The Four Gifts
Day Retreat for GfR Women and Dharmacarinis from the North-East

This day retreat, led by Taravandana and Shakyapada is open to all women in the North-East who have asked for Ordination and to all Dharmacarinis from the area. The theme is Sangharakshita's poem, The Four Gifts.

I come to you with four gifts.
The first gift is a lotus-flower.
Do you understand?
My second gift is a golden net.
Can you recognize it?
My third gift is a shepherds’ round-dance.
Do your feet know how to dance?
My fourth gift is a garden planted in a wilderness.
Could you work there?
I come to you with four gifts.
Dare you accept them?

In this poem, Bhante asks us significant questions: 

• Do we understand the significance of the lotus? 
• Do we recognise the golden net? 
• Do our feet know the intuitive dance of the Sangha? 
• Could we work in the garden in the wilderness? 

Dare we accept the challenge offered in the profound vision Bhante offers to us?

Today we will be exploring these challenges together.

This Day Retreat is open to all women who have asked for Ordination and Dharmacarinis from the Leeds, York, Scarborough and Newcastle areas.

COST: There is no charge but we would appreciate a donation either on the day or when booking. We suggest £15-£20 but please donate what you can manage.

TO BOOK: Please follow the link below.

Background - The Brighton Lectures
This year is the 50th anniversary of the ‘Brighton Lectures’, a series of seminal talks given by Bhante in 1976 in which he clarified the central vision of the FWBO / Triratna Buddhist Community.

These lectures - A Method of Personal Development, A Vision of Human Existence, The Nucleus of a New Society, and A Blueprint for a New World - communicate and evoke the greatest myth by which Triratna lives - the transformation of self and world.

This vision was clearly on Bhante’s mind for some time before the lectures, and in his 1973 poem The Four Gifts he presents the same ideas in a different form, with each gift an imaginative expression of the central idea of each lecture:
 
The lotus gift represents the whole process of human development, the whole unfolding of the potential of life. Triratna offers a method of personal development, especially meditation, and this helps us develop ever higher levels of consciousness, and the further development of the individual. 

The golden net represents a vision of human existence - nets are interconnected, and when you catch something of the Dharma, the rest of the Dharma unfolds, until you are left with the glowing interconnectedness of the whole of the Buddha’s teaching, a whole vision of the Dharma. This process begins with moving from wrong view to right view, and then from right view to Perfect Vision - the vision the Buddha communicated in his teachings on conditionality. 

A shepherd’s round dance represents the Order at its best - the joyful dance of people at the core of the Sangha with lives interwoven and accomplished in their interactions with each other, and with others joining in as they learn the steps. This Order, and its expression as the Triratna Buddhist Community, forms the nucleus of a new society, a different way of living in the world that is deeply informed by the Dharma. 

The garden in the wilderness is the engagement of our Sangha with the world, offering a blueprint for a new kind of society that offers a refuge from the wilderness of saṃsāra. The garden comprises all those ways in which our Buddhist community grows in and engages with the world, and all the Sangha are the gardeners working to help maintain and grow this beautiful garden.