The Triratna Buddhist Order

Our Buddhist movement was founded in 1967 as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) by Urgyen Sangharakshita, an Englishman who realised at the age of 16 that he was a Buddhist and, after a long search, was ordained as a Buddhist monk in India in 1950. After a further 14 years living and teaching Buddhism in India, he returned to England in 1964, and saw the need for a new kind of Buddhist organisation - a community of Buddhist practitioners committed to living a Dharma life, who were neither monastic nor lay. Despite feeling that he was not the ideal person to found such a thing, he believed it was needed, and so he founded the FWBO in 1967 and a year later, the Western Buddhist Order (which was renamed the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2010). 

The Triratna Community comprises Order members and all those who attend Triratna Buddhist centres and groups worldwide. The idea behind the Community is to make the living principles and practices of Buddhism accessible to people in the modern world, both in the West and in the East. It is now represented on all the world’s inhabited continents. You'll find more information on the Triratna Buddhist Community at The Buddhist Centre Online.

Unfortunately, Sangharakshita's life was not without controversy. He had sexual relations with a number of his male disciples between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, and some of those relationships caused harm to the men involved and others. Sangharakshita, who died in 2018, issued an apology in 2016 for the hurt he had caused, and Triratna now strongly discourages sexual relations between teachers and their students.

Triratna centres now have rigorous safeguarding policies, such as our own policy. You can also read about the controversies and Triratna's response to them here*. If you want to talk about these issues in person, feel free to contact Akasharaja, centre chair and safeguarding trustee.