An Ancient Connection Re-Awoken

Some of the most familiar object from Sangharakshita’s childhood were Tibetan ritual implements from the Lama Temple of Peking; favourites included a Thanka of the Buddha and a large Vajra bell - which “rarely could I refrain from ringing”. At nine Bhante studied the life of the Buddha, and at 11 began praying daily to the Buddha and wrote “The Life of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha” “which when finished I copied out in purple ink on my best notepaper”.

By the age of 17, Bhante had already regained Insight. “At John Watkins, which thereafter I visited frequently, I bought the two books by which I have been most profoundly influenced. These were the Diamond Sutra, which I read first in Gemmell's then in Max Muller's translation, and the Sutra of Wei Lang (Hui Neng). If, when I read Isis Unveiled, I knew that I was not a Christian, when I read the Diamond Sutra I knew that I was a Buddhist. Though this book epitomizes a teaching of such rarefied sublimity that even Arahants, saints who have attained individual nirvana, are said to become confused and afraid when they hear it for the first time, I at once joyfully embraced it with an unqualified acceptance and assent. To me the Diamond Sutra was not new. I had known it and believed it and realized it ages before and the reading of the Sutra as it were awoke me to the existence of something I had forgotten. Once I realized that I was a Buddhist it seemed that I had always been one, that it was the most natural thing in the world to be, and that I had never been anything else. My experience of the Sutra of Wei Lang, which I read in the original Shanghai edition of Wong Mou Lam's translation, though taking place at a slightly lower level, was repeated with much greater frequency. Whenever I read the text I would be thrown into a kind of ecstasy.”