In 1992 Professor John White made his first-ever trip to the Shin Buddhist Temple of Shogyoji in Japan where he and the Head Priest, Venerable Chimyo Takehara, enjoyed what was to prove a seminal encounter. The maturity of Professor White’s own spirituality at the time was such that he was able to recognise through this encounter the profound truth of Mahayana Buddhism, and specifically its culmination in Japan, Shin Buddhism.

In 1993 Professor White delivered his very first talk at Shogyoji, when he expressed the depths of his thought and feeling in the following haiku,

You of pure 
faith,

I,
who am certain
of nothing,

travel
the one
road.

Setting aside his illustrious career as an art historian, Professor White subsequently devoted the rest of his life and all his energy to establishing Three Wheels, the London-based branch of Shogyoji Temple. Looking back at his twenty-eight years of constant endeavour, I feel that John’s haiku poem was an expression of his promise that we would travel the one road together.

At the request of Venerable Takehara, Professor White would travel to Japan every year to give at least one talk at Shogyoji, resulting in a collection of over forty such talks. The twenty-eight presented here were selected by himself for this online publication, a short while before his death at Three Wheels on 6th November, 2021.

The subjects of Professor White’s Shogyoji talks cover a broad scope, ranging from ancient Indian philosophy to modern science, by way of art history, Western philosophy and poetry, especially haiku. In his lectures, he examined these subjects and their deep relationship to Buddhist principles such as “emptiness”, “interdependent origination”, “impermanence” and “the unity of all that is and is not”.

In order to deliver his annual address at the Temple, Professor White studied Buddhism in great detail, not only the Theravada texts from the Pali Canon but also Mahayana sutras in English translation, including the Nirvana Sutra, Lotus Sutra, Diamond Cutter Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra and Larger Sutra of Eternal Life. The clarity and depths of his understanding of Shin Buddhism, in particular, both grew from and reflected his deep involvement in the establishment of Three Wheels. As a result, his last talk, Amida Buddha, Transcendence and Otherness, given online at Three Wheels on 12 April 2021, is both very profound and extremely important. It represents not only the culmination of all his painstaking study but also the conclusions he drew from the experience of working in partnership with Shin Buddhist followers in London to establish and develop a Buddhist temple, known as Three Wheels. Let me quote a haiku by Issa, which I translated with him, and which well expresses his attitude of always doing for the doing, even at the moment of death:

A butterfly flies
as if wishing for nothing
that’s here in this world.