Faithful Observer
With the reprint of his first two memoirs as The Rainbow Road, Sangharakshita talks to Viryadevi about his life and his writing.
A warm, sleepy afternoon. Blackbirds singing among the bright leaves of early summer and the slow quietness of a Birmingham suburb. In a room full of books and Buddha images, Sangharakshita seems to fit the English setting perfectly. His speech is slow and precise, his movements deliberate, his demeanour courteous. But there is something else: a vigorous youthful energy, a current in the deep sea, something unusual un-placeable and certainly un-English.
This was the first time I had seen Sangharakshita since his tour of America and New Zealand, when he had spent none months visiting Buddhist centres and communities of the FWBO, the Buddhist movement he founded in 1967. he has also written numerous books on Buddhism.
On this occasion I wanted to talk to him about the volume of his memoirs that is about to be published. It was first brought out in two parts, Learning to Walk, and The Thousand-Petalled Lotus. Now the two have been brought together into one volume, as Sangharakshita originally intended, with the restoration of a few cut passages and a new title: The Rainbow Road.The title is a reference to perhaps the most decisive moment of Sangharakshita’s early years. At the time of our departure it was raining, but as in the course of our descent, we emerged from the clouds into the bright sunshine below, we saw arching the road at intervals of a few dozen yards, not only single but double and triple rainbows. Every time we turned a bend we found more rainbows waiting for us. We passed through them as though through the multi-coloured arcades of some celestial palace. Against the background of bright sunshine, jewel-like glittering raindrops, and hills of the freshest and most vivid green, this plethora of delicate seven-hued bows seemed like the epiphany of another world.
This was the rainbow road along which, in 1947, a generation earlier than the exodus to the East of the hippy era, Sangharakshita went forth into he homeless life of a wandering Buddhist monk.
When we spoke, Sangharakshita was careful to refer to The Rainbow Road as a volume of memoirs rather than autobiography. Autobiography suggests something complete and comprehensive, giving a full account of one’s life and trying to see an overall pattern. But my life has been so complex that such an account would be quite beyond my literary capacity.
The Rainbow Road, however, bears witness to this complexity. The early chapters describe Sangahrakshita’s childhood in a pre-war London that now seems impossibly far away, a city of horse-drawn carriages and gas-lit streets. The account is a collage of the ordinary and the extraordinary: the little boy’s world of birthday parties, comics, dressing-up, tears before bedtime, and the portrait of a swiftly emerging individual. Confined to bed for two years with a suspected heart complaint, and with only a many-volumed encyclopaedia for company, he plunged into a world of artistic, philosophical and religious discovery. Poetry, he says went through me like a spear
. Music induced mystical experiences and the chrysanthemums in the garden gave him one of the major emotional experiences of [his] life
.
But this sensitivity did not stop Sangharakshita from finding a job as soon as he could (his first was in a coal merchants’ office). He did not live in a dream of poetry and art; his awareness made him also a sharp and humorous observer of people — a quality that makes his memoirs at times very funny. In his adolescence, as well as falling in love more than once, Sangharakshita developed a love of truth — explored though thousands of books on the philosophy and religions of many cultures — which matched his love of beauty. Reading Isis Unveiled at the age of 14 proved to him that he was not a Christian. Then, happening upon one of the most profound of Buddhist scriptures, the Diamond Sutra, he discovered he was a Buddhist, and the course of the rest of his life was set.
But how could one be a Buddhist in 1940s London? Again there is an intriguing mixture of the ordinary and the completely extraordinary. Mystical experiences happened to Sangharakshita as he was walking along the street. He had precognitions, but they showed him nothing more momentous than what was about to happen in the office where he worked. His first move towards other Buddhists was to attend the London Buddhist Society; Usually not more than a dozen people were present,
he says. One afternoon an air-raid warning sounded while we were meditating. But either out of Buddhist equanimity or British phlegm we continued to meditate, not stirring even when, a few minutes later, the windows rattled with the blast of an explosion.
This was about the full extent of Buddhist activity in Britain at that time. But strangely enough, despite his history of ill-health, the young Buddhist was declared fit for army service and posted to — of all places — India. Thus it was that once the war was over, he set out along a road edged with rainbows in search of a living Buddhist tradition. It seems entirely appropriate that this decisive moment of truth seems also to have been one of such beauty. One of the great themes of Sangharakshita’s life is the realisation that beauty and truth are both essential to spiritual life.
In The Rainbow Road we see the quick observation of the boy become the discriminating awareness that is crucial; to an authentic spiritual life. There were few people to whom he could turn for advice. But Sangharakshita’s self-reliance gave him the ability to think for himself. He read and thought incessantly, going back to first principles, trying to work out what Buddhism really was. As he encountered gurus and sages, his perceptiveness and sense of irony enabled him to see through empty formalism and to recognise spiritual authenticity when he met it. His quest for ordination proved to be something of an ordeal but was eventually fulfilled in 1949 at Kusinara (site of the Buddha’s death), where he was ordained as a novice and given the name Sangharakshita.
The story of Sangharakshita’s friendship with the companion of his wandering years is by turning moving, funny and alarming. Buddharakshita is impressively zealous in his attempts to embrace the spiritual life, but he also has a terrible temper. Sangharakshita describes how a difference of opinion while bathing in a river nearly ended in a drowning. He had had enough of me, he hissed, his eyes bloodshot with rage. Now he was going to kill me. Looking at him, I knew that he meant it. For the first time in my life I was actually face to face with death. Strange to say, though I was frightened, I had no intention whatever of withdrawing the offending remark. On the contrary, I became aware of the existence within me of a rock-bottom of obstinacy that made it utterly impossible for me to retract or disown any opinion which I genuinely believed to be true, even to save my life.
Sangharakshita also describes a number of inner experiences, including a vision of the Buddha Amitabha, which convinced him it was time to seek ordination: The colour of the Buddha was a deep, rich, luminous red, like that of rubies, though at the same time soft and glowing, like the light of the setting sun. How long the experience lasted I do not know, for I seemed to be out of time as well as out of the body; but I saw the Buddha as clearly as I had ever seen anything under the ordinary circumstances of my life, indeed far more clearly and vividly.
While he is willing to describe both visionary experiences and personal struggles, Sangharakshita’s focus tends to be on people and places rather than on his own psychology: I am happy writing about things I have seen and observed,
he says, I am also happy to speak, even if it isn’t always possible to write, about striking inner experiences. But I am not happy to write about minor psychological ups and downs. I did have some of those in the past, but I never took too much notice of them. One doesn’t talk about the state of one’s bowels every day. Equally one’s mental states go up and down within a certain range, but there is no need to make them the main focus of one’s interest and bore one’s friends with descriptions of what one is experiencing.
At the end of The Rainbow Road, having travelled to the Himalayan border town of Kalimpong with his teacher, the Pali scholar Jagdish Kashyap, Sangharakshita is simply left there, and urged to stay here and work for the good of Buddhism
. And this is what, in the subsequent volumes of memoirs, Facing Mount Kanchenjunga and In the Sign of the Golden Wheel, we find him doing. Meetings with the most influential Buddhists of his generation and discoveries of the riches of the Tibetan tradition are juxtaposed with struggles to find funds and premises for his projects. Indeed Sangharakshita’s wish to share these experiences is one of his motivations for writing these memoirs.
Some people have experienced intense suffering for years on end. I have never had to face anything of that sort. None the less, in the course of my Buddhist life, I have had certain difficulties to face, and I have written about them as part of the story. Perhaps some people will find it consoling that they are not the only ones who have had difficulties. It isn’t as though as a monk in India I was leading a very easy, leisurely life, as of course many monks in the East do.
Now that Sangharakshita has handed on responsibility for the Buddhist movement he founded, he is planning to spend his time writing. He is 72 this year, and time may be short, but he wants tot write at least two more volumes of memoirs, including one covering the years after his return to Britain in the 1960s. But is this the best use of the remaining time of such an experienced Dharma teacher? Why not write more about Buddhism? Sangharakshita’s response is characteristically frank.
The assumption is that it is easy to write Dharma books. But the more you come to know about the Dharma, and the more deeply you experience it, the more you realise how completely beyond you it is. It is very difficult indeed to write about it, in fact in a sense, ultimately impossible. When I knew less I could write more. Now that I know more, hopefully, I feel less able to write. In comparison, writing memoirs is quite easy. So, since I find the act of writing of some spiritual value and since I do not see myself as a creative writer in the strict sense, I follow a middle way and write memoirs. I see writing as a spiritual discipline because when you write you are striving for clarity and truthfulness. Also you can sometimes understand your past self in retrospect better than you understood yourself at the time. There is an accession of self-knowledge.
Whatever value they may have for the writer, the autobiographical writings of a Buddhist practitioner are of great value to other Buddhists, and such writings have a special place in Buddhist tradition. However sublime the example of the Buddha, however profound his teachings, Buddhism would have died with him if it were not for the men and women who have continued to follow the Buddhist path through the centuries. Buddhism’s in the life and in the heart
, writes Sangharakshita in one of his poems. Perhaps the lives of 20th-century Buddhists are especially important to us because they demonstrate that spiritual progress is possible even here, even now. Among such accounts The Rainbow Road, which combines passion, lyricism, integrity and a well-honed sense of the ridiculous, should take a special place.
This article was originally published in Dharma Life magazine, summer 1997.