or priest, to understand, and they did not. Now, through Kerouac’s words, I heard of the luminous emptiness that is the heart of all things. At last I had some context for my experiences, and I would be a Buddhist from that moment on. Yet six years would pass before I would start to practise it seriously.
Instead, imagining that I might find Buddhism, I came in at the tail end of the Beat Generation. It was really long over, even in Greenwich Village, its original location, and San Francisco, the places you might find some fading echoes of the Beats, but I tried to pick up their trail in the coffee houses of Manchester. There were a few poets around, and a guy who was rumoured to sell peyote, but there wasn’t much else. By the end of 1967, I had made it as far as London, visiting the Arts Lab in Covent Garden and Indica bookshop on Southampton Row, ground zero of the ‘underground’ scene, where I bought a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Right around the corner was a shop selling Japanese incense. In the back room there was somebody called Sangharakshita, who was busy founding his own school of Buddhism. I didn’t go in that back room, though – karma, I guess.
Although I left home and school a year later, still chasing the visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder and the other Beat writers, I never really found what I had imagined would be there. From time to time, I met people who were searching for the same things. A few of them are still around today, but, as the years slipped by, that world grew darker. Sooner or later, everything became drugs or politics, and, after a while, I discovered that I wasn’t really all that interested in either of them. Thinking back over this period of the so-called ‘Alternative Society’, it seems to me now that the same message that some heard as meaning that one should become ‘free from self’, others heard as indicating that one should ‘free the self’. One way leads to Buddha, and the other to Aleister Crowley or Mao Tse Tung. Perhaps it was easy to confuse them in those days.
Eventually, I had to admit that there was nothing truthful in those places: just the ravenous self-love that roars out today in the million locations that make up contemporary culture. Some of us may have started from the right spot, but we were now on a wide road that led only downwards. As for the Beats themselves, they were long gone. I would meet up with Allen Ginsberg, though, several years later. By then, he was a disciple of Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first popularisers of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.
It was in late 1972 that I came in from the wilderness and started to get serious about Buddhism. Initially I practised in the Theravada tradition, where I met the wise old-timer Russell Williams and the scholar Lance Cousins. However, within a couple of years, I had found the two Tibetan lamas who would be my masters for life: His Holiness the 41st Sakya Trizin (1945– ) and Karma Thinley Rinpoche (1931– ). Thanks to them, over the next several decades, I received some of the elements of a traditional Buddhist education, primarily the contemplative and philosophical teachings of the Sakya and Kagyu schools.
In the meantime, my academic life began in 1973, when, two months after meeting Karma Thinley Rinpoche, I embarked upon a degree in Religious Studies at the University of Manchester. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it would eventually stretch to a BA, a PhD, and twenty years of teaching at the two universities in Manchester. I was trained there as a historian of religions by such eminent professors as Trevor Ling. However, I have to confess that academic work was just a way to support my Buddhist studies, practice and retreats. It’s not, incidentally, that I think that such academic scholarship isn’t worthy of respect, but I just didn’t want to get too caught up in it. I had other things to do.
Chapter 2
The Space for Buddhism
The Buddhism that I discovered through the Beats was not entirely new in the West. In fact, it had been entering it for over a century without great fanfare, whether through Asian immigrant communities, Western scholarship or converts. Ironically enough, during the very period of the 20th and 21st centuries when Western culture and values have seemed triumphant, a spiritual decay at the heart of this culture appears to have created an opening for Buddhism. The story of how this has happened is of some importance.
It starts with loss. Our culture seems to be one that is haunted by it. It is as if we modern men and women have lost our sense of place in the world, our place in the very rhythms of birth and death. At this time when people measure their lives in terms of popularity and fame, it sometimes seems that nothing of value remains. Fleeting passions and manias infest people’s minds with images and distorted facts. It is as if we are living in a valley of dry bones where the only noises are the rustle of yesterday’s newspaper with its story of an already-forgotten celebrity and the voice of Big Brother sounding from the electronic screen. Consequently, we are forever chasing happiness, hoping to find it in the forgetfulness of pleasure. Similarly, not knowing who we are, we seek confirmation of our identity through the chatter of social media. However, we find in either place only frustration and insecurity.
Of course, as Buddha pointed out, suffering afflicts all sentient beings and hence is undoubtedly present in all cultures. However, maybe our culture is unique in selling the promise of happiness so strongly but delivering only disappointment and bewilderment.
To understand how this has come to pass, we have to begin with the past. In other words, we must ask, in the fashion of Buddhist reasoning: ‘What are the causes and conditions which have given rise to the apparent phenomenon of our deracinated and dissatisfied culture?’
To begin, one might concede that the Renaissance was undoubtedly significant in shaping some of our contemporary sensibilities. This recovery of the best elements of Classical civilisation produced, in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, a culture that was focussed on man ‘as the measure of all things’ – part of a shift towards modern individualism. However, it is probably more accurate to say that modern Western culture began with the sixteenth-century Reformation. It was this cataclysm that shattered the world of mediaeval Catholic Christianity in Western Europe, a culture which, despite its many faults, had nurtured a sense of the unity of the sacred and secular, and thus given men and women a secure notion of their rootedness in the world.
At the heart of the mediaeval vision was a notion of a cosmic order into which humankind was folded. It was a hierarchy comprising humans, saints, angelic orders and God, and, of course, the denizens of purgatory and hell. Reflecting the vastness of this vision, the Catholic culture of the time was spacious enough to accommodate everything from the scholarship of the monastic orders to the devotional cults of the peasantry, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
In 1517, the German Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther (1483–1546) – followed, a few years later, by Jean Calvin (1509–1564) in Geneva – shattered the world of Catholic Christianity. Luther and Calvin’s new theology eliminated devotion to the saints, jettisoned purgatory, abolished the monastic orders and dispensed with the role of the priesthood as the intermediary between man and God. Through removing these structures that securely located the individual life within a spiritual and social context which was greater than the mere individual, the two Reformers broke the chain that had connected the sacred and the temporal. It seems also that, in insisting on the absolute privacy of the individual conscience alone before God, they unintentionally gave rise to a new alienated individualism, for, from now on, humanity would be cut off from the mediating assistance of the priest and saints.2
To this interior transformation of what it was to be religious, Calvin added the sanctification of work, through his notion that one’s profession was a divine calling or ‘vocation’, and this, together with his depiction of wealth as a sign of divine favour bestowed only upon those who had been chosen by God, brought into being a culture that was remarkably favourable to the growth of a capitalist economy. In due course, these cultural and economic shifts would sweep away the mediaeval ordering of society, together with its religious forms.3
In this way, the old spiritual world was fractured, and our sense of having a place within an ordered cosmos was lost. From that time onward, Christianity, even in its new guise – and despite the ambitions of the Protestant Reformers – has only continued to cede territory and authority to other blueprints for meaning and happiness, most notably those stemming