Southern Counties

Dharmavasita has been a Buddhist for twenty years; she was ordained into the Western Buddhist order two years ago. The painting takes pride of place in the Buddhist centre in Brighton. It was unveiled by the founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita,  in November of this year. Here's her story...

' It was painted by Aloka, who lives up in Norfolk. He spent about eight months painting this representation of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni.

We're sitting in our top shrine room which is, if you have not ever been here, a beautiful room. This was an old warehouse belonging to the Co-operative Society. It was a sausage factory and a freezer food warehouse but now it's been transformed since we moved here eight years ago  and this top shrine room has a sort of skylight; it's a very light room and this painting has really made the room.

When I first came across Buddhism which was more than twenty years ago, I think one of the first things I heard about was some of the stories from the life of the historical Buddha; you might know of him as Siddartha, Prince Siddartha.  I was then touched by his kindness and his simple humanity.

He never did any miracles. There's a lovely story about a woman whose child has died and how he responds to her with just common sense and humanity and kindness and appropriateness. It's just a beautiful story.

The other relationship that we have to him is as a symbol; as a symbol of my own potential. So he holds two things in the sense that he was a man, a human being, just as I am. But he penetrated into an understanding of how things are which at the same time is a very profound but in a way quite ordinary and that's what I delight in in my practice of Buddhism.

My relationship with this painting is with who or what I can become and if you think infinite wisdom and compassion and kindness, if you can imagine what that would feel like or how I might be able to experience that, well, it would be something along those lines With this painting, as I sit here, I just get more and more absorbed in it.

I come up here most mornings when I come to work at the Buddhist centre and I usually meditate here in the morning. Also our team, the team that runs the Buddhist centre, we gather here in the mornings and we do some chanting and we chant our intentions, our practice of ethics in the mornings and we also connect with each and we find out how we are.

And then sometimes we just sit here and we can't go away.We just sit here and look at this painting, which is huge, it's golden and around the head of the Buddha there's a turquoise bluey aura. Yes, I just sit here in absorption. It just seems to be a privilege to be able to start the working day in this fashion.