Reimagining Buddhism
Understanding Sangharakshita's Life and Teachings
Sangharakshita is a central figure in modern Buddhism, whose vast output includes poetry and memoirs along with dozens of volumes of Buddhist teachings and commentaries on traditional texts.
Reimagining Buddhism offers a fresh reading of Sangharakshita’s life and work. It approaches him as an imaginative thinker whose approach was fuelled by the central concerns of his spiritual life. It traces his efforts to return the Buddhist tradition to its founding inspiration, to present the Buddhist path as a process of organic growth based on a coherent philosophy and to show the place of symbols and the imagination in Buddhist spiritual life.
The book is an overview of Sangharakshita’s work that shows the unified outlook that holds it together. It explores the concerns and psychic forces that guided in his life and shaped the movement he founded: the Triratna Buddhist Community. It also examines his complex legacy, including the controversy surrounding his sexual activities and how it affected his reputation within the Triratna Buddhist Community and beyond it.
The book, written with sensitivity, scholarly insight and historical breadth, is an introduction for newcomers and a deep dive for those familiar with Sangharakshita’s work.
Interviews
This book sensitively and critically examines one of the most important figures in Buddhism’s twentieth-century transmission to Britain. It throws light on Sangharakshita as poet, mystic, creative spiritual thinker, innovator, and the architect of what is now the Triratna Buddhist Community. It is also unafraid to ask difficult questions about Sangharakshita’s complex character. This should be essential reading for anyone interested in Buddhism’s presence in the west.
Vishvapani has discovered a golden thread running through Sangharakshita’s work, which is the image of organic growth, common to Buddhism and Romantic poetry. Reimagining Buddhism uses that thread to explore Sangharakshita’s whole approach to the Dharma and to founding a new movement. This is a breakthrough work of study, reflection, and synthesis.
Following the publication of Sangharakshita’s Complete Works this is a book many of us have been waiting for, and it will become an essential text for all interested in the development of Buddhism in its engagement with Western culture. Vishvapani brings intellectual rigour, beautiful writing, and incisive thought alongside his personal devotion to and practice of the Dharma.
‘[This book] will have a big impact on the current discourse, because it takes fully into account the problematic issues, whilst demonstrating very clearly the extraordinary genius of the man. And that will be of enduring importance, given that the facts are now completely open and will be known by each succeeding generation. Vishvapani is qualified by way of his experience and his particular somewhat sceptical perspective, but he is also a gifted writer of proven ability. His magisterial biography of the Buddha shows that he can write, and write very well, and is capable of tackling large subjects in considerable depth. And his writing and understanding have matured considerably since then.
Vishvapani’s thoughts, feelings, inspirations and reflections ... give us something entirely new and immensely valuable - and I say that as someone who has also read Subhuti’s books on Bhante’s teachings and Nagabodhi’s recent book about Bhante. Those works are of great value too, but Vishvapani has found a way to go even deeper, considering and putting into clear and evocative words not just the teachings Bhante gave and the life he lived, but the forces that shaped that life and gave life to those teachings. Not just what, but why.
No one else could write this book, and I am quite sure that it will be of deep and lasting value both to those of us involved in Triratna now, and those at present and in the future who are not involved yet, but for whom this book could be a way in.
As it happens, in my last ever conversation with Bhante, Bhante asked me whether I thought that Vishvapani would be the right person to write about his life. That’s in my mind too as I write this - as though ‘coming events were casting their shadows before’, as Bhante himself would say. The answer was yes.
We can find the sources of Sangharakshita's inspiration by entering imaginatively into his connection to Padmasambhava. But that also brought some problems
Sangharakshita is an organic thinker who set out to find the organic core that gives coherence to the whole of Buddhism