Year in Review
2023–2024
As I write we’re poised between two of the most significant dates since Bhante died: his fifth death anniversary last year, and his one-hundredth birth anniversary next year. This has prompted me to reflect even more than usual on the magnitude of Bhante’s life and its significance for me. One hundred years, especially, represents more than a round number – it’s a number that stretches the imagination beyond the limits of a single lifetime.
I don’t know firsthand what the conditions were like when Bhante was born, and I can only imagine what they may be like in 100 years’ time. One of Bhante’s many striking qualities was his imaginative connection with the Buddha and other historical figures – I hope in this forthcoming year we will lay the foundation for our imaginative connection with Bhante well into the future. Who knows what forms Dharma practice might take then? I hope 2025 will help us to stand back a little and take in Bhante and his life’s work more fully in their historical context. We’re already working with our partners to coordinate the celebrations for Bhante’s centenary, and unearthing new offerings from our own treasuries to this end.
Since I last wrote, we’ve been focusing on our preparations for the Centenary year: refining our overall strategy, reviewing our Life Story for translation into Hindi and Spanish, looking at how to make our web portfolio more visible to search engines and itself searchable, and financially supporting the final efforts on Bhante’s Complete Works.
We also moved to a new fundraising database and have begun engaging with major donors about key future projects. In early 2024, we had just begun this period of fundraising when, quite unexpectedly, we received two separate large gifts totalling over £21,000. Thank you to those two people and to all our generous supporters for continuing to enable us to offer a vivid encounter with Bhante, especially for those who never had a chance to meet him.
We said thank you to Mahamati, who stepped down as chair of trustees after 22 years in a moving ceremony in February – but will continue as a trustee – and goodbye to Sarvapala, our late bookkeeper who died this year after living for a long time with cancer. We also welcome Amalavajra, who has become our chair of trustees and Prajnanita who joined our trustee board in February.
With warm wishes for the rest of 2024,
Prajnaketu
Director, Urgyen Sangharakshita Trust
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Since Bhante died in 2018, our Trust has produced a wealth of different channels for people to deepen their connection to him. We’re pleased to see people enjoying all these projects of ours – but the range of our output has prompted us to ask ourselves: How do these projects tie together into a collective vision? How do we prioritise and distribute our limited resources amongst them? Why are we doing these things, rather than any other Triratna institution? How does our work join up with the work of the rest of Triratna?
Earlier this year, members of our team and trustees met together in Urgyen House and took stock of all of our projects. We agreed that we could articulate the objective that ties all of our projects together as:
A vivid encounter with Bhante
Our work flows from the inspiration that encounters with Bhante gave people. This inspiration continues to flow since his death, but we need more creative ways of enabling those encounters. All our work aims to facilitate this. We’re uniquely placed to offer vivid encounters as the guardians of Bhante’s physical and intellectual legacy, including his photo and video archive, and of course his last home.
Our second Urgyen House exhibition– accessible both in-person at Adhisthana and online at UrgyenHouse.org – focuses on the pivotal years of 1964–1970. Years in which Sangharakshita returned to England, led the nascent English Sangha, and after a dramatic dismissal, founded a new Buddhist movement. On display are:
Letters showing correspondence with Christmas Humphreys, Maurice Walshe, and other notable figures
Diary entries
Original photographic slides taken by Terry Delamare
Audio recordings from the first public ordination
Lecture notes
Sangharakshita’s yellow monastic robes
“A vivid, immersive exhibition exploring the founding and the early years of the movement! I particularly enjoyed following the heated exchange of letters between Bhante and the other Buddhist groups, as well as listening to the audio of the first ordinations. A wonderful experience!”
– Nick, mitra from London
We also added two new Urgyen house video blogs this year – one on the Foundations exhibition and another exploring Sangharakshita’s connection with William Blake.
There are now 20 of these Urgyen House video blogs available.
Urgyen House has also increased its range of unique postcards to 24 beautiful images. These impressively strong postcards are printed on “un-bendy” paper with a velvety soft touch coating for the kind of postcards you just want to hold on to. Now, due to many requests, the cards are available to stock in Triratna Buddhist Centre bookshops via a private link on the Urgyen House website. Please get in touch if you’d like this link.
The images offered include a number of thangkas found in Urgyen House and a fascinating selection of photographs of Sangharakshita taken over several decades.
The Triratna Picture Library continues to grow as an ever-more invaluable visual archive of Sangharakshita’s life and Triratna’s first 50 years. Since last September, over 800 photos have been made available for viewing, and for free non-commercial use on triratnapicturelibrary.org. Anybody who would like to use them for purposes such as advertising can buy a single-use or annual licence; there is a commercial rate and a suggested donation for Triratna centres of various sizes. Fifteen Buddhist Centres from around the world currently have such licences and make good use of the photos in their marketing materials.
In addition, more than 2,000 photographs have been digitised and added to our offline digital photo archive which now holds more than 18,000 images with thousands more waiting to be scanned. These images are one by one repaired and metadata (e.g names of people in the image) added where possible. Images are then selected from the archive for the library based on repetition, quality, metadata, and privacy.
All the photos in this annual report are newly available images, uploaded to the Library within the last year, except the images of our projects and video screenshots.
The Triratna Video Library has also continued to grow this year. There are in total 254 videos on the Triratna Video Library, and our offline video archive of 3,000 tapes is now almost completely digitised.
A team of volunteers coordinated by Jnanacandra has been adding subtitles in nine different languages to videos in the Library. Unprompted, we received this beautiful testimonial from Silvia, a mitra training for ordination in Valencia:
“[Thanks to the Spanish subtitles] I was able to watch the video of Sangharakshita's talk ‘A Taste of Freedom’... Seeing Sangharakshita there in 1980 changed something in me. I was struck by his non-verbal communication: the tone of his voice, the peculiar rhythm of his speech, his smile, and also his own image, when he was about 55 years old, with his golden kesa resting on his neck....I was now connecting much more with the human being behind his books. We all know that Bhante's dharmic message is profound and liberating, but if we add to that something as human as seeing his smile, something changes. [He] transmitted passion, strength, even a certain attraction, magnetism.Thus, I realized how much it can help us to receive his teachings through different means (reading him, but also listening to him and seeing him) … Finding this website with so many videos and photos was a gift to me, and made me understand better what Triratna is all about.”
(Originally written in Spanish and slightly edited.)
Anybody who has begun to explore Sangharakshita’s extensive body of teachings is familiar with the challenge of trying to navigate it all. Last year we spent some time working towards a truly searchable catalogue of all of Bhante’s work. This work had two main aspects:
Sangharakshita’s work is spread across different media, found in different places. Most of the audio (except for the yet to be digitised seminar recordings) is on FreeBuddhistAudio. The books are available from Windhorse Publications, including the Complete Works and individual volumes. His later articles are on Sangharakshita.org, where they were originally published. And there are also videos of more than 40 of his lectures available on the Triratna Video Library.
The first step to bringing all this work into one searchable place is to standardise and unify the metadata. For example, the lecture series originally titled “Vision and Transformation” was later published as the book “The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path”. A complete database should show this work once, and make the relationship between the various versions clear, including the date of each version.
After a considerable effort last year, this work is now almost complete.
So much for the ‘back end’. But how will we navigate such a database? For users who know exactly what they are looking for, we can provide an interface to search by title. But when testing this, we found it had limited usefulness. What we really want is something where people can say, for example, “When did Bhante first mention that commitment is primary?” and to instantly receive an answer. i.e a comprehensive search of contents which allows for paraphrasing. We wondered if recent advancements in AI technology might make this possible.
However after investigating this, we found that the technology can’t yet cope with the size of Bhante’s oeuvre. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT struggle with large amounts of unprocessed, unstructured data, to quote verbatim, and to accurately cite their sources. For this reason, we’ve put a pause on this project to wait for two things to happen: (1) The AI technology to take another step forward and (2) The Complete Works concordance (which is essentially a structured index of the catalogue) to be completed.
We hope to pick this work up in the coming years, and get to a place where we can ask “Where did Bhante say ____?” and get an accurate answer.
The mammoth task of bringing all Bhante’s published works together in one unified set will reach its conclusion in 2024 with the publication of the three remaining volumes, including the Concordance. Vidyadevi and the team at Windhorse Publications have been hard at work compiling this final volume, which is the closest thing we’ve ever had to a map of Bhante’s mind. This is a huge leap forward for our capability to study and teach Bhante’s presentation of the Dharma, as next time you want to find out what he’s said on a particular topic, you will most likely find a whole section of it in the Concordance, along with every mention of it in the 26 other volumes of Complete Works.
Vidyadevi writes:
“When we were planning the Complete Works, the idea of a concordance came to me, and when I put it to Bhante (in 2015) he agreed that ‘a concordance is certainly needed’. Now that the series is almost complete, it’s much clearer to me why it is needed. Looking at the elegant vastness of the published volumes, which occupy two whole shelves of my bookcase, I can’t help feeling a bit daunted, even though I know what’s in them, so I can only imagine how a newcomer to them might feel. The concordance is designed to be a friendly guide, a way in – or rather, thousands of ways. (‘A thousand doors fly open’, Bhante wrote in a poem about the Zen Blue Cliff Record.) Bhante is a mine of information on all kinds of subjects, and the map of the Concordance shows the way to all that buried treasure.”
As well as the concordance, this year will see the publication of Volumes 6: The Essential Sangharakshita & Volume 11: A New Buddhist Movement I.
Buy Sangharakshita’s Complete Works from Windhorse Publications
Over the last year Bhante’s Literary Executors have begun a project, now coordinated by Vidyaruchi, of editing Sangharakshita’s complete seminar transcripts for publication. Among those in the first wave are:
Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism,
Q&A with Windhorse: Evolution,
Advice to Three Fortunate Women, and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
This project is still in its early stages but we will be communicating more details as they emerge. Make sure you’re signed up to our mailing list for the latest updates.
At the beginning of 2024, we surveyed our donors and mailing list subscribers. We were glad to see that people are very positive and happy with our work and throughout the responses there was a strong interest in how we are helping people connect with Bhante. For example, when asked how effectively they felt our mission was being achieved through our projects, 84% of our donors said ‘effective’ or ‘very effective’ – while 13% responded ‘neutral or unsure what our mission is’. Across all respondents, only 2% felt our projects were ineffective at achieving our mission.
When asked why our donors give to our Trust, one responded “Keeping Sangharakshita present, especially for those who are new and had no contact with him, and for young people, so our community and Order can continue to grow” while another said they were sure the response to Bhante in their local sangha has been more positive in recent years, and sure our work had contributed to that.
There was also a small minority who were concerned mainly about, as one respondent put it, “whilst venerating, avoiding hero worship.” We're of course very aware that it’s easy to misrepresent Bhante, and we endeavour to represent him in his fullness, which we see as both inspiring and essential for fostering a genuine connection with him as a teacher.
We were interested to see that some people are still unaware of the breadth of our various projects, so we are looking to raise more awareness of our lesser known activities in the future – particularly our Video and Picture Libraries. We were pleased to see some respondents writing that they, too, would like to see greater awareness of our projects – hopefully this will result in them spreading more via word of mouth.
“I was delighted with the response to the new Urgyen House exhibition: Foundations. The chosen exhibits give a glimpse into the great importance of the Trust’s archiving and preservation work. Recording and preserving Triratna’s history, particularly on video, has been a major thread in my Order life. Now being able to work towards completing the Triratna video and photographic archives to ensure that they are safe, complete, shared and protected can only happen thanks to the perspective and vision of the Trust.”
“After working closely with Bhante for many years on his literary output, I am very pleased to help support and promote his legacy in whatever way I can and appreciate the opportunity to liaise with the many generous supporters of this project.”
“Over the past year, I’ve particularly appreciated us clarifying, and deepening our understanding of, our Trust’s mission. Being more explicit that we want to provide ‘vivid encounters with Bhante’ has spurred me creatively to reflect on how we can best utilise our resources to help people reach a deep connection with the man himself.”
“The wondrous qualities and potential of our Order and Movement flow in large part from the unique insight and genius of Sangharakshita. The Urgyen Sangharakshita Trust helps to create the conditions for us to renew and deepen our appreciation of our teacher and I am glad to be contributing to the Trust's work.”
Sangharakshita’s Literary Executors work on behalf of the Urgyen Sangharakshita Trust to administer Bhante's Literary Estate, quotation requests, translations, and editing his seminars for publication. The coordinator of the Literary Executors is Kalyanaprabha and she works closely with Viryabodhi, the coordinator of the International Triratna Translation Board, and the TTB India.
In the last year Nagabodhi and Subhuti retired from the more hands-on aspects of this work, but continue to offer advice from their many years of experience working with Bhante’s writing.
We’re delighted to celebrate two recent Sangharakshita media landmarks. First, our former Literary Executor Nagabodhi topped Windhorse Publications’ sales list in 2023 with Sangharakshita: the Boy, the Monk, the Man, an outstanding overview and introduction to Sangharakshita’s life from a close friend.
We also rejoice in the premiere of Suryaprabha’s new film Great Ocean - Abiding at the Combined Area Order Weekend in August 2024. This film, the fourth in the series, adds great depth and colour to Sangharakshita’s life through hearing about his friendships. We supported Suryaprabha financially with the colour grading in Abiding, and are proud to host his films at lightsinthesky.org.
Next year will mark 100 years since Urgyen Sangharakshita was born. This is not just a large number; it’s an opportunity to reflect on the impact that one lifetime can have on the world, and particularly the world of Buddhism. It’s not just about looking back 100 years, but looking forwards into the centuries to come, and how Buddhists of the future can continue to Go for Refuge to the Three Jewels through a connection with Sangharakshita.
These are of course questions that go far beyond the scope of our Trust alone, so we’ve begun coordination efforts with other central Triratna institutions to ensure these centenary celebrations are joined up and build on each other to create a cohesive year across our community. We’ve convened a group of friends from Adhisthana, the College of Public Preceptors, Dharmachakra, International Council, the Order Office, and Windhorse Publications. Collectively, we’re working out what story we want to tell in 2025 and how we’ll do that with our various projects.
In terms of our Trust, we’re planning to use the year to tell Bhante’s Life Story for the first time in Hindi and Spanish, bringing those incredible series of events from 1925–2018 to vast amounts of people who are often highly devoted to Sangharakshita as a teacher but know relatively little about how he lived.
Urgyen House contains a huge wealth of artefacts, including hundreds of paper documents: letters, diary entries, lecture notes, and much more. Some of these we’ve displayed in our first two Urgyen House exhibitions. Most of these documents are not yet digitised, meaning they are only accessible in-person and are more liable to deteriorate.
Cataloguing and digitising these documents will be a large project, and something our current finances don’t support. Over time, we want to improve our financial situation to allow us to take on this huge task.
Thank you for your continued support
Most of you reading this report give regularly to support our work, but as you’ll see from our financial report we are in need of more money to continue doing what we do. As we are such a small charity, every single donation has a significant impact on our capacity.
If you can, please give today to support our work to deepen and reach more people.
If you’d like to increase – or discuss – your existing regular donation, enter your details below and we'll get back to you.
Prajnaketu (Director)
Mokshapriya
Suryanaga
Shantavira
Visarada
Kalyanaprabha (Co-ordinator)
Nagabodhi
Prajnaketu
Subhuti
Vajratara
Vidyadevi
Vidyaruchi
Amalavajra (Chair)
Mahamati
Mokshapriya
Paramartha
Prajnanita
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our work.
Get in touch: mail@sangharakshita.org
Urgyen Sangharakshita Trust
Adhisthana, Coddington
Ledbury
HR8 1JL, UK
UK Registered Charity no: 1046398
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Fifth Death Anniversary
Most new spiritual movements do not live on beyond their founder. Much has been made of Sangharakshita’s marked ability to ‘hand on’ his responsibilities well before his death, but five years on, has his greatest project continued to thrive?
To mark the first significant anniversary since his death, we led a social media campaign which focused on celebrating how much Triratna has continued to grow in these past five years. We shared the great news that, since 2018:
513 women have begun training for ordination at Tiratanaloka
348 men have begun training for ordination at Padmaloka
748 people have begun training for ordination in India
128 people have been ordained in India
Thousands of people have circumambulated Bhante’s burial mound at Adhisthana
As well as re-telling the story of his last days and funeral.