Amida rupa

Object location: Conservatory

Sangharakshita first came to know of the great ‘Kamakura Buddha’ of Japan – a representation of Amida or Amitābha Buddha – through reading the Children’s Encyclopaedia during his enforced two-year bed rest from the age of eight. When he was twelve, en route to Shoreham for a family holiday, he bought a small representation, later offering incense to it – his first act of Buddhist worship. The figure which sits on a small table in the conservatory was purchased from an antique shop in Muswell Hill, London in the early 1970s. It took centre place on some of the shrines in the early days of the FWBO (Triratna). Dharmachari Aloka recalls that “it was on the earliest retreat shines when I first started going to Padmaloka for study seminars with Sangharakshita when Padmaloka first started in the summer of 1976.”

The piece of green malachite that is placed before the figure was left there by Sangharakshita himself as a sort of offering while engaged in writing one of his last pieces, Green Tārā and the Fourth Lakṣaṇa, which was composed December 2017 – January 2018.