XPost: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

Controversial Buddhist convert who deserted the army and was plagued by
sex allegations after founding an influential order in Britain.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/sangharakshita-obituary-r0ghw72tg

Stationed in India at the end of the Second World War, Dennis Lingwood
deserted the British Army, burnt his passport, gave away his possessions
and wandered the sub-continent in search of enlightenment.

When he returned to Britain two decades later, the original “drop-out” would become a modern-day prophet with a new name, Sangharakshita, which
means “one who is protected by the spiritual community”. He would
arguably go on to do more than any other person to popularise Buddhism
in the West.

A tall, gaunt man with crooked teeth and a disarming grin,
Sangharakshita founded the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO)
in 1967. At the same time, the traditional moral order was being
challenged in swinging London. A growing appetite for eastern mysticism
was exemplified by the Beatles, who had appointed the Hindu guru
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their spiritual adviser. Sangharakshita’s
timing was propitious.

In Soho, hippies gathered in a room above a shop where Sangharakshita
held forth. They would sit mesmerised as the Buddhist monk spoke with
quiet charisma, quoting from William Blake or citing Nietzsche and Freud
to render esoteric Vajrayana Buddhist texts understandable to his young disciples. Critics would later accuse him of peddling an illegitimate “semiintellectual pot-pourri of Buddhism”, but Sangharakshita argued
that after the Buddha had founded the religion in the 5th-century BC, it
had developed “cultural accretions” depending on the region to which it
had spread. The West was no different.

In solidarity with his young followers, Sangharakshita grew his hair and started to wear jeans. He conducted his first ordinations in 1968,
shocking some Buddhists by allowing women to become monks. The order
would open 30 centres in the Britain and operate in 26 countries. In
India Sangharakshita would be revered by tens of thousands of people
whom he had converted to Buddhism.

Ultimately his reputation would be tainted by allegations of sexual
misconduct. A gay man who had lived as a celibate monk in India, he had
a sexual awakening after returning to London. He began to question
traditional Theravada Buddhist teaching that forbade acts of
homosexuality and by the early Seventies was encouraging some of his
young male novices to enter into sexual relationships with him.

One member of the order, the actor and writer Phil Kingston, said there
was “a lot of anything goes”. A report made wide-ranging allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse. In 1997 Mark Dunlop and other former
novices accused Sangharakshita of manipulating them into becoming sexual partners. He refused to comment for many years. In 2016 Sangharakshita
finally responded and said he had “deep regret for all the occasions on
which I have hurt, harmed or upset fellow Buddhists and ask for their forgiveness”.

Dennis Philip Edward Lingwood was born into a working-class family in
Tooting, south London, in 1925. His father, Philip, was a French
polisher who met his mother, Florence (née Kecskemety), while being
nursed back to health by her at a field hospital during the First World
War. As a child Dennis would play at “weddings” with his sister, Joan.
He would often play the bride, using his baptismal lace as a veil. “I
could spend hours in front of the mirror experimenting with different
styles of dress,” he recalled.

Such larks ended after he was diagnosed with a heart condition at the
age of eight, which he later attributed to psychological trauma and said
that his heart rate slowed considerably after he started to meditate. He
spent two years in bed convalescing, and reading an encyclopaedia.
Evacuated to Devon after the outbreak of war, he ceased to attend
school, preferring to educate himself with books by Cardinal John Henry
Newman, Dr Samuel Johnson, Sir Francis Bacon and the Greek poets.

Sangharakshita grew his hair in solidarity with his young followersSangharakshita grew his hair in solidarity with his young followers Two books framed his spiritual quest. The first was Isis Unveiled by
Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the theosophical movement, which ridded
him of any loyalty to Christianity that had been instilled at the local
Baptist church and in the Boys’ Brigade. The second was the Diamond
Sutra, a fifth-century text, which made him want to be a Buddhist.

At the age of 16 he began writing for the magazine of the Buddhist
Society while working as a clerk for London County Council. He was even
invited to address the society by its founder, Christmas Humphreys. Two
years later, he was conscripted into the Royal Corps of Signals and
served as a radio engineer in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. He would
bribe his way out of bayonet practice and as his comrades snored in the dormitory Lingwood would sit beneath his mosquito net in the lotus
position and meditate. “My mind became at first buoyant, then filled
with peace and purity, and finally penetrated by a quintessential, keen ethereal bliss that was so intense I had to break off the practice.” He resolved to “burn his identity” as generations of mystics had before him.

He shaved his head, donned a saffron robe and started to wander Kerala,
begging for bowls of rice. Walking from ashram to ashram, he encountered
yogis, swamis and gurus, some of whom wore a loincloth all year round, “completely indifferent to heat, cold and wet”. He would be accosted on
the road by people demanding to know who he was and where he had come
from. His favourite reply was that he was a sadhu or holy man and had no nationality. “When asked ‘what is your caste?’ I replied that I was a Buddhist and as such did not believe in the institution.”

In May 1949 he was accepted as a novice monk after astounding a
sceptical lama with his knowledge. After his full ordination, he founded
a hermitage at Kalimpong in West Bengal in the foothills of the Himalayas.

After China invaded Tibet in 1950, several eminent Tibetan lamas arrived
at the hermitage as refugees. Sangharakshita, as he was now known, was impressed by their “inner joy” and that they were not in the least concerned by matters of caste and hierarchy, as were some Indian
Buddhists, but treated everyone as equals.

In 1956, after years at the hermitage, he was mobilised into social
action after meeting Bhimrao Ambedkar, a lawyer who was the chief
architect of India’s constitution. Ambedkar was an “Untouchable” who had converted to Buddhism and started a movement to convert other
Untouchables, or Dalits, to Buddhism as a way of liberating them from
their innate inferiority. After Ambedkar’s death that year,
Sangharakshita toured the sub-continent teaching Dalits about Buddhism.
Tens of thousands converted and many would become members of the FWBO.

Sangharakshita relied on audiobooks in later life because his eyesight
had deteriorated
Sangharakshita relied on audiobooks in later life because his eyesight
had deteriorated
His research into different Buddhist traditions throughout Asia would
later form the basis of his influential book, A Survey of Buddhism,
published in 1957.

Seven years later he returned to Britain after being invited to take
over a small Buddhist community in Hampstead, north London, by his old
mentor Humphreys. After 20 years in India, Sangharakshita was a
different man to the precocious youth Humphreys had first encountered. Membership of the Buddhist Society was made up mainly of people from the
upper echelons of society, like Humphreys himself. They wanted a
Buddhist equivalent of a clubbable Anglican vicar. His radical vision
was unpalatable to them.

For his part, Sangharakshita thought it inappropriate that Humphreys was practising as a criminal barrister leading Crown prosecutions in murder
trials that led to the executions of Derek Bentley in 1953 and Ruth
Ellis in 1955, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Sangharakshita
was asked to leave the Hampstead community.

He started to build his own community, which would be praised for
setting up co-operative enterprises that he called “right livelihood businesses”, such as vegan restaurants, whole food shops, craft
businesses and even providers of car and home insurance.

Some of his ideas continued to be controversial, however. He is said to
have encouraged male and female members of the community who were
married to live apart because heterosexual relationships led to “mutual exploitation, addiction and neurotic dependence”. He wrote: “The
single-sex community is probably the most powerful means of assault on
the existing social set-up.”

From the late 1980s he passed on responsibility for running the order, stepping down in 2000. The order was renamed the Triratna Buddhist
Community in 2010 to reflect its evolution as an international
organisation with many devotees in Buddhism’s Asian heartland.

Sangharakshita retired to the order’s main retreat at Coddington, near Hereford, where he would listen to audiobooks because his eyesight had deteriorated. He wrote more than 70 books. Thousands of his followers in
India are expected to gather tomorrow at the Triratna centre in Nagpur,
where they will watch his funeral on big screens.

When a doctor gave him a long and convoluted explanation as to why he
was going to stop treating him for sepsis, the monk interrupted him:
“You mean I’m dying?” The doctor nodded. Sangharakshita looked thoughtfully at the pile of audiobooks that had just been stacked by his
bed. He smiled and said: “You had better put those back.”

Sangharakshita, Buddhist leader, was born on August 26, 1925. He died of pneumonia and sepsis on October 30, 2018, aged 93

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)