So many kind people have praised the Garden at Three Wheels during the last few months, and many have said to me 'you must be proud of it'.

The answer to this implied question is quite simply, "No, I am not".

Attachment, whether to the past, the present, or the future, is something that ties us down. It takes away, or at best restricts, our freedom. It makes us prisoners.

The Garden, perhaps, is beautiful, as I am not. It is certainly, as I am, and as all of us are, full of faults.

Nevertheless, the Garden is, and I am, as all of us who made it are; it is done.

But whoever is satisfied with that has not understood its purpose and meaning; has not, perhaps, understood themselves.

And that in itself leads to a paradox. However much we attempt to do for the doing, without expectation or hope of gratification or reward, there is always a context, a framework of meaning or purpose, from which we can never escape, however much we may strive for purity in our actions.

From ourselves, in this life, there is no complete escape; there can be no absolute purity either of action or of inaction. In every act, in every abstention from action, we can do no more than struggle, as best we can, to weaken and break the bonds of attachment that bind us.

However much the myriad actions involved in making the Garden were done for the doing, it is, now that it exists, a beginning, and little more. In itself, it is hardly of any importance, but what is made of it, that is another matter.

If it encourages quiet meditation and a calming of the normal hubbub of the mind; if it takes anyone out beyond themselves, beyond the selfish self that inhibits all of us, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

If it has given new perspectives to some of those who worked for its creation, that too will be something. But even if it has, it will remain no more than a small garden, out in a London suburb, made, for the most part, by a group of amateurs with, and even under whom, true experts, men of real humility, were prepared to work.

What will indeed be made of it over the years, or even how long it will still be there, I do not and I cannot know. All that I do know is that you, that all of you, have made it possible.

The Buddha Shrine, strange as it is, and unlike any Buddha Shrine that has preceded it anywhere in the world, together with the two Cabinets for Ashes which are now in the process of construction; those too are the creation of your faith, your generosity of mind and purse and spirit.

In fundamental ways, all these material creations in a distant centre reflect Shogyoji itself, which is a concrete Temple in a side street of a minor town, the significance of which lies solely in the depth and quality of that faith through which your forebears and yourselves have brought it into being, and nurtured and maintained it as a spiritual centre.

With your encouragement and under the wise leadership of Chimyo Takehara sama and the loving direction of Taira and Hiroko Sato, Three Wheels, small, and seemingly insignificant as it is, is already on the way to becoming such a centre, and some of you, having seen the Garden, have said to me," You must be pleased with it".

This question, again in the form of a statement, I find more difficult to answer than "You must be proud of it", and I never quite know what to say. It is almost the same question, but not quite.

Again it is asking one to look back, to gloat if you like, or mentally to congratulate oneself on an achievement, though it is certainly not meant in that way, and it brings up the whole question, which Chimyo sama has asked us to think and talk about, of what is meant by happiness.

Non-attachment, and with it meditation, leads, as I have said, to a calming of the mind and a stilling of the emotions. It can, and often does, in India in particular, but not only in India, lead to quietism and to total separation from one's fellows.

But it can also, as the great Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita so clearly indicates, lead to non-attachment and to calm in the midst of action, even the most seemingly violent action, such as the battle which provides its context, and to which the poem is the prelude.

This is the state which I have striven to achieve for many years, and done so with a quite spectacular record of recurrent failure. It seems to me, however, that in the context of our present lives there is too much that is merely negative in a state of total calm, of complete lack of emotion, or if you like, of being neither happy nor not happy.

Whatever may or may not precede or succeed our present existence, I believe that, in this life, happiness, or, if you prefer it, joy, though it may be incredibly difficult to achieve in the midst of the tortures of pain and illness to which so many are subjected, is indeed a wonderful thing.

But what is happiness? Worse still, what is true happiness? There are all too many less than joyous people who, when faced with a seemingly happy person, are only too ready to tell them that what they have is not what they themselves consider to be happiness, and that it cannot, therefore, be true happiness.

Indeed, the question appears to be one which either has no answer or one which is asked with some particular answer in mind that actually begs the question.

I am not a philosopher and, I have to say, if you will forgive what is, in the present context, a facetious remark, quite 'happy' not to be one, so I can only tell you how it seems to me. I believe that happiness at its most intense, true happiness if you like, lies in, and consists of, delight in the present moment, in each fleeting, never to be recaptured, instant of time, whatever that moment brings.

Of all the emotions, love is the most powerful; of all the actions, making love, not merely having sex, but making love, is the most intense; but always, if our concentration is on those we love and on what we can give and do for them, even that can be done without attachment in the sense in which I have tried to use the term.

In this respect, therefore, I am, for myself, forced to part company both with the Gita and with many Buddhist and Christian writings, in their abhorrence, or their advocation of the total sublimation, of the act of love.

In this, I think, from what I have seen, that you, as Shin Buddhists, and I as an agnostic, a man of no faith, are at one. The past is gone. To be attached to it by pride or by regret, is a mistake.

The past which we remember is not the past as we actually lived and experienced it in all its incalculable richness and complexity. The future is unknown; to be attached to it is folly.

The future that we imagine, or for which we hope, may never in fact come into being, and, in reaching out for it, we may lose our sense of the present which, each fleeting moment of it, is the only thing of which we can have direct experience.

Our only sure way to the future, and here again is the inescapable paradox of the inevitable frameworks which surround our every action, and to which I referred at the start, and I hope that you will forgive me for repeating a constant refrain, is joyfully to do for the doing whatever we perceive as good, and, insofar as it is possible within the context of the paradox, to do it and as well as ever we can.

For me, this is at once the meaning of happiness and the means of attaining it. As far as the past and the future are concerned, regret, on the one hand, and worry, on the other, poison the present. It follows that for me, as I think is also the case for many true Shin Buddhists, the Pure Land is for you, each one of you, if it exists, within you. It is yours to make.

The journey to the Pure Land is also, therefore, as it seems to me, within yourselves. it is, moreover, a journey that I cannot make with you. All I can do is wish you well and wave you on your way and, as you leave, shout out a final paradox into the wind.

It is that, if you are not there already, now, this very instant, is the time for your arrival.