Spreading the Dharma
Sharing our Practice
Connecting our Community Worldwide
by Viriyalila
In January I spent a month in the UK touring around to different Triratna Buddhist Centres promoting and fundraising for Free Buddhist Audio. During this trip I had the delightful opportunity to meet up with Ananda, the founder of Dharmachakra Tapes (the old name for FBA). A published poet who was ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Order (then the Western Buddhist Order) in 1968, Ananda was one of the first people to make audio recordings of Sangharakshita as early as 1966. I was interested in hearing stories about these early days of Dharmachakra and the conversation included some thoughts on the nature of communication, Ananda’s first meeting with Sangharakshita and the evolution of consciousness itself! We’ve included audio excerpts from the interview to listen to along with the transcript of our conversation. So we set up the recorder and then just sort of forgot about it. We started out chatting generally about the nature of communication being multi-dimensional, i.e.having effects on multiple levels.
VL: When I first started studying Buddhism in the Trirat
na Community, having access to the audio cassette tape recordings was really essential for me. For me, there is just so much more that comes through when I listen to someone speak as opposed to just reading what they have to say.
AN: Voice is so important to communicate the person, especially Bhante [Sangharakshita] – he’s such a textured reader or speaker. I was listening to one of his talks last night and his voice just so embodied he what he was talking about – like kindly communication, harmonious communication, useful communication – it’s all embodied and you can see it happening as he’s speaking, it’s wonderful.
Listen here: Ananda Extract 1
VL: When Bhante came to Britain in 1965/6 and he started speaking publicly, I understand that you were very pivotal in making the first recordings of Sangharakshita. Would you talk about that?
AN: There were some earlier recordings that were made at the Hampstead Vihara, I didn’t do those, but after his return from India in 65/66 – the very first ones that he did were given at Kings Way Hall in London , it was the aspects of Buddhist psychology – the first series – and there may have been an odd talk given at Wesak. In 1967 were the first recordings I did.
VL: What sort of equipment did you use?
AN: I was a sound engineer at the BBC, I was quite interested in sound recording. I already had a Revox machine – (VL: What’s that?) It’s a big reel to reel with 10 inch spools, huge thing, very, very heavy, semi-professional. The BBC didn’t use them, but they were considered halfway between ordinary domestic use and professional and but they had similar machines they used made by the same company called Studoc, made to the same standards as the big machines at the BBC. It cost me £100, which was a lot of money back then.
VL: Did you have to carry it around?
AN: Yes, it was very, very heavy.
Listen: Ananda Extract 2
VL: What did you do with these recordings?
AN: I listened to them – and made copies. I had two machines going all the time, playing the talks over and over again as copies were made on 7 inch reels. It was very time intensive as there was no high speed option. The ten-inch reels were used for master recordings.
VL: Who did you give them to?
AN: Mainly I remember there were two groups – there was one in Nottingham [UK] and one starting up in Auckland, New Zealand. there was a new group starting up. Those were the first people we were sending tapes to. They were shipped by boat and took weeks to get there. I think there was also a group in Brighton in those early days too.
It all started with the tapes. The tapes were the first thing. Then you could get people to come around and listen to them. Because we didn’t have Order Members giving lectures at that time, so people came around and they listened to the tapes of lectures that Sangharakshita was giving in London at the time.
VL: Is there any particular series of taped lectures that you remember being particularly struck by?
AN: I think The Noble Eightfold Path – it was the first one where he Sangharakshita really opened up the Dharma from basic principles and methodically went through it. Those talks are very accessible.
The people who came to those first lectures – and they were packed 80 to 100 people – were mostly people who didn’t know anything about Buddhism. People in careers, middle-aged people, generally not many young people. The talks were geared to those sort of people, I seem to remember a lot of people in their 50s and 60s.
Listen here: Ananda Extract 3
VL: How did you find yourself there?
AN: I found Bhante in a little place called Sakura, a Japanese Buddhist shop where Upaya – the first Order member [in strict chronological terms] – worked and where Bhante used to meet people before the class. Bhante used to go in to the shop to talk to him, I think he was giving a talk at Wesak. He used to go in there and talk, promote his activites. I used to go in because I was attracted to the books in there, I used to go in browse.
Bhante was sitting in there one day and he just said hello. I was amazed by this man sitting in this brown orange robes, from top to toe with very short hair. Very strange… Not the sort of thing I was used to at all.
We got to talking after that and he began giving meditation sessions and giving talks which I went to which is how I started out. But it was really that I was interested in the books on Zen and that got me involved in other things.
There was a little café next door to the shop we’d gather after the meditation classes and chat about our lives. That became a little regular thing in itself a kind of prota-sangha. People coming together and chatting about Buddhism. That’s how it began.
The tapes were really important because it was the thing that sparked it all off – the seed of the groups.
Listen: Ananda Extract 4
VL: I’m really interested in reinvigorating the practice of listening to talks, especially in groups of people and encouraging people to dialogue with each other about the teachings being offered.
AN: These ideas take a long time to kind of make their way in to one’s mind in a way. b/c You cannot just immediately understand something – because it is so different, you need a frame of reference. So, some of these ideas have taken decades just to be understandable really. Like the whole idea of the higher evolution…. and the fact that there are different kinds of consciousness – such basic things – but you can’t just immediately understand something like that, one has to grow into it I think is what I’m saying.
Listen to this here: Ananda Extract 5
AN: I’m only now just beginning to understand, after all these years… what we are doing
VL: What are we doing? Do you have a key to that? Just listening to different practitioners give their Dharma talks thru fba and how they are working out how they are practicing the Dharma is so helpful.
AN: at the ordinary level of just improving our lives, improving your ethics and relationships and that sort of thing, but there is a whole bigger context of it which is mind boggling really, which is we are changing the human race…we are changing the whole consciousness of humanity into something new. It’s part of that vision of evolution, the higher evolution. Start off with very low organisms with no consciousness to mammals higher mammals like the apes, and then you get human beings, and then you get whatever comes after the human being, the next stage.
we can’t really understand that any more than the monkey can understand the human life.
It is a new phase of consciousness.
I am beginning now, after all these years, just to see, yes, we are just one stage in that huge evolution evolving of consciousness. The whole of humanity alive now is but one moment in what we’ve become and what we are going to be. We cannot imagine what are going to be. That’s assuming we don’t destroy our planet before we have a chance to do it.
Listen: Ananda Extract 6
So Bhante’s vision is absolutely vast it’s only just really sinking in, after all this time, what his vision is, you see a little bit of it, and then you say wow, it’s so much bigger than that bit that you saw.
The next stage of being human – where we are all going to – just as lower animals become higher animals – suddenly it’s part of something bigger which is even beyond Buddhism. Of course we may not get there, nothing guarantees we’ll make it to the next stage. Even to have an idea that there is a next stage is quite revolutionary.
Raises a question for us: Why is it so important for us to live ethical and moral lives? I almost get the feeling that Bhante knows he is part of this process and he is preparing us for the next stage of the process.
Every time I go to see Bhante I am amazed by his simple humanity. When you meet him he is just a human being. He is very approachable – this great intellect you can never imagine talking to– he is a sensitive human being with many different interests in like music and policics and history. And it’s very imp for people to see that, because not very many people take the trouble to to see him.
VL: His writing is just one particular expression of him. I really encourage people to listen to his talks.
AN: It makes a big difference when you meet him.
Many thanks to Ananda for sharing his stories with us, and for letting us share with you all.
~ Viriyalila, Free Buddhist Audio Team
Today’s FBA Podcast is titled “Chetul Sangye Dorje” by Vajratara. A forthright and passionate talk, taking as its starting point the great contemporary Tibetan teacher (sometimes also written ‘Chatral Sangye Dorje’) and his relationship to practice in the Triratna [FWBO] Community via his giving of the Green Tara practice to Sangharakshita. The main focus, however, is the need to practice the Dharma for others as part of a meaningful community, and Vajratara argues her case with a balance of down-to-earth humour and uncompromising vision.
Today’s FBA Dharmabyte, 
