So Many Precious Items
‘Oh yes, I had forgotten we had those!’ Sangharakshita (Bhante) has picked up an item from the box in front of him, one of two ancient-looking leather pouches, adorned with small ornamental plates of brass or bronze. He is obviously taking some delight in weighing the object in his hand, while running one finger across the engraved plates that are affixed to the front and back of each. Inside one of the items is a dark nub of flint and a musty roll of tinder. They are, it seems, old Tibetan fire-making pouches and Bhante is trying to recall where they may have come from. ‘Perhaps’, I suggest, ‘you brought them in the Kalimpong bazaar?’ – knowing that Bhante, though not having much money himself, would often buy items from some of the desperate Tibetans who were flooding into Kalimpong after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. ‘Yes, perhaps’, he replied, still absorbed in exploring the shape and texture of the curiosity he held in his hand.
We are sitting in Bhante’s study at Madhyamaloka, some years before his move to Adhisthana. I have brought a selection of boxes and files up from a room in the community that has been designated as the ‘treasury’. Most of Bhante’s archival material had been stored there since its relocation from Padmaloka some fifteen years earlier. There will be many ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ and ‘Can you read it out to me?’ over the next month or so as we unpack and rediscover old sheaths of letters, hand-written manuscripts, caches of semi-precious stones, dozens of old Tibetan bronzes and, of course, many other curiosities. Box by box, file by file, Sangharakshita patiently examines each dusty folder, reminiscing on its significance or, if it is an object, talking of its likely provenance – a little fragment of personal history attached to each one.
I ask him about a letter from the Maharaj Kumar of Sikkim. It had been written in acknowledgement of a letter received from Sangharakshita in the early 1960s, but the reply from the Maharaj Kumar betrays evident indignation. Bhante reminds me of the story of the Maharaj Kumar’s wedding plans. Before the wedding took place, Bhante had found out that not only were animals to be sacrificed and alcohol supplied for the wedding feast, but there were also plans to dispose of the dogs that hung around the Gangtok bazaar prior to the celebrations. As the Maharaj Kumar was also to be the twelfth Chogyal (‘righteous ruler’), the title conferred upon Sikkim's Buddhist kings, it was of course incumbent on Sangharakshita to register his disapproval. Many more stories and anecdotes were to follow before the exploration of Sangharakshita’s archive was completed.
These memories are poignant. Now we are nearing the first anniversary of Sangharakshita’s death, work on the ‘Annexe’ (Urgyen House) is underway and the storage, cataloguing and eventual display of some of the archival material can be planned. How best to preserve it for posterity? So many precious items: arrays of ancient Tibetan thangkas, sacred scriptures and ritual artefacts; letters from Dhardo Rimpoche, Dr Ambedkar, Lama Govinda, Edward Conze and many others; thousands of letters that make up Bhante’s own outgoing correspondence over six decades; a chest full of personal notebooks, some of which date back to the 1940s and Bhante’s freelance wandering days in India; great piles of hand-written or typed manuscripts, testament to a lifetime of literary activity; thirty-odd volumes of photograph albums, showing intimate glimpses of friendships recorded and journeys undertaken over the last fifty years; intriguing fragments of unfinished pieces such as ‘What I have Learned from my Gurus’ listing thirty-nine ‘gurus’, with a line or two recording what was learnt from each, including lessons from his mother and father. And many more fragments that chart an extraordinary personal history – a history in which we ourselves share.
Dharmachari Paramartha