Chapter Two of: Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition, written by Dharmachari Subhuti
and published by Windhorse Publications, 1994 - ISBN Number 0 904766 68 3

The Unity of Buddhism

(Reprinted in this collection with the kind permission of
Dharmachari Subhuti and Windhorse Publications)

[Please note that whilst diacritic marks were used where appropriate for Pali and Sanskrit terms in the original
publication, due to the lesser technology being used to produce this book they have been omitted!]

They carved Him out of sandal, chipped from stone
The Ever-moving, cast in rigid bronze
Him Who was Life itself, and made Him sit,
Hands idly folded, for a thousand years
Immobile in the incensed image-house;
They gilded Him till He was sick with gold.

And underneath the shadow of the shrine
They sauntered in their yellow silken robes,
Or - lolled replete on purple-cushioned thrones In
sleepy stanzas droned His vigorous words
To gentle flutterings of jewelled fans...

Arise, O Lord, and with Thy dust-stained feet
Walk not the roads of India but the world!
Shake from the slumber of a thousand years
Thy dream-mazed fold! Burn as a Fire for men!7

In the late summer of 1942, at the age of sixteen, Sangharakshita had the decisive experience of his life.
On reading the Diamond Sutra he knew for the first time that he was a Buddhist. Sublime as was the
teaching of the Sutra,

I at once joyfully embraced it with an unqualified acceptance and assent. To me the Diamond Sutra was
not new. I had known it and believed it and realized it ages before and the reading of the Sutra as it were
awoke me to the existence of something I had forgotten. Once I realized that I was a Buddhist it seemed
that I had always been one, that it was the most natural thing in the world to be, and that I had never been
anything else.8

He had a similar response to the Sutra of Hui-neng, a translation of which he discovered at the same time
as the Diamond Sutra. Whenever he read it, he was thrown into a ‘kind of ecstasy’. The impact of thesetwo spiritual masterpieces has continued to affect him. Recently he has said that he has never seen anyreason to doubt the initial insight they precipitated in him. Indeed, it has been the basis for his whole life,
from that moment on.

Sangharakshita’s discovery that he was a Buddhist and that he had always been one came through directcontact with the inspired utterance of the Enlightened mind, for, although the Diamond Sutra is almost
certainly not a literal record of the historical Buddha’s teaching, its words clearly emanate from a veryhigh level of spiritual experience. The Sutra, through paradox and counter-paradox, systematicallynegates all the categories of Buddhist thought. It leaves nothing for the rational mind to grasp,
particularly a mind almost entirely unfamiliar with Buddhist doctrine. The prajna-paramita or
‘Perfection of Wisdom’, which is the subject of the Sutra, reveals itself not to the intellect, but only tothe uplifted spiritual imagination. It is all the more remarkable that the sixteen-year-old youth shouldhave responded as he did.

Before encountering the Sutra, he knew little of Buddhist teaching. He had had no contact with Buddhistculture and he was not to meet another Buddhist for a further two years. For him, Buddhism wastherefore nothing but the supra-rational insight to which the Diamond Sutra had introduced him.
Buddhism was the Dharma: the pure and undiluted truth about the nature of reality, communicated fromthe lips of the Buddha of the Sutra who himself embodied that truth. The Dharma was, for
Sangharakshita, beyond all thought and all culture. In a sense, it was therefore eternal and omnipresent.
This is perhaps partly what he means when he says that the Diamond Sutra was not new to him when
he first heard it.

The Unity of Buddhism Page 1
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


Sangharakshita’s insight into the meaning of the Diamond Sutra enabled him to see from the outset the
underlying unity of Buddhism. Extraordinary though it may seem, he first perceived the truth of theDharma at the point where words dissolve into paradox and the rational intellect is confounded. He saw,
from the first, the entirely transcendental nature of the Buddha’s Enlightenment - transcendent, that is,
over all our normal ways of knowing, accessible only to the eye of Wisdom. If the Dharma is, by its verynature, beyond all thinking, then no one expression of it can claim to be exhaustive. Words and conceptscan only be ‘fingers pointing to the moon’, as the Zen saying has it: they can only indicate a higher truththat they can never fully capture. Sangharakshita has therefore always seen the various schools andtraditions as so many attempts to express that single transcendent experience that he first encounteredin the Diamond Sutra. Indeed, his first published work on Buddhism, written at the age of eighteen, wasan article on ‘The Unity of Buddhism’, published in June 1944 in Buddhism in England (now The Middle