Personal shrine in bedroom

Object location: Bedroom

The central figure on Sangharakshita’s personal shrine in his bedroom is that of Mañjughoṣa who was an important figure in his spiritual life. Two years before he died, he wrote:

With this figure I was already familiar, through my practice of the Mañjughoṣa Stuti Sādhanā, but [reading] the Śūraṅgamasamādhi Sūtra gave me a much more vivid awareness of his presence and of his true nature. He was the veritable embodiment of the dharma niyāma and to be worshipped and meditated upon as such.

From ‘A Reverie-cum-Reminiscence in the form of a Letter to Paramartha’ in Adhisthana Writings, https://www.sangharakshita.org/downloads/new-writings-urgyen-sangharakshita.pdf

This figure sits atop three small, hand-typed, hand-stitched texts that Sangharakshita produced in Kalimpong. Two of these texts contain prayers to the three protectors of the Tibetan Nyingma tradition. (The small thangka on the opposite wall depicts these three figures – see below.) The remaining one refers to verses that were composed by Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche on the occasion of Sangharakshita’s initiation into the Mañjughoṣa Stuti Sādhanā in 1957. Paramartha remembers Sangharakshita asking for them to be brought out of the archive and placed on the shrine, just after his move to Adhisthana in early 2013, during a very difficult period of illness. 

The other figures on Sangharakshita’s personal shrine consist of small Buddha figures that visitors from India brought from time to time as gifts. You will notice that Sangharakshita arranged them in a five Buddha mandala with a small Spanish tile depicting a golden lion taking centre place. Above the shrine you will see a carved wooden head. The expression on its face reminded Sangharakshita of that on the face of one of the Four Great Kings which he had seen in a vision. The head was a gift from Dharmachari Nityabandhu who lived with Sangharakshita at Madhyamaloka, Birmingham, from 2003. He was ordained by Sangharakshita in 2004 and in 2008 returned to his native Poland to establish Sanghaloka, a Triratna Buddhist centre in Krakow.