So Many Precious Items

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 Sangharakshita’s freelance wandering days in India; great piles of hand-written or typed manuscripts, testament to a lifetime of literary activity; hundreds of photographs, showing intimate glimpses of friendships recorded and journeys undertaken over the last fifty years; videos, audio tapes, 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. The work to store, catalogue and eventually display these collections has only just begun.