History
As the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the community was founded in London in April 1967 by Sangharakshita. He had then recently returned to England after spending two decades as a Buddhist and monk in India, following demobilisation from the British army. He had been born in south London as Dennis Lingwood, in August 1925. He would lead the organisation until his formal retirement in 1995, and would continue to exert a decisive influence on its thinking and practices thereafter.
In the 1990s, the order grew in India, and, according to the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Indian members now make up about half the movement's formal membership. In a book published in 2005, the FWBO's members and supporters were estimated to number 100,000, the majority of whom were in India.
In 1997, the responsibility for ordination and spiritual leadership passed to a "preceptor's college", based in Birmingham. In 2000, the first chair of a preceptor's council was chosen by Sangharakshita. In future, this position will be elected by the WBO to five-year terms.
In 2003, the public preceptors, responding to feedback, decided to move away from a formal relationship to the order and movement, and to concentrate on the ordination of new order members, teaching and dharma practice. At the same time, to increase flexibility, the number of preceptors was expanded.
Read more about this topic: Triratna Buddhist Community
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading the land of the free in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Libertys too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (19021975)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by handa center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (18181883)