Refuge Before Sect: Sangharakshita's Founding Choice

By the time Sangharakshita returned to England in the mid 1960s he had spent over twenty years in Asia and trained inside more than one living tradition, ordained as a Theravada bhikkhu and also studying under Tibetan teachers rather than settling permanently within either lineage's own institutional structure. When he founded the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in 1968, that mixed formation shaped the movement's central design choice: rather than transplant one Asian school's monastic and doctrinal apparatus wholesale into a British context, he built the new order around what he took to be the single act every Buddhist tradition shares underneath its particular forms, going for refuge to the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha, treating that threefold commitment rather than ordination lineage or sectarian affiliation as the actual definition of a practicing Buddhist. The approach drew criticism from more tradition-bound quarters precisely because it declined to anchor itself in any single school's authority, but it also let the movement scale in a way a single transplanted lineage might not have, growing by the time of his 2018 death into more than a hundred affiliated centres across twenty seven countries. His earlier activism alongside B.R. Ambedkar's mass Dalit conversion movement in India shows the same instinct at an earlier stage: a conviction that Buddhist refuge belonged to whoever sincerely took it up, official lineage credentials or not.