Imagine a world without beauty, myth, celebration or ritual. It seems that to feel fully and vibrantly alive, these experiences are essential to us–helping us to feel in touch with all levels of our being by engaging our emotions, senses and imagination. Devotional ritual also speaks this language of the heart and can bring us closer to our highest ideals, but it can be a confronting aspect of Buddhism for some people in the West. However, for the Buddha’s teachings to have a real impact on our lives we need to have a deep feeling for the Buddha’s teaching, a clear understanding is not usually enough. Skilfully steering us through the difficulties we may encounter, Sangharakshita leads us through the sevenfold puja, a poetic sequence of devotional moods found in Tibetan and Indian forms of Buddhism. Within this he discusses the use of chanting, offerings, recitation and other activities in creating ritual space and moods. Engaging in this way can help us commit ourselves to the spiritual journey with all our heart.
The image of the Buddha, cross-legged and meditating, appears increasingly in magazines and on television in the West. But who was the Buddha?
Here we see the Buddha as a historical figure, a warrior prince searching for the truth; in the context of the evolution of the human race, as the pinnacle of human perfection; and as an archetype.
In a letter dated 12 December 1935, the secretary of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Society for the Abolition of Caste system), an anti-caste Hindu reformist group organisation based in Lahore, invited B. R. Ambedkar to deliver a speech on the caste system in India at their annual conference in 1936. Ambedkar wrote the speech as an essay under the title “Annihilation of Caste” and sent in advance to the organisers in Lahore for printing and distribution. The organisers found some of the content to be objectionable towards the orthodox Hindu religion, so intemperate in the idiom and vocabulary used, and so incendiary in promoting conversion away from Hinduism, that they sought the deletion of large sections of the more controversial content endangering Brahmanical interests.They wrote to Ambedkar seeking the removal of sections which they found, in their words, “unbearable.”.Ambedker declared in response that he “would not change a comma” of his text. After much deliberation, the committee of organizers decided to cancel their annual conference in its entirety, because they feared violence by orthodox Hindus at the venue if they held the event after withdrawing the invitation to him. Ambedkar subsequently published 1500 copies of the speech as a book on 15 May 1936 at his own expense as Jat-Pat Todak Mandal failed to fulfill their word.
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