Transformation of Self and World in
Sangharakshita’s approach to Engaged Buddhism

SEM, Bangkok 07.01.2012

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Ajahn Sulak, Venerables, Mr. Sirisi, brothers and sisters,

It is a great honour for me to give Spirit in Education Movement lecture for 2012, and I am delighted to be asked to give it on my teacher, Sangharakshita, and his contribution to socially-engaged Buddhism.  However I think Sangharakshita would say that all Buddhism is implicitly engaged. He often quotes the Buddha’s words to his enlightened disciples at the end of the first rainy season retreat, Bahujan Hitaya, Bahujan Sukhaya. Born in the UK, Sangharakshita went to India in the army in 1944 at the age of 19, already a Buddhist. He became a bhikkhu and continued to live in India for next 20 years. During that period he became closely associated with Dr. Ambedkar and conversion movement of so-called Untouchables to Buddhism. He became known as Buddhist scholar, meditator, poet, writer, and was very well grounded in western philosophy, literature, history and the arts. After returning to the UK in the mid 1960’s he developed a new Buddhist movement, the Triratna Buddhist Community (until recently known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order), which now has centres throughout the world. He has also made a significant contribution to the revival of Buddhism in India, especially among Dr. Ambedkar’s followers.

I was ordained by him in London in 1974, that is I took three refuges and 10 precepts of skilful action from him, becoming a member of the non-monastic Triratna Buddhist Order (then known as the Western Buddhist Order), which is the heart of the Triratna Buddhist Community. A few years later he encouraged me to live and work in India, among the new converts to Buddhism, where I have been ever since. I cannot do justice to all the aspects of Sangharakshita’s contribution to engaged Buddhism, and so I am going to approach the subject through my own experience of trying to live the Dhamma life, and work for the Dhamma under his guidance.

In the early 1970’s there were very few Buddhist teachers in the UK, and very few books on Buddhism, which was usually presented in dry and over intellectual manner. Sangharakshita was different. He presented the Dhamma in ways that engaged us in the west at that time, and inspired us to practice.

I will give one or two examples to give you an idea of what I mean. He spoke of the path of the Dhamma in terms of the Higher Evolution. The Lower Evolution, he said, consisted of the biological forces that had brought us to the human state. This was the evolution of the group, the species. As humans we had the capacity to evolve further, through the stage of stream entry, the Sotapanna, (he suggests all people can reach stream entry in this lifetime if they make sufficient effort), to the state of Buddhahood. The Higher Evolution was not the work of the group, but had to be undertaken individually.

Evolution is measured in terms of consciousness. The consciousness of animals is largely determined by their sense experience. If a cat sees a mouse, what does it do? It has to run after the mouse; it cannot do otherwise. Humans have the capacity of awareness, enabling them to reflect on their experience, and chose how to act. The stream entrant goes further. While humans can consciously decide to act unskilfully, the stream entrant cannot sink back to grossly unskilful states of consciousness.

He talked of reactive and creative mind. Reactive mind just re-acts to stimuli, rather like animals. Reactive states are unaware or blind, mechanical, like putting a coin in slot machine, and not free in that they are largely determined by sense experiences.  This mind is easily exploited; advertisers and politicians the world over are experts at manipulating it. It is represented in the Buddhist tradition by the wheel of life or the 12 cyclical nidanas starting with ignorance and ending with old age and death.

The creative mind, on the contrary, uses experiences as opportunities to evolve further. To put it simply, unpleasant experiences are opportunities to cultivate patience or love, rather than react with hatred.  Creative states are skilful mental states, and they are progressive. Each paves the way for the cultivation of even more skilful states. The creative mind is symbolised by a spiral, and is illustrated by the teaching of the  twelve positive nidanas, starting with suffering and faith and spiralling up to knowledge of the destruction of the asavas.

Sangharakshita seemed at first to present the Dhamma as a method of personal development and that is what most of us were interested in at the time. But within those teachings were the seeds of another dimension of the Dhamma, the dimension of engaged Buddhism. The precepts are one of the most basic practices. The first precept is usually interpreted as not killing other beings. If one does not personally kill, presumably one is an “OK” Buddhist. Sangharakshita showed us that practicing the first precept meant avoiding any violence whatsoever. It meant not imposing ourselves on others in any way, or negating others by asserting our own ego. This, he said, was operating according to the power mode. The practice of this precept is not only concerned with our immediate actions but also with the implications of our actions. We need, for example, to look at eating meat (and thus creating a demand for killing living beings), abortion, how we treat the environment, and the production of arms and especially nuclear weapons.

He showed us that to be sure we were practicing this precept we had to cultivate the opposite. To practice the first precept, he said, meant cultivating a cherishing, protecting, maturing love, which has the same effect on human beings as the sun has on plants. The second meant practicing generosity.  This principle was the love mode and ran through all precepts. Far from being only a matter of restraint, ethical practice meant consciously cultivating the positive counterparts of the precepts. In the Triratna Buddhist Community, we always follow the chanting of the traditional negative rendering of precepts in Pali, with a recitation of the positive counterparts in the local language.

At that time in west many people thought that Buddhism had nothing to do with the emotions but rather meant cutting off from them. Sangharakshita’s view was very different. He translated the second stage of Noble Eight Fold Path, Samma Sankalpa, not as it was usually as Right Aspiration, but as the much stronger Perfect Emotion. The Eight Fold Path consists firstly of the Path of Vision, represented by Samma Ditthi, and secondly by the Path of Transformation, made up of the other seven stages of the Eightfold Path, representing the working out in practice of Vision. By using the term Perfect Emotion for the first stage of Path of Transformation, Sangharakshita made it clear that there was no spiritual progress without emotional development.

The most basic positive emotion is metta, which is cultivated through the Metta Bhavana meditation practice. Sangharakshita gave as much importance to this practice as the more common Anapanasati, or Mindfulness of Breathing. At the end of the Metta Bhavana practice we try to cultivate metta equally to ourselves, our friend, a neutral person and an enemy. Buddhaghosha, the compiler of the Vishuddhi Magga, describes this stage very well. If you and the other three people were held up on the road by robbers, who wanted the life of one of the four, your feelings would be so strong, and yet equal for each, that you would not be able to decide, which life to sacrifice. Through the Metta Bhavana we began to see that personal development had an altruistic dimension.

Metta between those practicing the Dhamma is spiritual friendship, or Kalyana Mitrata, about which Sangharakshita often referred to the Buddha’s teaching to Ananda.  In a state of inspiration, Ananda told the Buddha that he thought Kalyana Mitrata was half of the spiritual life. The Buddha corrected him saying that it was not half the spiritual life but the whole of it. In other words if we have Kalyana Mitrata, we have the most important condition to enable us to work towards Enlightenment. And Kalyana Mitrata is the heart of Sangha about which I will say a little more later (by Sangha I mean the spiritual community of those trying to practice the Dhamma together, whether leading a celibate life or not).

Besides the more direct Dhamma practices Sangharakshita also talked of need to develop conditions that supported our practice, especially as there was no supportive Buddhist culture in the west. The two areas of life that take most of our time and energy are home and work. Family members and work mates were not always sympathetic, and sometimes even antagonistic to our attempts to practice the Dhamma. This made it very difficult for us. Work often involved unskilful or stressful activity. Some of us started residential single sex communities, to enable practitioners to live together and support each other. And we explored the Buddha’s teaching on Right Livelihood in the Noble Eight Fold Path. Sangharakshita showed us that it meant bringing whole economic side of life into line with the Dhamma. Some of us started right livelihood businesses.

These were in accordance with the precepts; they involved no harm to other living beings, no exploitation or dishonesty, and where possible they made a positive contribution to the world. They were organised on the basis of team work, which encouraged all to feel responsible, and avoided the usual employer/employee attitudes. There was another important aspect to this work. Any surplus income was donated for Dhamma activities. This was significant because most people in the west did not share our ideals, as a result of which we received very little dana to develop Buddhist activities. Sangharakshita felt that this was an important development for Buddhism, as reliance on dana in the East had led to compromising Buddhist principles.

By 1975 we had established a few communities and right livelihood businesses. All were very small but they were enough to show us that commitment to the spiritual life meant creating institutions that were supportive of our practice. We began to see that to transform ourselves had social implications. Sangharakshita was helping us to understand and clarify Buddhist principles through his lectures, seminars and personal communication, all the time extending our understanding of Going For Refuge. In 1975

he gave a lecture on the Sangha as the nucleus of the new society. This implied that Sangha was much more than a context for personal practice. It set an example to others of a community trying to live at a higher level of consciousness. Its members taught the Dhamma to the wider society, some of whom would eventually go for refuge, crossing the bridge to join the Sangha, while some others, who did not want to take that step, would remain receptive to the Sangha and support it. The ultimate aim of Sangha was nothing less than to transform society, create a Dhammarajya or a Buddha Land.

It was his 1976 lecture series on “The Transformation of Self and World in the Sutra of Golden Light” that brought home to me the real fullness of the Buddhist vision. I understood, as if for the first time, that one could only transform one’s self by working on transforming the world, and equally that one could only work on transforming the world by working on one’s self. The two could not be separate. The Dhamma stands for nothing less than creating a society in which all its aspects, economic, cultural, moral, political, support the Buddhist vision, and encourage people to live their lives accordingly. This teaching, as much as any other, has guided my life since then.

A year after Sangharakshita gave these lectures I went to India to visit the Buddhist Holy places and study yoga in Pune. The train journey from Calcutta to Pune was well over 30 hours and so I decided to stop half way in Nagpur, right in the centre of India. Sangharakshita had some friends there whom he suggested I could meet. Encouraged by him I had taken the Anagarika vow for the pilgrimage, and was wearing a yellow robe, as had Anagarika Dhammapala, the founder of the Maha Bodhi Society. I found Nagpur in a state of celebration, and, much to my surprise was greeted by many with the respect traditionally given to a Buddhist monk. I had arrived un-knowingly on the 21^st anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism along with 500,000 followers from the Dalit or formerly Untouchable communities (I use the popular word Dalit, although the official term these days is Scheduled Castes), and at the very place.

Dr. Ambedkar was born in 1891, as an untouchable with all the immense disadvantages that entailed.  He became one of the very first Untouchables in the whole of India to complete a school education, a considerable feat considering Untouchables make up one sixth of the population. Helped by progressive rulers, he completed his education in USA and UK, becoming one of the most highly educated Indians of the time. He came back to India and could not get a job in government service as no one would work with him as  he was an untouchable. In the course of an exceptionally brilliant career he brought about many reforms in law, economics, education, labour and social welfare. He became the first Law Minister of Independent India and was mainly responsible for drafting the new constitution. Despite this he was convinced that external reforms were not enough. Real progress would only take place if the victims of the caste system changed their own minds.

This eventually brought him to Buddhism. In a conference on Buddhism and Communism in Kathmandu in November 1956, he said, “The greatest thing that the Buddha has done is to tell the world that the world cannot be reformed except by the reformation of the mind of man, and the mind of the world.” That Buddhism was at the heart of his social revolution, he made even clearer when he said that he derived his most important values of “liberty, equality, and fraternity. …from the teachings of my master, the Buddha.” He could have converted to a more assertive religion but given India’s recent history, this may well have turned India into a blood bath. He could have become an extreme and violent Communist, like the present day Naxalites in India. If he had done so, millions would have followed him but with terrible consequences. The Buddha was for him the Prince of Peace. Despite all he had accomplished for India and the Untouchables, it was his conversion to Buddhism that gave him the greatest satisfaction in his life. This, I hope, gives an idea of significance of his conversion to Buddhism, and of Nagpur, the centre of his Dhamma Revolution. I was asked to speak to gathering of half a million people, and during the 36 hours I spent there, also talked to many people personally. In those hours I entered a new world, a world of millions of the most oppressed people desperate to transform their lives and their society through the Dhamma. I found myself in a situation in which the two fold transformation of self and world seemed a real possibility;

In that short period I met many people who remembered Sangharakshita with the deepest gratitude. Dr. Ambedkar had died just six weeks after his conversion on 6^th Dec 1956. By coincidence Sangharakshita had arrived in Nagpur on that very day. He describes his experience very vividly in “Ambedkar and Buddhism”. At the condolence ceremony attended by 200,000 people, he was the only person who could speak all the others being overcome by tears. In the next four days he spoke in 34 localities, and it was said that he saved Nagpur for Buddhism. Until he returned to London in 1964, he spent months every winter, touring towns and villages in central India, helping the converts understand their new religion. One politician, now deceased, always had tears in his eyes whenever he spoke of Sangharakshita. “He came to our villages, lived in our homes, and ate our food. No one had done that before (because they were untouchable) and he was a monk and a foreigner! And he taught the Dhamma in a way all could understand.”

After Nagpur I spent two months in Pune, where Sangharakshita had spent more time than anywhere else among the followers of Dr. Ambedkar. I took classes, gave lectures and led a retreat. I found Sangharakshita’s old disciples so grateful to be in contact with him again, even though indirectly through me. It seemed to me that since he had left India no one had taught the Dhamma as he had. Generally I found that there was considerable despair about the future of Buddhism. People desperately wanted to make a success of their new religion, but the conversion movement had been decimated by politicians who

did not have Dr. Ambedkar’s vision. It had been largely ignored by the Buddhist world -  almost no foreign Buddhists had come to India to help. And the new Buddhists were amongst the most socially deprived and exploited people in India, No wonder there was despair. Sangharakshita asked me to start activities there, which I was more than ready to do.

We started as Sangharakshita had guided us in the west, with meditation and Dhamma study. At first we had very little in the way of financial support, and we held our first classes anywhere we could - in a disused railway carriage, the veranda of an unfinished police station, and such like. Retreats were especially important. We take a balanced approach including meditation, Dhamma study, puja and some silence. A few days out of the city, with nothing else to do but practice the Dhamma, meant that people could experience skilful mental states and engage with Dhamma in ways which were very difficult in their usually overcrowded living conditions and very demanding lives. The joyful mental states they experienced gave them a very strong faith in the Dhamma, and from their own direct experience. They could understand, often for the first time, why Dr. Ambedkar could say at the time of his conversion, “Now I have taken a new life”. We also conducted many lecture tours in villages. Every single village in the state of  Maharashtra (population today approximately 100 million) had Buddhists. They make up about 8% of  the population of the State. That meant that in every village there were people who wanted to know to know about and were receptive to the Dhamma. Sangharakshita came out to India several times, during which he gave many valuable lectures, guiding us how to communicate the Dhamma in the situation.

We could not close our eyes to appalling conditions in which so many people lived. From the beginning Sangharakshita had urged us to start social projects. And he encouraged his disciples in the UK to start the charities Aid for India and Karuna Trust to raise funds for the social work. We started many hostels, for children who otherwise would have found it hard to get a school education. They are places where village children can stay while attending school in the town. We not only gave them food and supported their school education, but were able to give them positive psychological support, as all our wardens were practicing Buddhists. We also started a number of health and education community centres in the slums of Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur and other towns. All these activities provided right livelihood for those who worked in them, and we tried to run them much along the same lines as the right livelihood businesses were run in the west.

This work gave us the confidence to intervene socially in other ways. We were able to respond to two earthquakes, floods and the tsunami of 2006 with both relief and rehabilitation work. Dalits suffer enormous discrimination in these areas after natural calamities. We started responding to the horrific and very common atrocities on Buddhists and Dalits, developing an advocacy and support wing. We also started working with the Dalits and Tribal who suffer most from Untouchability and do the most degrading work. On whole those who have converted to Buddhism come from the most progressive Dalit communities, and they have tended to ignore others. Now we are working scavengers (people who clean up human excreta), people from the so-called thieving tribes, as well as others from extremely disadvantaged and degraded communities. This work has made significant difference to the lives of thousands of people. It has been inspiring for the followers of Dr. Ambedkar. Seeing practicing Buddhists working together to help the socially deprived has convinced them that Buddhist practice has social implications. Sangharakshita has always given us the greatest encouragement in this work. From his unique experience in India he is acutely aware of the suffering of the Dalit communities.

Until the early 1990’s the new Buddhist movement was centred in the State of  Maharashtra, and our Dhamma and social centres were  concentrated there. 1991 was the centenary of year of Dr. Ambedkar’s birth. This led to an explosion of interest in Dr.Ambedkar from Dalits all over India. Whereas there were just a few hundred thousand Buddhists in India in 1951, some estimate the number at 40 million today, and that number is growing day by day. There are over 200 million Dalits, most of whom would want to know about Dr. Ambedkar and why he converted to Buddhism. Besides this there are over 100 million Tribals, as well as many from the so-called Other Backward Classes (Sudras) who are also interested.

We did not have the capacity work all over India, but we did have the experience and capacity to train people. At our Nagaloka centre in Nagpur, we started a one year residential training programme in Dhamma and social action. In the last ten years over 650 young people from 22 different Indian states, and many, many Dalit castes have benefitted from this training. The students come from some of the most deprived and oppressed situations in India, often in a state of despair.  After a year of Dhamma practice most feel transformed, with a new vision of life, and the Dhamma tools to work on it. They develop the confidence and energy to share what they have learnt in their villages and towns. When they arrive they usually identify with their old Dalit caste, and see others from that perspective. This attitude has led to a crippling divisiveness which continues even after they have converted to Buddhism. After a few months of intensive Dhamma practice at Nagaloka they leave behind old identity and they relate to each other just as Buddhists, thus breaking down the age-old walls of caste. Out of these students we are beginning to develop a core of the most capable and dedicated who can take this work forward There are many differences between Buddhism in the west and in India. In the west most people come to the Dhamma through concern with themselves and their own states of mind. They have to be shown that they can only develop themselves by going beyond the self, and responding to the world. In India most come to the Dhamma because they want to understand Dr. Ambedkar’s conviction that it could change society. Most traditional Buddhists I met in the late 1970’s dismissed the new Indian Buddhists as only interested in social or political progress, with no genuine interest in the Dhamma; not surprisingly they could not work with them. On the contrary I experienced the conversion movement as a Dhamma gold mine, as a result of Sangharakshita’s teaching. His vision matched Dr.Ambedkar’s vision. Dhamma practice was not about oneself alone, but also about transforming the world. The two had to go together. Whether one started with self or world was secondary.

Another major difference was that whereas in the West there was no wider Buddhist society, in India millions of people wanted to be guided by Buddhist principles. In India, much more than the West, it seemed that the Sangha could really become the nucleus of a new society. Dr. Ambedkar’s understanding of Sangha was very similar to Sangharakshita’s. He called it an ideal or model community, which set an example to others how to live. Members of the Sangha, he said, would also work together for the benefit of others, just as we had discovered in the West.

Their approach to Sangha had other aspects in common. Dr. Ambedkar had considerable doubts about the monastic Sangha, and at one point said he would have Upasakas/Upasikas in his Sangha. In World Fellowship of Buddhists conference held in Burma in 1954, he suggested that suitable lay people with families be supported to teach the Dhamma. He, himself led 500,000 people in the conversion ceremony, something usually understood to be the role the work of the bhikkhu. Most people we come across are relieved that we present the Dhamma in a way that does not emphasise becoming a monk, but that encourages lay people to fully commit themselves to Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha.

I will mention one more similarity in their approaches. Like Sangharakshita, Dr.Ambedkar also emphasised a positive approach to the  precepts. He said, “Of these the most important one was the precept not to kill. Buddha took care to make it clear that the precept did not merely mean abstention from taking life. He insisted that the precept must be understood to mean positive sympathy, good will, and love for everything that breathes…..He gave the same positives and extended content to other precepts.” Dr. Ambedkar went even further, saying that the practice of morality was the practice of metta. That is extremely close to Sangharakshita talking of the practice of the precepts implying working in the love mode. These and other similarities in the approaches of the two men have made it possible for us to work in what otherwise are extremely different situations. They have enabled a remarkable conjunction between new Buddhists mostly from middle class backgrounds in the West and new Buddhists from some of the most oppressed societies in India. The possibilities of the Dhamma and Sangha transcending such differences was clearly something Dr. Ambedkar hoped would happen, and this has always been very dear to Sangharakshita’s heart.

There is much more I could have said about Sangharakshita and his contribution to socially-engaged Buddhism, but I hope I have given you a little taste, which you can follow up if you want (www.Sangharakshita.org).  I hope that you have understood something of the very special coincidence between his ideas and those of Dr. Ambedkar, especially those concerning transcending self and world. Personal Dhamma practice means developing altruistic attitudes, transcending barriers between people, and trying to influence the world. On the other hand if we want to influence the world, we have to strengthen our skilful states through the practice of the paramitas. I would like to welcome you all to visit us in India to see for yourselves the work guided by Sangharakshita within the context of Dr. Ambedkar’s momentous peaceful Dhamma revolution. It is still very young, and has potential to change social face of India.