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1996
LONDON LETTER
BUDDHISM COMES WEST
BY: T.R.KThe Dalai Lama was once
again in London at 
the
beginning of September,
doing his round of lectures and public teachings which are hugely
attended. Arguably the best known High Priest of Buddhism in the West,
he is regarded even now as a mythic being from a place called Tibet: a
science fiction monk from an antiquarian Shangrila of the future. This
Nobel Peace Prize winner is amazingly at ease with Quantum physicists,
modern philosophers, cosmologists, moral physicians dealing with death
and mortality of the Western citizenry. Through his ecumenical
diplomacy he has tried to spiritualise the Western political drive with
the Buddhist Mahayana entreaties for "Universal Compassion". He has the
ears of the largest international forums like the United Nations. Even
non-Buddhists seem to venerate him in a way that could even be termed
an expression of irrepressible gratitude that such a compassionate man
in simple maroon robes lives among us. World Church leaders flock to
listen to him talk about Madhyamaka dialectics. And yet until late 1991
no British Prime Minister had consented to receive him officially,
because British relationship with China would be upset.
These speculations bring me to the subject of how Buddhism has come West and established itself so very firmly, whilst retaining its purity, along well defined institutional lines, where the teaching and individuality of various sects seems to have been rigorously re-planted. Without doubt this "intellectual religion" has appealed to thousands of middle class Westerners, who are demonstrably capable of distinguishing between the saffron of a Hare Krishna groupie and that of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, as the bereaved parents in Seattle in Bertolucci's "Little Buddha" know when they have to lose their son to these weather-beaten delegation of Tibetans at their front door-step.
My friend Chip somehow typifies fully this "conversion" of a middle class educated Westerner. He is a Boston "Brahmin" by birth and temperament, with a doctorate in psychology. The only use he could find for his skills was to work as a social worker on the mean streets of New York with the drug addicts dependent on the merciless villainy of the drug dealers. Very soon Chip was targeted by the Underworld. As an escapee he arrived in England and settled in an artists' colony in St Ives in Devon and spent several Bohemian years practising as a musician, when he had first intimations of dissatisfaction with life, awareness of constant change and impermanence, of utter pointlessness of a culture of ambition in the Western sense. This was in the mid-seventies, when I met him on a ten day meditation retreat in an Oxfordshire mansion set in the midst of some 100 acres of woodlands. The retreat was harder , we all felt than a 10 day trek across wild uncharted terrain as a bunch of trainee soldiers, but it was over-subscribed. The hundred odd retreatants who crowded the shrine-room each morning at 4 am were all Westerners, except myself. The teacher was an American in saffron Theravada cotton robes, a Vietnam veteran, visibly Californian in his drawl and ease of manners, but strict in his observance of the Buddhist Vinaya. There were none of the incantatory revivalist themes that you usually encounter at such contemplative retreats. Moreover it was free, with dormitory accommodation, breakfast and lunch before noon, as the last meal of the day. I wondered what spiritual crisis afflicted these 100 individuals so deeply that they were prepared to observe the eight strict rules of avoiding sex, alcohol, all forms of entertainment like music and TV, high beds, any forms of lying or killing, observe total silence, to sit cross legged for up to 12 hours each day looking into the deep abyss called the mind. Fifteen years later Chip is a shaven-headed monk in a deep-red Tibetan habit, with no money but great joy of action and speech.
Today there are over 250 Buddhist groups and centres throughout England (more in Europe) from the Dharma Study group in Brixham in Devon, to the Rigpa Centre, the Throssel Hole Zen Priory, the Madhyamaka Centre in York. Some of these have magnificent temples like the Thai temple in Wimbledon in London and the Samye Ling Karmapa temple in Scotland; and other like the Amaravati in Hertfordshire is a prefab converted ex-school for Western Theravada monks in training and for lay supporters.
I could not help noticing during a recent visit to some of these centres in search of a pictorial feature-article for an European magazine, that there has been a major paradigm shift, a wholesale purification and transformation of this 2500 year old "religion" at the hands of Westerners. Barring a few exceptions of self-styled Buddhist "Masters", discipline or Vinaya as codified by the Buddha himself remains the sheet anchor of these new Buddhist groups. There is very little of the 60s Beatnik and hippy idiom or influence infiltrating these groups. Serious scholastic work has been going on quietly at many of these centres, like the Manjushri in Cumbria, the Madhyamaka Centre in York, and major centres throughout America, some with their own publishing houses, printing presses and a team of translators. A Scottish friend of mine, outwardly an ordinary University fellow in Sanskrit and Tibetan scholarship attached to London University has recently spent 14 years working with the head of Nyingma Sect of Tibetan Buddhism in Paris, on a translation of the definitive history and philosophy of this red-hatted sect. An international Buddhist directory published in 1985 listed over 1000 such centres in the Western World.
There is a prophecy in the Buddhist apocrypha attributed to the Buddha: "When the Iron Bird flies in the sky, Buddhism will go West to the land of red-faced people." The prophecy seems to have come true and India's spiritual gifts to the world seem unending.