Sangharakshita lived at the English Sangha Trust’s Hampstead Buddhist Vihara where he was the ‘incumbent’ with all the day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Keen to heal the rift between the English Sangha Association and the Buddhist Society, he gave lectures at both the Vihara and the Society. He held question-and-answer sessions, taught meditation, led retreats and visited Buddhist groups around the country including Hastings, Leeds, Brighton, and Manchester, as well as student societies at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. After giving a lecture, he would sometimes go to a local cafe or back to his rooms and talk with people informally. Through all this contact, he came to have a keen sense that there were people in the West eager and ripe for the Dharma. And he began to understand what kind of approach might be needed if the Dharma really was to take root in another, very different, culture. All this happened against a backdrop of tension, in-fighting and back-biting among members of the English Sangha.

‘After my return to England I soon found that my duties as Head of the English Sangha and incumbent of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara left me with as little time for personal meditation as for literary work. Not that I minded overmuch. For me, communicating the Dharma through the medium of the spoken word was an important spiritual practice, and one that sometimes left me, at the end of a lecture, in an exalted state of consciousness from which it was not always easy to come down.’

Sangharakshita, Moving Against the Stream, (CW23), p.132

‘At Hastings took the Meditation Class from 3.45 to 5.30. Nice atmosphere, with most people practising earnestly. Mrs Smith a bit argumentative afterwards. Said that, as for metta, she was practising it all the time, anyway! Caught the 5.50 back to Victoria…. Read Symposium and slept.’

Diary, Saturday 9 January 1965