The Complete Works - More Than Halfway

Of course it’s different working on Sangharakshita’s complete works now he’s no longer with us, but it still feels like a collaboration; he was deeply involved in the work, and my last conversations with him were mostly about it. There are specific questions I wish now I’d thought to ask, but the general approach was clear, and I know he trusted us to see it through.

In recent months as I’ve worked on the volume of Sangharakshita’s poems and short stories I’ve come to understand in an almost visceral way how someone can live on through their words. He once said (in My Relation to the Order): ‘In my poetry ... there is a great deal of me, perhaps more than there is in some of my prose writings, at least in certain respects. When you read my poetry you are not only very much in contact with me but in contact with me in a special kind of way.’ This is how I’ve come to feel during many hours spent absorbed in the poems – it really is as though he is present through his words – and I would recommend this volume to anyone who wants to get to know more deeply the cast of his mind and especially the passions of his heart.

Meeting Sangharakshita in a very different mode, I’ve also been working on volume 14 (The Eternal Legacy and Wisdom Beyond Words), an illuminating and heartfelt exploration of the words of the Buddhist tradition and the way beyond them.

And in her final and much-valued contribution to the series, Kalyanaprabha has been working on the memoir Moving Against the Stream. That, together with the two volumes I’ve been editing, will be published in April 2020, at which point we’ll be more than halfway – 15 volumes published, 12 to go.

The complete works project is benefiting hugely from the labours of love of a number of people working voluntarily – many thanks to them, and praise and gratitude in particular to Shantavira and Kalyanasri for all their hours of copy-editing and proofreading.

Dharmacharini Vidyadevi