Rainbows and Blue Robes
The day of the funeral had arrived. That morning Sangharakshita’s body had been placed in a cardboard coffin, lovingly designed with a paper cut collage some years before by Annie Leigh. The design was based on the Parable of the Rain Cloud from the White Lotus Sutra and had been agreed with Sangharakshita (Bhante). The coffin was carried to the grave by six pall-bearers in their Guhyaloka-style blue robes. From the morning, the elements put on a fine display with rainbows and light rain. It was somewhat cold but not freezing. At the time of the burial itself, there was a beautiful, late-afternoon golden-yellow light glowing with the autumnal colours of the trees, and the shadows lengthening as hundreds of us scattered flower petals over the coffin and circumambulated the grave.
There was a long run up to this momentous day: the ninety-three years of Bhante’s life, of course, but also eighteen years of planning and re-planning this most significant of funerals. In November 2000, soon after Bhante’s seventy-fifth birthday, I was approached by Subhuti to draw up a funeral plan. Subhuti said to me, ‘I am sure that we would manage without a plan if Bhante were to die tomorrow, working round the clock, but it would be better to have something prepared.’ So I drew up the first of what were to be many different plans with many different people over the years, engaged in committees and follow up work. Each person made a contribution to the eventual plan which was, of course, very different to the original one. Our final team meeting took place at Adhisthana just two weeks before Bhante died – and with no idea that Bhante would die so soon.
The earliest plans involved telephone banks and telephone trees – internet communications not of course being so all-pervasive in those days – and lists of halls in London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere, venues that might just possibly be able to accommodate a thousand people at short notice. One of the outlandish places which somehow made itself onto a ‘B’ or possibly ‘C’ list was the London Palladium (a theatre in Soho with more than 2,000 seats). We also considered our larger urban Buddhist centres, but numbers would then have had to be limited to invitation which we were naturally very reluctant to do. Apart from anything else, how would we decide who to invite? Bhante did not have any personal preference whether it would be cremation or burial. Early on we considered, in consultation with him, possible places where he could be buried, but then agreed that it would be a cremation with a limited number of stupas for the ashes. It was only with the purchase of Adhisthana that we had a place that would be ours ‘for ever’, and Bhante agreed that he should be buried there.
Soon after we moved to Adhisthana, we were very fortunate in finding a funeral director in Malvern who was very supportive of our wish to have Bhante’s body laid out for visiting for as long as possible, and without the unnatural intervention of embalming. When the time came, he helped us make it possible with careful temperature control, including the use of many hundreds of ice packs. Over a period of about a week, hundreds of people came to Adhisthana to sit with Bhante’s body in the Amitabha shrine-room. Bhante looked extraordinarily serene. Many people commented on the special atmosphere.
At the funeral itself, there were around 1,200 people present at Adhisthana who heard the funeral orations, participated in a sevenfold puja, and chanted together the five mantras that Bhante had asked us to chant at the time of his death: the mantras of Shakyamuni, Manjushri, Amitabha, Padmasambhava and Green Tara. Maybe 70,000 people around the world watched it live online, in many cases participating simultaneously in the rituals. The largest numbers were in India. Sangha members gathered at many centres, including, in New Zealand and Australia, during the night.
The commonest response to the funeral that I heard was that it had been ‘amazing’. It really did seem that something from another dimension was present with us that day.
Dharmachari Mahamati
Watch 20 minute video:
https://thebuddhistcentre.com/sangharakshita/death-and-funeral-urgyen-sangharakshita
Watch the full funeral:
https://thebuddhistcentre.com/sangharakshita/funeral-and-burial-urgyen-sangharakshita-1925-2018