In the summer of 2015 Triratna people worldwide raised well over £100,000 for Sangharakshita’s 90th birthday, for the publication of his Complete Works, in hardback, softback and digital format. As Triratna publishers Windhorse Publications report, this mammoth project, anticipated to end in 2021, is well under way: the first volume will appear in October this year. Windhorse director Priyananda reports.

“In the next five years we will publish all the published work of our founder. Twenty-seven volumes will be divided into in six thematic divisions, provisionally titled: Foundation, India, The West, Memoirs, The Arts & Poetry and Commentaries.

The volumes will be of more-or-less uniform length - and big! The average length will be about 450 pages. (For comparison, A Survey of Buddhism is 538 pages.) Following the first volume later this year, the other four volumes in the first group will be published in April 2017. There will then be four more groups of five or six volumes each, until the last one in 2021.  

With the appearance of the first volume we’ll launch the subscription system by which you buy these books.

Just as with the Star Wars films, our creations will not come out in order; for example, the first one will be Volume 9 in the series, and the other four in that group will be Volumes 1, 3, 17 and 20.

The team
We had our first Complete Works retreat at Adhisthana in early January, and are very happy to be working with a small team of volunteers. I hesitate to use metaphors, being aware of the dangers of extending them – are we an orchestra, a farm, an assembly line? Whichever, we all know that we are part of a very committed team. We are all involved in, as it were, carrying precious objects from a treasury or archive, and making them universally available. That said, the crucial ‘heavy lifting’ of editing, copyediting and typesetting is being done by Kalyanaprabha, Vidyadevi, Shantavira, and Ruth Rudd, helped by our volunteers. We are also very glad to have as part of the team, and designing the covers, our design maestro, Dhammarati.

May the Force be with us!”

Read more about the Complete Works project.
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