A personal message from Sangharakshita Some of you will have had personal contact with me, others will have known me only through my books and recorded lectures, while yet others may not have heard of me before. I was born in London in1925, of working-class parents, and grew up largely self educated. After a year in the retail coal trade and two years in local government service, I was conscripted into the Army and sent, at the age of 19, to India. Having realised that I was a Buddhist three years earlier, after reading the Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Wei Lang (Hui Neng), I was delighted (unlike some of my fellow conscripts) to find myself in the land of the Buddha. After a year in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and a year in Singapore I returned to India, where I spent two years as a freelance ascetic, wandering from place to place, often on foot, living on alms, and meditating in caves and ashrams. During this period I met, and spent time with, a number of famous Hindu teachers, including Ananda Mayi, Swami Ramdas of Kanhangad, and Ramana Maharshi. Contact with Hinduism served to confirm and deepen my faith in Buddhism, and in 1949 I was ordained as a samanera or novice monk in Kusinara. In 1950 I became a bhiksu or fully ordained monk in Sarnath. Early in the same year the venerable Jagadish Kashyap, with whom I had been studying Pali, Abhidhamma, and logic in Benares, took me up to Kalimpong, a small town in the eastern Himalayas, and told me to stay there and work for the good of Buddhism. I stayed there for fourteen years, founded a Buddhist organization and a Buddhist magazine, and engaged in literary work, A Survey of Buddhism being published in 1957. I also had the good fortune to come in contact with a number of eminent Tibetan lamas. From some of them, including Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche, Dudjom Rimpoche, and Dilgo Khyentse Rimpoche, I received initiations and teachings. With my monastery in Kalimpong as a base, I went on regular preaching tours in the plains, visiting every State in India except Kashmir. From 1959 I was involved in the movement of mass conversion to Buddhism inaugurated by Dr. Ambedkar, the great leader of the former Untouchables, now known as Dalits. Together with meditation and literary work, my work among the New Buddhists was a major preoccupation for many years.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:11:08 +0000
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