Terry’s Sculpture 

Object location: Bedroom

The small, black, clay sculpture of a head that sits on the window sill in Sangharakshita’s bedroom was made by his friend, Terry Delamare, in the 1960s. Terry called it ‘Mother’. Sangharakshita first met Terry in 1964 after a lecture he had given at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. In his foreword to Crossing the Stream (Sangharakshita’s memoir covering the period 1964–1969) Abhaya writes: 

At the core of the friendship that quickly develops between them is a kind of mutual responsiveness on the basis of a shared spiritual ideal that … Sangharakshita has defined as the essence of Spiritual Community. This friendship, he writes, ‘was to have important consequences for the rest of my life and, through me, for the future of British Buddhism’.

The Complete Works of Sangharakshita, vol. 23, p.xviii