Buddhism ... is not one road to Enlightenment but many - although in a deeper and more hidden sense all

ways (dharmas) are one. It is therefore suited to all sorts and conditions of minds; the youthful and the

aged, the melancholy and the joyful, the simple and the profound; it is the universal way of salvation. In

its all-embracing unity all the polarities which our arbitrary habits of discrimination have built up since [the]

beginning of time, all distinctions of colour, creed, and social position, of ignorant and learned, even of

Enlightened and Unenlightened - all these are utterly obliterated.9
An understanding of this would seem to be integral to Buddhism itself, yet it has not always beenunequivocally shared by all Buddhists. This is not, in a sense, surprising. In the elaboration of theBuddha’s original teaching by the different schools, quite diverse, even contrary, teachings and practicesarose. Those divergences were then compounded by transmission through the various cultures of Asia.
It has not been easy to see all Buddhism’s many manifestations as equally striving for the sametranscendental goal. Buddhists have therefore often identified the Dharma with their own particularbrand. Fortunately, such Buddhist sectarianism has been altogether of a milder kind than is often foundin Christianity, yet ignorance of other schools or indifference to them is widespread.

From the very outset of his career as a Buddhist, Sangharakshita did not identify with any particularschool, nor did he conceive of Buddhism in terms of any one of its many cultural forms. This perspectivegave him the freedom of the entire Buddhist tradition. He could draw sustenance and inspiration fromwhatever source was available to him, according to his unfolding spiritual needs. Before we examine hisidea of the unity of Buddhism in more detail we must follow him in his encounters with its variousmanifestations.

He had begun early on the road to that crucial experience brought to him by the Diamond Sutra. It was
principally his reading that guided him to Buddhism. At the age of eight he was confined to bed for twoyears and launched into the world of literature and art. Among other books, he read Charles Kingsley’sHypatia, a historical novel about the last of the Neoplatonists in Christian Alexandria. He was deeplyimpressed by Kingsley’s description of the trance into which the beautiful Hypatia falls as her soul flies‘alone to the Alone’. This was his first encounter with the mystical and it made a lasting impression. InHarmsworth’s Children’s Encyclopaedia he read the lives of the world’s great religious leaders. TheBuddha must have made a particular impression on him, even at this age, for he wrote a life of the greatsage, which he copied in purple ink on his best notepaper. He learnt of Plato too, when he was about ten,
and sent his mother to the local public library for a copy of the Republic, the first work of philosophy
he read.

Although baptised into the Church of England, Sangharakshita received little formal religious educationand his parents put him under no pressure to attend services. Indeed, they themselves showed decidedlyheterodox tendencies and dabbled in some of the more obscure popular religious movements of the time,
such as spiritualism, the Rechabites, the Druids, and Coué’s New Thought. When he was eleven, mainlyfor social reasons, he joined the Boys’ Brigade - a quasi-military organisation similar to the Boy Scouts,
formed to encourage the leading of a Christian life. His company was attached to the local Baptist churchand so he began attending Bible classes and Sunday services. Although he did experience sometemporary fervour for the person of Christ, the simple emotionalism of the Baptists made little lastingimpression on him. He was, even then, already thinking for himself on religious matters and said hisdaily prayers to the Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed in turn,

it being my na.ve conviction that by this means I should be sure of gaining the ear of whoever happened

to be the true saviour.10

When he was evacuated to Devon at the age of fourteen to avoid the London Blitz, the young Dennisread more deeply in the great philosophical and religious classics of the West: the works of Plato,
Aristotle, and Longinus, for instance. It was however those of Seneca and of the emperor Julian ‘theApostate’ that most deeply impressed him. He began also to read some of the classics of the East: the

The Unity of Buddhism Page 2
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


Vedas and Upanishads. Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, a verse translation of the Bhagavad Gita,
he read ‘in a state bordering on ecstasy’. However, the book that most deeply affected him at this periodwas Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Reading this convinced him

that I was not a Christian - that I never had been, and never would be - and that the whole structure of