Chapter Seven: Healing the Breach
The idea of forming a Sangha Sabha or Council of Buddhist Monks of Great Britain was not mine but Venerable Ratanasara’s, though it was I who called the meeting at which that body came into existence. Ratanasara was a Sinhalese monk of a type with which I had become familiar in India as a result of my connection with the Maha Bodhi Society. Portly, urbane, and voluble, and my senior in both years and ordination, he was working towards a Ph.D. in the University of London with a thesis on Pirivena Education in Ceylon. Though there was little of the monk about him except his robes (he wore a long overcoat over them when he went out,while his shaven head was concealed by a beret), and though he regarded meditation as frankly a waste of time, he was good-natured and sociable, and since I was used to his type, and did not expect much from him, spiritually speaking, I did not find it difficult to get on with him. We met at his lodgings in South Kensington, and at the Vihara, where on occasion he could be found sitting at our dining room table in the basement, puffing away at a big cigar, and jovially presiding, through clouds of tobacco smoke, over a meeting of his Buddhist Studies Trust.
One day he told me that being newly arrived in England I was in duty bound, as a monk, to report my arrival to the Sangha and seek their cooperation. Thinking this a good idea, I made arrangements for a meeting of the Sangha to be held at the Sinhalese Vihara in Chiswick on the next full moon day. Seven monks in all attended, the senior most being Chao Kun Rajasiddhimuni, a leading member of the Thai ecclesiastical establishment who later became Sangharaja or Supreme Patriarch. He had been in England since June or July, teaching ‘insight meditation’ and conferring with his embassy about the temple the Thai government planned to build in London. I had met him once or twice before, when he spent a few days at the Vihara, where a few weeks earlier I had been welcomed with a warmth that was in marked contrast to the coldness of my reception at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. Phra Maha Vichitr, who was junior to me in years and monastic ordination, was the Chao Kun’s interpreter, besides being a teacher of ‘insight meditation’ in his own right. Plump and self-satisfied in appearance, he always reminded me of a well-fed cat.When the Chao Kun returned to Thailand, a month or so after the formation of the Sangha Sabha, he stayed on at the Vihara for a year or more, though not without making it clear that he was not part of the Vihara and had nothing to do with the English Sangha. On the door of his room he hung a sign announcing, in large letters, ‘Office of Thai Sangha’. In the room itself he installed an enormous executive desk, quite the biggest I had ever seen, behind which he sat when receiving visitors. His stand-offishness saddened me. In India, in recent years, Thai monks had been among my closest friends within the Monastic Order. They had stayed with me in Kalimpong, and accompanied me on my lecture tours, and it seemed strange that in England one of their compatriots should behave in such an unfriendly fashion. Besides Ratanasara,who in respect of seniority came between Sumangala – the bhikkhu in charge of the Chiswick Vihara – and me, the remaining members of the meeting were Vimalo and Mangalo, the two junior most in ordination. Ananda Bodhi did not attend.
After I had reported my arrival to my brother monks, and explained that we needed to discuss ways and means of ensuring the continuance and expansion of Buddhism in Great Britain, the meeting got down to business and a number of resolutions were passed. I was formally recognized as Head of the English Sangha and incumbent of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, and the establishment of the London Buddhist College, by the Buddhist Studies Trust, was ‘highly commended’ and given the meeting’s wholehearted support. It was also resolved that those present should constitute themselves into an organization known as the Sangha Sabha or Council of Buddhist Monks of Great Britain, with Venerable Sayadaw U Thittila as President and Venerable Sthavira Sangharakshita as Secretary. U Thittila was the first Buddhist monk I had ever set eyes on. It was from him that I took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts at a Wesak meeting in London, during the War, and I was glad to be once again associated with him. A fine Pali scholar, he now lived outside London with an elderly English couple, his supporters, and was engaged in editing an Abhidhamma text for publication by the Pali Text Society.
The fact that I had been formally recognized as Head of the English Sangha and incumbent of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara naturally strengthened my position, both at the Vihara and within the wider British Buddhist movement. As I realized only later, this had not by any means been Ratanasara’s sole objective. His principal objective, in reminding me of my duty as a monk, and getting me to call a meeting of the Sangha,was to secure the Sangha’s backing for his London Buddhist College, which was due to open the following month at the Vihara, in whose premises the classes would be held for the time being. It was in fact Ratanasara who had directed discussion at the meeting, who had drafted all the resolutions, and who had persuaded the rest of us to agree that novices should be encouraged to take advantage of the College, as he tactfully put it, and it was clear that in his eyes, at least, my cooperation with him in his plans for the Collegewas nomore than a quid pro quo for the part he had played in my recognition as Head of the English Sangha and incumbent of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. When I was obliged, later on, to oppose certain of those plans because of their implications for the Sangha Trust’s finances he therefore felt that I was not keeping my side of the bargain. For my part, I was unaware of any bargain having been struck. When I supported his plans I supported them on principle, and when I opposed them I did that, too, on principle. Ratanasara seemed quite unable to understand this. At the same time, he was too shrewd a person to quarrel with me; we remained on friendly terms, and when he found himself without anywhere to live (he was not welcome over at Chiswick) I offered him a room at the Vihara.
Whether or not I had Ratanasara to thank for it, I was certainly in a stronger position after the holding of the Sangha Sabha, and could start thinking of establishing personal contact with the dozen or so little Buddhist groups that had sprung up outside London, some of whose members I had met at the Summer School, and of how best to heal the breach between the Sangha Association and the Buddhist Society. I had already conducted a meditation class in Hastings and given a lecture in Leeds, where I stayed with the Secretary of the Leeds Buddhist Society, Rosa Taylor, with whom I had exchanged letters while still in Kalimpong. As Rosa was not on the platform to meet me when my train arrived, as I expected she would be, I went and waited for her outside the station entrance. Two porters were talking to each other. As they were standing quite near me, and had loud voices, I could not help overhearing their conversation, but it was only after a few minutes that I realized I did not understand a word of what they were saying. I was in the North of England! I was in Yorkshire!
A less amusing experience awaited me in Staffordshire, at the meditation centre at Old Hall,which the Sangha Trust had bought the previous year. Not much of the original building was still standing, the greater part of it having been reduced to ruins by Cromwell’s cannon during the Civil War. There were only eight or nine habitable rooms, two of them quite big, and I quickly perceived that a good deal of work would have to be done on the place. This did not worry me.What worried me was the tense, strained atmosphere of the place. I do not remember who was in charge at the time, or if a formal course was in progress, but I noticed that the seven or eight meditators then in residence all had a remote look. They were practising ‘insight meditation’.
As tiny, white-haired Mrs Rauf drove me back to London, crouching over the wheel as we hurtled down the m1 at a speed to which I was unaccustomed, I had a lot to think about. ‘Insight meditation’, at least in the form taught by Ananda Bodhi, in conjunction with the Canadian monk’s brash personality, had been responsible, at least in part, for the breach between the Sangha Association and the Buddhist Society. If that breach was to be healed, and if more people were not to be given a wrong impression of Buddhist meditation, then the teaching of the controversial Burmese technique at the Vihara by Vichitr and Nai Boonman, a Thai layman, would have to be phased out and the more traditional methods taught instead. This would have to be done circumspectly. In recent years many members of the Sangha Association had come to identify meditation with ‘insight meditation’, and in the eyes of some of them not practising ‘insight meditation’ was tantamount to not meditating at all. It also had to be borne in mind that in the case of some people, at least, a moderate practice of the technique had proved beneficial. But even if the teaching of ‘insight meditation’was phased out at the Vihara this would not by itself be enough to ensure that relations between the Sangha Association and the Buddhist Society were harmonious and cooperative. There were other, broader differences between the two organizations to be resolved, some of which were rooted in their respective histories.
The Buddhist Society had been founded in 1924 as the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society, from which it separated two years later as a result of the Krishnamurti debacle, and members and friends would soon be celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Christmas Humphreys, the President (‘Toby’ to his intimates within the Society), was Britain’s best-known Buddhist and his best-selling Pelican Buddhism had probably introduced more people to the Buddha and his teachings than had any other book since the publication of Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia in 1879. Perhaps because of its origins in the Theosophical movement, and Humphreys’ personal sympathies (he believed Buddhism and Theosophy to be complementary), the Buddhist Society’s approach to the Buddha-Dharma was not sectarian but ecumenical. Besides running its own classes and holding the Summer School, it provided a platform for visiting Buddhist teachers of all traditions, and was the central body to which what London-based Buddhists called ‘the provincial groups’ were loosely affiliated. Since the appearance of Dr D.T. Suzuki’s writings in the fifties, Christmas Humphreys’ special interest within the field of Buddhism had been Zen, and his ‘Zen class’ (the scare quotes indicate its admittedly non-traditional status) was in effect the Buddhist Society’s equivalent of the Theosophical Society’s esoteric section. Other members of the society had a special interest in the Theravãda and it was one of these who, as the Bhikkhu Kapilavaddho (formerly William Purfurst), had in 1956 been mainly responsible for forming the [English] Sangha Trust and, I think, the Sangha Association, with the object of creating in Great Britain a monastic community for Westerners.
Kapilavaddho was by all accounts an eccentric, charismatic figure who oscillated between the cloister and the hearth, asceticism and hedonism, and who tended to go to extremes in both directions. After spending less than a year in Thailand, and achieving what he seems to have thought was Enlightenment, he had returned to England, spent not much more than a year in a whirlwind of activity, and then abruptly given up the robe in order to marry and run a public house. ‘I like my beer and women,’ he had told the press, according to a cutting sent to me at the time. Kapilavaddho was succeeded by Pannavaddho, who despite his youth and inexperience, and the fact that he had been a full monk for only six months, nobly rose to the occasion and carried on his teacher’s work for the next five years. All the English Buddhists to whom I spoke praised him warmly for his simplicity, his sweetness of character, and his conscientiousness. In 1961 he went to live permanently in Thailand and his place was taken by Ananda Bodhi. At first all was well. Both Kapilavaddho and Pannavaddho having worked in harmony with Christmas Humphreys and the Buddhist Society (Humphreys had originally hailed Kapilavaddho as ‘the modern Milarepa’), there appeared to be no reason why Ananda Bodhi should not do likewise. The Buddhist Society had accordingly made him welcome, invited him to teach under its auspices, and published a portrait photograph of him in The Middle Way. It was not long before his ‘insight meditation’ evangelism, coupled with what he himself called his ‘hell-and-brimstone’ style of lecturing and his abrasive personality, not only helped to bring about a split between the Sangha Association and the Society but also alienated a number of the Sangha Association’s own members, many of whom resigned. There was an exchange of letters between Maurice Walshe, who was both a Vice- President of the Society and a loyal supporter of Ananda Bodhi, and Christmas Humphreys, in the course of which the latter had spelled out his objections to Ananda Bodhi’s teaching. This was more than a year before my arrival on the scene, and since then the breach between the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association had been complete.
I had no wish to take sides in the dispute. I wanted to be fair to both parties, and despite the fact that my first few days at the Vihara had given me an unfavourable impression of Ananda Bodhi’s character I was prepared to recognize that he was not without good qualities and had done much for the Sangha Association and, indeed, for the cause of Buddhism in Britain. He was active and enterprising, and possibly on account of his Canadian background was not afraid to break fresh ground or to do things in an unconventional manner. It was he who, the Sangha Trust having received a large donation, bullied the reluctant trustees into buying first the two adjacent properties on Haverstock Hill, one of which was now the Vihara, and then, a year later, Biddulph Old Hall. I was also prepared to recognize that both parties may have been at fault to an extent, and that in respect of certain of Ananda Bodhi’s proceedings opponents and supporters alike may have over-reacted. The incident of the bowl of jelly was a case in point. I was told about this incident by many people, some of whom had been present at the time. It had taken place in Cambridge, at a meeting of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society, among whose undergraduate members the controversial monk had an enthusiastic following, and had generated an enormous amount of excitement. Ananda Bodhi had walked into the lecture hall carrying a bowl of jelly and a large spoon with which he proceeded to flick the jelly over the audience until the bowl was empty. His disciples were beside themselves with delight and admiration. Once again Ananda Bodhi had demonstrated his unique greatness as a teacher. Flicking jelly was an absolute masterstroke. It was a profound teaching, even an initiation of sorts. Others were less impressed.
When I first heard about the jelly-flicking I could not help smiling to myself. To me it seemed amusing at best, at worst childish and in poor taste, and I was surprised to learn that it had provoked such over-reactions. But I quickly perceived that, as symptomatic of a tendency to polarization within the British Buddhist movement, such over-reactions were in reality no laughing matter. Ananda Bodhi’s teaching of the Burmese ‘insight meditation’, itself a controversial variant of an important traditional practice, may well have been one-sided, and his supporters within the Sangha Association may well have gone to extremes in their enthusiasm for the technique, but Christmas Humphreys and Ananda Bodhi’s other opponents at the Buddhist Society and elsewhere had also gone to extremes, albeit in the opposite direction. ‘Insight meditation’ stood accused of concentrating on the development of the iddhis or lower psychic powers of which the Buddhist Society’s Theosophical heritage had taught it to be so afraid. Some of its members went so far as to throw away the meditation baby with the ‘vipassanã’ bathwater. Meditation was ‘dangerous’! I could perhaps have resolved the conflict, at least to an extent, by speaking to Ananda Bodhi and persuading him at least to teach ‘insight meditation’ in a more traditional manner, but he was no more willing to discuss matters with me than he had been to discuss them with Christmas Humphreys, and shortly after the formation of the Sangha Sabha he left for Canada. Better to be the first man in a village than the second in Rome!His departure left me free to start phasing out the teaching of ‘insight meditation’ at the Vihara. It also made it easier for me to heal the breach between the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association and, perhaps, resolve some of the broader differences between them.
The first thing I did was to make myself equally available to both organizations. On Sunday afternoons I lectured at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara and on Friday evenings at the Buddhist Society’s premises in Eccleston Square, near Victoria Station, to which it had moved seven or eight years earlier. I also started visiting the provincial groups on a regular basis and giving talks for societies and clubs of various kinds in and around London, besides officiating at funerals, speaking at the Buddhist Society’s fortieth anniversary celebrations at Caxton Hall, and organizing an innovatory three-day Christmas Buddhist Seminar for fifty persons at the Vihara. In this way I got to know quite a number of people, especially in London. After my weekly lecture at the Buddhist Society ten or twelve of us would adjourn to the Jiffy Bar, where those who had come to the lecture straight from work would have a meal or a snack, I would have a cup of tea, and where a lively discussion would generally take place, either on a point arising out of the lecture itself or on some unrelated Buddhist topic. Several of the participants told me that they enjoyed these informal gatherings even more than the lectures themselves and actually learned more about Buddhism from them. After meetings at the Vihara, if no one wanted to see me privately, as was often the case, I would invite two or three people up to my room for a chat. Some faces I saw both at the lectures I gave at the Buddhist Society and those I gave at the Vihara. In fact I encouraged members of the Sangha Association to join the Buddhist Society and attend its meetings and members of the Buddhist Society to join the Sangha Association and take part in its activities both at the Vihara and at the Biddulph meditation centre. Many were happy to do this, though there were a few diehards on both sides who wanted to have nothing to do with the rival organization.
Several of the faces I saw both at the Buddhist Society and at the Vihara were to become very familiar to me. They included the morose and radiant faces belonging, respectively, to Maurice and Ruth Walshe; the jovial, worried-looking, and smiling faces of the Vihara’s ‘Three Musketeers’ – Alf Vial, Mike Hookham, and Jack Ireland; and the plump, cheerful face of Anna Phillips, who had a car and had already constituted herself my driver. They all, in their different ways, played a part in my life during the next two years, and even beyond, and I shall later on have to attempt a portrait – or at least a sketch – of each of them.