History Of My Going For Refuge

The History of My Going for Refuge Reflections on the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Western Buddhist Order Sangharakshita Originally published by Windhorse Publications ISBN 9780 904766 33 2 © Sangharakshita, 1988 Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Wei Lang 3. U Thittila and Pansil 4. Going Forth 5. Sramanera Ordination 6. Bhikshu Ordination 7. ‘Taking Refuge in the Buddha’ 8. A Survey of Buddhism 9. Dhardo Rimpoche and The Path of the Buddha 10. Ambedkar and the ex-Untouchables 11. More Light from Tibetan Buddhism 12. The Three Jewels and Other Writings 13. Bodhisattva Ordination 14. Light from Vatican II 15. ‘The Meaning of Conversion in Buddhism’ 16. Founding the Western Buddhist Order 17. The Wider Context 18. Levels of Going for Refuge 19. Going for Refuge Old and New 20. Upasaka into Dharmachari 21. Ambedkar and Going for Refuge 22. Conclusion Notes Foreword A few years ago I had the good fortune to accompany Sangharakshita as he made a lecture tour of Central India. Our hosts in the thirty and more towns we visited were almost entirely ‘ex-Untouchable’ Buddhist followers of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, drawn from India’s poorest, most disadvantaged classes. The crowds of thousands who attended each talk were welcoming and attentive in the extreme, but the daily journeys demanded by our schedule were long and arduous, the travel and accommodation arrangements – often hastily arranged – very basic. In Ahmedabad, Sangharakshita contracted a fever and to his obvious regret was obliged to brief an alternative speaker and dispatch his support party to the evening’s venue. Suffering myself from a mild stomach disorder, I also remained behind. The two of us spent most of the evening in our own rooms, reading our books and nursing our particular ailments. However, when I took Sangharakshita a bedtime drink, an easy conversation developed between us, during the course of which I urged him to talk a little about the time when he first ‘discovered’ himself to be a Buddhist – the occasion evoked in the second section of this History. Having read – having even written – a few of the short biographies that prefaced his early books, I was already familiar with the outlines of this experience, and with the by now ‘stock’ formula: ‘At the age of 16 he discovered that he was a Buddhist – and that he had always been one,’ which was generally, if enigmatically, used to convey its import. But as Sangharakshita calmly reminisced between sips of warm milk, I began to understand that the experience had been more powerful, more thoroughgoing and unfathomable, than I had yet realized. I was to be granted the further realization that Sangharakshita himself sometimes found the experience baffling. He almost chuckled as he talked of the proverbial flash in which a young lad, in pre-war England, had sustained a clear and exact vision of the metaphysical core of the Buddha’s teaching. Without a shadow of doubt – for so it seemed – he had seen and felt in his own core exactly what the teachings of Buddhism were fundamentally about. ‘But what is most surprising,’ he continued, ‘Is that none of my subsequent spiritual practice, none of my work as a scholar or as a teacher, in fact none of my experience of Buddhism over the past forty years, has made me feel the need to revise or modify that original insight.’ He cocked his head pensively as a new thought occurred to him: ‘I do realize that that is quite a claim to make!’ To see, in a flash, to the Transcendental heart of Buddhism is one thing: to understand, unfold, and embody it quite another. This latte