Special events

108 year puja for Bhante Urgyen Sangharakshita

Celebrating the founder of our community and Order

Every year since 2004 we have a collective ritual across the worldwide Triratna Buddhist Community that not only celebrates our founding teacher's birthday but also marks the continual changes going on within our community. This year will be our 19th of 108 pujas.

It is a timeless ritual marking the passing of time, recording those changes through Sangha photographs and signatures in an anniversary log book: a log-book of a community over 108 years.

This year, the Auckland Sangha will celebrate together at the Ponsonby Community Centre (we've hired both halls, so we don't have to compete with parties in other rooms!) with a shared lunch and the traditional puja (ritual).

Programme

1 - 2pm: Shared lunch
2 - 3.30pm: Puja (ritual)

What to bring

Please bring a plate of vegetarian food to share. Note: there is an oven and microwave, but it's a hired facility so we're not sure what's available in terms of cookware

The 108 years of puja was the creation of Danavira, an Order member in the UK, who wanted our centres to be places of ritual and myth, as well as centres of study and training. Another Order member, Mokshapriya, followed up on the idea, gathering together special boxes, cloths, candles and photos - signed and blessed by Bhante Urgyen Sangharakshita - which were distributed out to centres around the world for this purpose.

Bhante Urgyen Sangharakshita was a complex personality, who gave us all an extraordinary and radical gift: the gift of the Buddha's teachings communicated in a way we could understand and practice in a modern, Westernized context. This puja is a celebration of the three jewels (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) that we received through him.

In his own words:

One of the illusions about myself that I do not cherish is that I was the most suitable person to be the founder of a new Buddhist movement in Britain - in the world, as it turned out. I possessed so few of the necessary qualifications... When I look back on those early days...I cannot but feel that the coming into existence of the Western Buddhist Order [now Triratna] was little short of a miracle. Not only did the lotus bloom from the mud; it had to bloom from the mud contained within a small and inadequate pot. Perhaps it had to bloom just then or not at all...

When

Cost