Dear Order members and friends,

A year ago at the College’s annual international meeting I was surprised when my fellow College members asked me to take over from Ratnadharini, in a year’s time, as the next College Chair. However, I quite quickly adjusted and have spent much of the last year reflecting on what this responsibility requires of me, and preparing to take it on. I am grateful to Ratnadharini for her support in this handover - I admired her chairing of the College, and when last year we had our initial round of nominations for the next Chair, I nominated her for a second term! On the first full day of this year’s College meeting we all enjoyed rejoicing in Ratnadharini and in her four deputy Chairs: Punyamala, Jnanavaca, Amrutdeep and Ratnavyuha.

During the handover ceremony, in the context of a Threefold Puja, the previous Chair places the ‘initiation vase’ that Bhante himself used for public ordinations onto the shrine. The new Chair then stands up, approaches the shrine, and, after saluting the Three Jewels and our precious teacher Urgyen Sangharakshita, picks up the vase. This represents taking up the responsibility as new College Chair.

I had decided that after taking up the vase, I would recite the four acceptance verses from our public ordinations, although in this case instead of “accepting this ordination” it would be “accepting this responsibility”. These were my words:

With loyalty to my teachers, I accept this responsibility
In harmony with friends and companions, I accept this responsibility 
For the attainment of Enlightenment, I accept this responsibility
For the benefit of all beings, I accept this responsibility

After reciting these verses, I spoke for a short while, and if you wish you can view that part of the ceremony here. There is also an edited video of the whole ceremony, including introductory words from Subhuti, the first Chair of the College. Many people participated in the evening: current and retired members of the College (including all the previous Chairs), the Adhisthana communities, the seven Mitras from the current young men’s Dharma Life Course and local Order members.

The Working Arrangements of the College allow the Chair to nominate Deputy Chairs – for agreement by the College – and I had approached five fellow College members earlier this year, so that we could start working as a team well in advance of the handover. Between the six of us we are quite well connected with Triratna worldwide.

The five Deputies are Parami (who lives in Glasgow, Scotland but for a long time has visited Latin America), Amrutdeep (who lives in Nagpur, India, though unfortunately he was not present at Adhisthana due to an illness), Ratnavyuha (an American who lives in Auckland, New Zealand), Vajratara (currently living in Wales at Tiratanaloka but property purchase willing, will be moving to the new Tiratanaloka 'Unlimited' in 2025), and Vajrashura (who lives in Dublin, Ireland). As part of the handover ceremony, the new Deputy Chairs did as I had done – holding their initiation vases, they too recited the acceptance verses. When the last mantra died away, a new chapter in our lives and the life of the whole College had begun.

During the College meeting the Deputies and I met each evening, planning and reviewing each day’s programme and also considering issues that we need to address. We will continue meeting regularly online, until we can again have the pleasure of all being together in the same room.

College meetings usually include a couple of days of study. This year Subhuti took us through a close reading of Bhante’s talk from FWBO Day April 1991, The Five Pillars of the FWBO (Triratna). How many of us, both Order members and those training for ordination, could say what these Five Pillars are? I’ll list them here: they are the Pillars of Ideas, Practices, Institutions, Experiment and Imagination. You may like to listen to the lecture here or read the transcript here.

A highlight of our meeting was an evening celebrating the Complete Works of Sangharakshita. This immense project has been undertaken with the skill, generosity, faith and commitment of so many people, and it was wonderful to be joined during our meeting by many of those who have made this ten-year project possible. After hearing short talks by three of the major figures from the project, and a roll call of honour for many others, we concluded with a ritual, placing the volumes one by one onto the Manjushri shrine in the library atrium and then processing out to the burial mound, chanting the Manjushri mantra and finally reciting the transference of merits under the night sky.

The next evening we were at the burial mound again, this time to lay memorial stones around its outer perimeter. Beneath each stone there is either a portion of ashes, or a relic. We had laid the first stone a year before, that of Sudarshan from India, the first public preceptor to die, back in 2009. The thinking behind the stones is to represent our lineage of ordination, at least as it manifests through the Public Preceptors. So with Urgyen Sangharakshita at the centre, as each Public Preceptor dies, a stone will be placed with a simple inscription marking the year that they joined the College of Public Preceptors, and the year that they died. One or two of my friends in the College say that they have walked around the perimeter wondering exactly where their stone will be placed – but of course none of us can know! On this occasion we laid stones for Vajragita, Ratnasuri, Mallika, and Abhaya.

On that evening Satyaraja rejoiced in another Public Preceptor, Kamalashila. However, given how recently he had died there was no time to prepare a stone for him. A week later I was pleased to attend Kamalashila’s Memorial at the North London Buddhist Centre. About eighty of us filled the shrine-room, and I understand close to 300 joined online. In last month’s Chair’s letter we read rejoicings in Kamalashila from four current or previous members of the College. Here I particularly want to mention Ratnadeva’s eulogy in London. He talked about how ‘just sitting in nature’ was for a long time a mainstay of Kamalashila’s Dharma practice. How he had an animistic sensibility, a felt sense of the aliveness of things, reflected for example in his love of Buddhafield and his eighteen month solitary retreat in Tipi Valley in Wales in the early 2000s. The aliveness of the so-called material world was also fundamental for Sangharakshita who said “I would go so far as to say that a universe conceived of as dead cannot be a universe in which one stands any chance of attaining Enlightenment.” (Living with Awareness, Complete Works, vol. 15, pp. 138-139). In the next sentence he goes on to say: “Whether you stand any chance in a living universe is of course up to you.”

In a few weeks time we start the centenary year of Urgyen Sangharakshita’s birth. When he entered his nineties I recall him saying to me more than once that he did not wish to live until he was a hundred – he didn’t of course. But his life and teachings are as present as ever and I am looking forward to many opportunities to celebrate next year. I will be at Bodhgaya towards the end of January, where we are expecting approximately 600 Indian Order members and 200 of us who will have travelled internationally, for a week’s International Convention. 

There will be no Chair’s letter in January, and when my second Chair’s letter goes out on 1 February, I will be at Nagaloka in Maharashtra and in the first day of an International Council meeting. I will say more about the International Council, as well as our Order Convention at Bodhgaya, in my next letter.

In the meantime, I wish you all well, and in particular a wish that together we can help make Triratna a more and more potent force for good in this suffering world.

Mahamati