Chapter Twenty-Seven: Circles Within Circles
Although there was no summary of my reflections on the recent history of British Buddhism, and no expression of my hopes for the future, as there had been in my diary of a year ago, this did not mean that I had no plans for the coming months or that I did not have a tolerably clear idea of the nature and present extent of our tiny British Buddhist movement or of my own place within that movement. It was as though there was a series of concentric circles, and that the bigger these circles were the greater was the number of people they contained. I occupied the innermost circle. With me in that circle there were only two other people, Terry and Eric, though we were shortly to be joined by a fourth, in the person of Thich Thien Chau, a scholarly Vietnamese monk of about my own age who had often stayed with me in Kalimpong and who was one of my closest friends within the monastic order.
The second circle, which was not very much larger than the first, contained the Three Musketeers, Amritapani, Ruth, Beryl Jenks, and, perhaps, Bernie Whitelaw. The Three Musketeers saw me regularly, and few weeks passed without my having a lengthy discussion with all three or with one or two of them. Alf and Mike continued to be strongly inclined to the Mahãyãna, especially in its colourful Tibetan form, and under their influence Jack, too, had begun to incline to it, though the Theravãda remained his favourite form of Buddhism. Amritapani saw me rather less often. Having left Biddulph before her year of meditation and study was up, she was struggling to create a community in the terrace property which, with the reluctant agreement of her trustees, she had bought in Camden Town, and which she liked to think of as an outpost of the Hampstead Vihara. Ruth (and of course Maurice) still lived just round the corner; we still travelled down to Victoria together by bus or tube whenever I had a lecture or class at the Buddhist Society, or at least did so on those occasions when Terry was not free to drive all three of us there in the Little Bus. Besides being one of the stars of the speakers class, she was now able to teach basic meditation, and I had already started handing over some of my classes to her. Beryl Jenks, a tiny, ginger-haired South African, was a former Scientologist. She was also a former actress, as well as being a drama teacher and a speech therapist, and it was by virtue of this combination of talents that she had quickly become my right-hand man at the speakers class. Lean, haggard-faced Bernie Whitelaw came to see me every Saturday morning, when it was his duty (unless I happened to be out of London at the time) to hand me the Vihara's housekeeping money for the week and his pleasure to stay for one of those little chats from which I learned so much about his tenants and about the previous occupants of the Vihara.
The third circle was not only bigger than the second but very much bigger. It comprised about two hundred persons, of whom the majority were people who regularly attended my lectures and classes, whether at the Hampstead Vihara or at the Buddhist Society. The rest were people like Christmas Humphreys, Muriel Daw, Kathy Phelps, Maurice Walshe, and even George Goulstone, with all of whom I was in fairly regular contact by virtue of the fact that they were office-bearers in one or other (or in Maurice's case both) of the two Buddhist organizations which, ever since my arrival in England, I had been trying to bring together, namely, the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association. Most of those attending my lectures and classes left straight afterwards, but a few of them, especially at the Vihara and especially after the Sunday lecture, stayed on either to talk with one another in the basement over a cup of coffee or to have a personal interview with me. On Sunday evenings there might be half a dozen people standing in the passage outside the door of the abbots room or sitting on the stairs, all patiently waiting their turn. Of all ages, both sexes, and varying degrees of cultivation, they were probably representative of the kind of audiences I had for my lectures (far more people came to lectures than to classes), at least there at the Vihara. Some of them wanted to ask my advice about a personal problem, others to discuss this or that point of Buddhist doctrine, and yet others simply to ask which book on the Dharma they ought to read next. Occasionally there would be a young man who wanted to be a monk, or an evangelist who wished to convert me to Christianity, or rather, to his own particular brand of that religion. But whatever the reason for their coming to see me might be, few of them, as I gradually discovered, thought of themselves as Buddhists or indeed could be regarded as such, so that the actual number of those attending my lectures, or even my meditation classes, was not a reliable indication of the real strength of the Buddhist movement in Britain.
Most of the people who came to see me in the abbots room are now not even names tome. Even those whose names survive in my diary are, in many cases, no more than names. The few exceptions relate to people who were unusual in someway or who had a strange story to tell. One of these was a young man of nineteen whose father was in prison for committing incest with his daughter, the young mans elder sister. The case had attracted a good deal of publicity (I could well imagine how the gutter press had revelled in the details), and he and his mother and sister had been forced to change their name and move to another part of the country. All this had happened some years ago, he said. His father would be in prison for a few more years, and in the meantime he was visiting him every week and trying to share with him whatever he himself had learned about Buddhism. I was greatly struck by the young mans sincerity and decency, as well as by his loyalty to his father in these painful and even traumatic circumstances. Eventually, when we had met a few times, he brought his mother and sister to see me, and it was then that I heard the strangest part of the story. His sister, who was now married, and who was the older of the two by five or six years, said little or nothing; but the mother had a good deal to say, and indeed seemed relieved to have found someone outside the family to whom she could speak freely. The relationship between father and daughter had lasted for several years, coming to an end only when the girl reached the age of sixteen, when she started going out with boys. This made the father very jealous, so jealous, in fact, that whenever she went out with a boy there was a furious row, and in the end, exasperated by his behaviour, she had told her mother the truth. Daddy didn't want her to go out with boys because he was jealous, and he was jealous because.
The mother had been thunderstruck. At the same time, she told me, she realized, to her horror, that she had known what was going on all along.
Veronica was certainly an unusual person. She was a witch. How she came to be present at my Sunday lectures I no longer recollect, if indeed I ever knew, but before long it became obvious that she was interested less in Buddhism than in me. Of medium height, blonde, and in her mid-thirties, she habitually wore a black sweater and black leggings that fitted as closely as a bathing costume and revealed every detail of her decidedly curvaceous figure. Naturally she was an object of intense masculine interest, and I was not surprised to learn, later on, that she could not travel on the Underground without exciting what Dr Samuel Johnson would have termed the amorous propensities of her male fellow passengers. In the meantime she had joined the queue outside the door of the abbots room, and was even coming to see me during the week, usually bringing some charm or amulet for me to wear. Perhaps she was trying to cast a spell on me. I certainly seemed to have cast a spell on her. In front of me she either stood absolutely rigid, as if transfixed by my gaze, or trembled and looked down in confusion as if totally overpowered by my presence. I was unable to make up my mind whether I really did have that kind of effect on her or whether it was just an act she put on in order to flatter my masculine or spiritual vanity and in this way wheedle herself into my good graces. Years later I remembered that my friend Dr Mehta of Bombay had once told me, after giving me a medical examination, that I had a high sex potential. Could Veronica, I wondered, have sensed this (untapped) potential and wanted to utilize it for her own magical purposes? It was well known that magic, especially of the darker kind, often depended on the deployment of sexual energy, whether individual or collective.
Whatever the reason may have been for her behaving in front of me in the way she did, that behaviour had no effect on me, and I was in no danger of succumbing to whatever designs she may have had on the potential of which Dr Mehta had spoken. Her antics amused me, like those of a kitten playing on the hearthrug, and when she invited me to tea at her flat in Putney, where she lived with her ten-year-old son, I had no hesitation in accepting the invitation. I arrived just as another person was leaving a tall, thin young man wearing a green dress and heavy make-up. That was her friend Daphne, Veronica explained, as though young men in green dresses and heavy make-up were part of everyday life. She was much more at ease in her own surroundings than she ever was at the Vihara, and much more talkative, and before long I was being regaled with an account of the activities of the various black magic groups to which she and her friends belonged. One of these friends was Gerald Yorke, whom she seemed to know quite well. Though aware that in his youth Gerald had been a disciple of the notorious Aleister Crowley, I was under the impression that his involvement with black magic was very much a thing of the past, but it now appeared this was not the case. Not that I was really surprised. Geralds' fondness for telling smutty stories in the Oak Room indicated there was a dirty old man side to his character, and this may well have found an outlet in some of the activities Veronica described. So far as I knew, he was the only Buddhist (for such he regarded himself as being) who had anything to do with black magic, but a few months later there came to see me a young Adonis with a Yorkshire accent who combined a fascination for black magic with an interest in Buddhism, and who besides attending my Sunday lectures wanted me to teach him the black magic practices he was convinced I must have learned in India. In vain I protested I had learned no such practices, whether in India or anywhere else. He continued to press me, and one day brought his girlfriend to meet me. She was Irish, and a Roman Catholic, and after our meeting told him so he reported that she had felt terrified and was convinced I was the Devil. But black magic is not a subject on which it is desirable to dwell, and I had better pass on to the fourth and last of my circles.
This contained all the people who attended the Summer School and the various provincial Buddhist groups I visited from time to time, especially those I visited on a regular monthly basis. As some of the people attending the Summer School also came to my lectures and classes at the Hampstead Vihara or the Buddhist Society, or at one or other of the provincial groups, some of the people contained in the third circle were also contained, temporarily, in the fourth. People whom I met only during the ten days of the Summer School, or in the course of a flying visit to a provincial group, I obviously could not get to know very well, though there were exceptions, at least in the case of some of the provincial groups. Among the exceptions were white-haired Charles Williams in Hastings, the Wraggs, and lame, loyal Jim Martin in Brighton, much-married Derek Southall in Birmingham, and bald, bespectacled little Cyril Petitt in Northampton, who despite being a victim of polio and having to run about on all fours when at home, had a wife and two children and functioned as the very efficient secretary of the group.
My fourth circle could be regarded as also containing people who, though I knew them quite well, I did not see very often. These included John Hipkin at the Blue House near Maidstone, Adrienne Bennett, whose husband was dying of cancer, Clare Cameron, still editing the Science of Thought Review down in Bosham and still a chain smoker, and the various Sinhalese bhikkhus at Chiswick, the seniormost of whom was the Venerable Saddhatissa, who at Ratanasaras insistence had been elected Vice-President of the Sangha Sabha in absentia. Tall, scholarly, and inclined to be sardonic, Saddhatissa had been known tome in India, having in fact participated in my bhikkhu ordination at Sarnath in 1950. Shortly after his arrival in England I went to see him at the Sinhalese Vihara, as the London Buddhist Vihara was commonly designated. I found him wriggling into the long, narrow tube that one could make with the upper robe by rolling its two shorter edges together, after which one pulled the top of the tube well down, thus freeing ones head, then wound the upper portion of the roll round ones left shoulder and so down into ones left hand, which had to keep a tight grip on the end of the roll if the whole arrangement was not to come undone. It was a style much in favour with the orthodox, probably because the way in which the monks imprisonment within his yellow cocoon was suggestive of a strict observance of the Vinaya on his part. Do you know why I am doing this? Saddhatissa demanded, as his head emerged from the drapery. No, I did not know. I am doing it, he said slowly and emphatically, in order
to please
fools. The fools in question, as I well knew, were the conservative Sinhalese lay folk who would soon be coming to offer Saddhatissa and his fellow monks a ceremonial meal.
Though few of the people attending the Summer School and the various provincial Buddhist groups were well known to me, after sixteen months in England I was sufficiently well acquainted with most of them to understand just where they stood in relation to Buddhism. As was the case with those attending my lectures and classes in London, few of them thought of themselves as Buddhists or could be regarded as such. Some were Spiritualists, some Theosophists, some Vedantists, while others subscribed to this or that brand of universalism. More than once, at the Summer School, I overheard a group of elderly women comparing the merits of the different summer schools they had already attended that year, it apparently being their custom to pass the summer months going from one to another of these. As one of them remarked, it was cheaper than staying at a hotel and one met more people. At a meeting of the Northampton group I met a stout, obviously uneducated woman who, it transpired, was a professional medium. Who was my spirit guide, she wanted to know. I explained that Buddhist monks did not have spirit guides. My reply greatly astonished her. She had a spirit guide, she assured me, volubly. He was a little boy, all dressed in blue. She saw him every day, and he told her what to say. If I did not have a spirit guide, how did I know what to say when I gave a lecture or when people asked me for advice? It therefore was not surprising that my experience at the Summer School and the provincial groups should have led me to conclude, as I had concluded from my experience of the people I saw at the Vihara, that the actual number of those attending lectures and classes was not a reliable indication of the real strength of the Buddhist movement in Britain.
British Buddhists still numbered hundreds rather than thousands, though from time to time one heard more optimistic estimates. Nor was the British Buddhist movement simply a very small one. It was also a highly diluted one. It was diluted in the sense that even those who regarded themselves as Buddhists, and they were few enough, tended to combine their Buddhism with elements that were incompatible, in some cases, with the basic principles of the Dharma. When asked how many Buddhists there were in Britain, I was apt to reply, if in provocative mood, that there were altogether two and a half. There was myself, reckoned as one whole Buddhist, while the combined membership of the Buddhist Society, the Sangha Association, and the provincial groups, made up the remaining one and a half Buddhists. This was a gross exaggeration, or rather minimization, of the actual position, but I wanted people to ask themselves what it meant to be a Buddhist and whether they were really justified in regarding themselves as such.
Though it was with Spiritualism, or Theosophy, or Vedanta, that many of them sought to combine their Buddhism, Christianity was the biggest diluting agent. This was only natural. Christianity, in one form or another, was the national religion, most people had been brought up in it, and much as they might appreciate the ethical teachings of Buddhism, or value meditation, they did not always find it easy to give up their belief in God or to accept the fact that Buddhism was a non-theistic religion. Some of them found it quite impossible to do this, even going so far as to maintain, despite the evidence of the scriptures, that the Buddha had not denied the existence of God. In India I had encountered this perverse attitude time after time (Mahatma Gandhi had famously argued that all great spiritual teachers believed in God, and that since the Buddha was a great spiritual teacher he too must have believed in God, whatever his latter-day disciples might say to the contrary), and it was disappointing to find the same attitude so prevalent in England. It was disappointing, indeed, that the Buddhist movement in Britain should be so small, and so diluted, even though I could not but recognize that it took people a long time to become accustomed to unfamiliar ideas, and that in the meantime their views might well be an odd mixture of the old and the new. Perhaps an entirely fresh impetus was needed. More than once I wondered if I ought not to start giving lectures and holding classes outside the orbit of the Hampstead Vihara and the Buddhist Society, though without relinquishing my existing activities and responsibilities, and even discussed the feasibility of my so doing with the Three Musketeers and Eric (Terry had no interest in the Buddhist movement as such), all of whom were as wholeheartedly Buddhist as anyone within any of my four circles. There was no question of starting another Buddhist organization. We already had two of these, the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association, and in any case, had I not been trying, ever since my arrival in England, to bring the Society and the Association together, and did not much work still remain to be done in this connection?
Just how much work remained to be done was borne in on me quite early in the New Year, when Maurice told me that the less we had to do with the Buddhist Society the better we meaning the Sangha Association, the Vihara, and, I supposed, the Vihara's present incumbent, who was still giving lectures and taking meditation classes regularly at the Society's Eccleston Square headquarters. What prompted him to say such a thing I do not know. Perhaps he was going through one of his periodic bouts of antagonism towards the Society's president. Perhaps he had quarrelled with Ruth on account of her loyalty to Toby and his Zen Class. (It was difficult to imagine her quarrelling with him.) Or again, perhaps he was unhappy at the extent of my own involvement with the older and better-known organization, of which, after all, I had been a member during the War and to which I still felt a certain loyalty. Whatever may have been the reason for his wanting us to have less to do with the Buddhist Society, I strongly disagreed with him. We ought to have more to do with the Society, I declared, not less, so that there took place between us what my diary terms rather a clash, after which he left to take the first of the Viharas Tuesday Theravãda study classes.
It was not simply that I disagreed with Maurice. I was profoundly shocked. Besides being Chairman of the Sangha Trust and the Sangha Association, he was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Buddhist Society, and one would have thought that as a matter of common honesty not to speak of Buddhist principle he would not have urged upon me in private a policy which, as he well knew, he could hardly have advocated publicly without being accused of trying to split British Buddhism. It also shocked me to recall how at the last Annual General Meeting of the Sangha Association, held a few weeks earlier, he had taken a very different line from the one he took with me. Speaking in his Chairman's report (which I published in the January issue of The Buddhist) of the past years very extensive programme of lectures and other activities, he referred appreciatively to how the speakers class and the guided group meditation classes had been held alternately at the Vihara and at the Buddhist Society's headquarters in Eccleston Square, adding relations between the two organizations have undoubtedly become closer recently as though he thoroughly approved of this development. As I was beginning to realize, Maurice had a Machiavellian side to his character, and a month after our clash I caught another glimpse of it. Mangalo having decided to leave Biddulph for good, the Sangha Trust had decided to dispose of the property and make plans for a meditation centre nearer London. Maurice had been one of the parties to the decision. However, at the beginning of February I discovered that he had been playing a double game, having secretly instigated the Midlands Buddhist Group, as the Birmingham group was officially known, to get up a petition opposing the sale of Biddulph. Though well aware that Maurice was difficult and irascible, I had not realized he could be duplicitous, and the realization gave me cause for disquiet.