The Early Days of Dharmachakra: A Conversation with Ananda - Part 1

A delightful conversation between Viriyalila and Ananda, the founder of Dharmachakra Tapes (the old name for Free Buddhist Audio). A published poet who was ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Order (then the Western Buddhist Order) in 1968, Ananda was one of the first people to make audio recordings of Sangharakshita as early as 1966. I was interested in hearing stories about these early days of Dharmachakra and the conversation included some thoughts on the nature of communication, Ananda’s first meeting with Sangharakshita and the evolution of consciousness itself! We’ve included audio excerpts from the interview to listen to along with the transcript of our conversation. So we set up the recorder and then just sort of forgot about it. We started out chatting generally about the nature of communication being multi-dimensional, i.e.having effects on multiple levels...