given us funds specifically for this.

So, as well as housing the library, we are planning a facility that will have space for study, teaching, meditation and accommodation. This brings us back to the plan for the ‘vihara’.

One of the most direct and effective ways for us to build coherence is for our most experienced practitioners to do more Dharma teaching, We intend to develop a teaching programme over the next few years, concentrating on Bhante’s distinctive approach to the Dharma, and particularly aimed at order members. The Preceptors College – a group of senior order members, who have worked closely with Bhante and who have his confidence, who are in close communication with him, with each other and with the people they’ve ordained – can make a distinctive contribution to that. We will work closely with Dharmapala College, and we will also use the facility to develop the training of Preceptors, who are one of the most important influences on the next generation of the order.

Because of the library’s association with Bhante, we want it to be accessible to both wings of the movement, which means that it will not fit easily into the existing, single sex retreat centres. So we are proposing a new building near Madhyamaloka, which would be accessible in those ways. Mokshapriya has begun preparatory work on this project. The new building would, incidentally, be a good investment, and would significantly increase the value of the assets.

Other tasks
The library would fulfill a number of the core tasks of fwbo Central. It directly lets us house Bhante, his archive, and a community engaged with the project. It gives us another significant way to ‘preserve, extend and communicate’ Bhante’s teaching, which is one of the most important ways the College can contribute to the ‘unity and coherence’ of the movement. (We are also proposing that we set up some of the forums for discussion planned in 2003, bringing the college, the movement and the order into more effective dialogue, another way to support unity and coherence).

Some speculation for the future
In some ways Birmingham is not ideal for what we’re trying to do. A more rural setting would be better for meditation, and we have at least speculated about moving from Birmingham to the country. We’ve speculated about a facility that would include a teaching centre and the library, one that could grow to include a wide range of order and movement activities, including big retreats and the Order Conventions. It is also likely that in future the library will have a symbolic role, and it would be good to see the library as part of something that would be widely used by the movement.

However, for the time being, Bhante wants to stay where he is, and perhaps in other ways the time is not ripe for such a development. A new library building in Birmingham, and a teaching syllabus, based on Bhante and aimed at the order, seem like doable next steps.