As I write, the last three volumes of Sangharakshita’s Complete Works are being despatched to subscribers around the world. The last three volumes of twenty-seven! Each of these volumes has around 750 pages – in total something like 20,000 pages and 10 million words. Publishing the Complete Works has been far and away the biggest project that Windhorse Publications has undertaken in its fifty years. I’ve been a trustee of Windhorse for the last twelve years, and have witnessed the project take shape from the inside, and then start to manifest in the world, three or four elegant grey-bound volumes per year.
On Saturday 9 November, at Adhisthana retreat centre in Herefordshire, UK, there was a celebration for the completion of the Complete Works, with speeches, reminiscence, thanks and a ritual dedication of merits around Sangharakshita’s burial mound. I had wondered if there could be any way in which the completion of the Complete Works could at all be appropriately marked, given the scale of the project, but I was delighted to be there at the celebration. There was a sense among us all of the scale of what had been achieved, an appreciation of the hard work of a very dedicated team of people, and a real sense of the value of these publications.
The question was asked – why a Complete Works? Surely this is the kind of thing that comes out well after a writer has died, once their legacy is assured? But in this case, the publication of Sangharakshita’s Complete Works had started while he was still alive – in fact, he got to see and handle the first eight published volumes before he died, in October 2018. More than anything, the ambitious project was an act of respect and devotion to the founder and teacher of the Triratna Order and movement. Many of the big decisions about what would be in the twenty-seven volumes were made in discussion with Sangharakshita, and some of the volumes contain newly-edited seminars and lectures that were talked over with Sangharakshita in the early years of the project.
In my view, however, these Complete Works are a bit different to a scholarly edition of a well-known author. They are much more of a creative act in themselves, involving the gathering, editing and study of Sangharakshita’s written legacy, while he was alive and while his memory is still fresh. They offer more than anything a direct continuation of his voice, his vision, now in the hefty form of handsome grey-covered volumes. I don’t think that they represent the last word on editing Sangharakshita – in fact, they create the doorway into a cathedral-like complex of written works, the study of which can now begin.
For instance, the two volumes concerned with Sangharakshita’s ‘India writings’ (volumes 9 and 10) open up the whole topic of Dr Ambedkar’s Dhamma Revolution in India, and Sangharakshita’s support for the Triratna Buddhist Order and community in India, thriving among the Buddhist converts among Dr Ambedkar’s followers. Reading Sangharakshita’s studies of Dr Ambedkar and his lecture notes for his teaching tours, I found myself amazed to witness different teaching emphases, and a clarity about the importance of going for refuge and about Buddhist ethics that is less clear in the more sophisticated books and studies aimed at westerners.
Putting all these volumes side by side allows us to see even more of the range of Sangharakshita’s interests and engagements. In volume 25 we meet his poems and short stories. It turns out that Sangharakshita was intensely engaged in writing and appreciating poetry, all his life. And now this work stands alongside opinion pieces, translations, commentaries on traditional Buddhist texts, and five volumes of memoir. In my own view, it was simply impossible to take in Sangharakshita’s work as a whole – until it was laid out in real life in front of me, as it now is.
Vidyadevi, the editor-in-chief of the Complete Works, has brought the project to a climax with a creative endeavour of her own, in the form of a concordance to the whole work. A ‘concordance’ is more than an index but less detailed than an encyclopaedia: it is a carefully-ordered list of all the key words and topics. When I heard that the final volume of the project was going to be longer than any of the previous volumes, my heart sank. How can we publish something that keeps growing like this? But it turns out the concordance, despite or perhaps because of having a life of its own, is looking like it really is going to be the key to the whole project: a guide to all of the interconnected details, in a life’s work that has a shape and coherence above and beyond all of its parts.
Congratulations to Vidyadevi, to Windhorse Publications, and to everyone involved in bringing this visionary project to completion.
Vidyadevi reflects on the Sangharakshita’s Complete Works
