One of the central concepts in the practice of Shin Buddhism is that of the importance of encounter, the one to one interaction between two people, with all its wholly unpredictable, often far-reaching consequences.

A small illustration of that essential unpredictability can, perhaps, be seen in the strange and unforeseeable consequences of my own encounter with Chimyo sama a decade ago, and with so many of you in the years which have followed.

Indeed, it seems to me that the importance of encounter, in the Buddhist sense of that term, has not diminished, but increased, in the centuries since it was illustrated in the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and later, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the lives of men such as Hōnen and Shinran Shonin.

It is a modem truism that, for the last two centuries or more, the world has, in practical terms been steadily growing smaller.

With the advent of the telephone, the motor car, the aeroplane, and now the email and the internet, the pace of that apparent shrinkage has been, and still is, accelerating dramatically, and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the years to come.

In every field of human activity, the possibility of instant global intercommunication has made it possible to create new contacts and to maintain existing ones in a way which, in the past, was inconceivable.

And yet, in the heart of this particular truism, as in almost every aspect of our lives, there lies a paradox.

The emergence of the global economy; of the multi-national financial and commercial corporations, with budgets far exceeding those of a high proportion of the nations of the world, and powers which place them beyond the control of even major national governments, has given rise to an increasing feeling of helplessness on the part of the vast majority of the world's inhabitants, who do not have their hands on the levers of power.

For many of us, the feeling of futility is compounded by daily bombardment by the worldwide news of wars and famines and disasters about which it seems that there is little or nothing that we, as individuals, can do.

In such a situation, a single personal encounter may appear to be almost inconsequential in comparison with the situation which existed when the human inhabitants of the world amounted to only a minute fraction of the present total, and when, for the vast majority of that tiny population, the few hundred inhabitants of the village in which, or near to which, they lived appeared to be almost the only network with which they needed to be concerned.

Vast urban concentrations, the increasing distances between home and workplace, the dispersal of the nuclear, let alone the extended family, seem for many to lead to a further erosion of the significance of an individual, personal encounter.

On the other hand, it was part of twentieth century folklore that everyone in the world was only six handshakes away from everyone else.

But most of us have, in practice, found this hard to believe.

We continue to think what an incredible coincidence it is when we happen, entirely by chance, to meet a complete stranger who turns out to know someone with whom we were briefly acquainted decades ago in another country or even another continent.

In reality, there is nothing at all extraordinary about what has come to be called ‘the small world effect', and it turns out that the folklore was nearer to hitting the mark than even those who half believed in it ever suspected.

In today's, computerised societies, the concept of the network has become increasingly familiar, and innumerable scientists are investigating its mathematical underpinnings and its implications in everything from the internal organisation of the brain to the design of transport systems or the evolution of species.

If you assume for a moment that on average each of us has, say, three hundred individuals that we know in one way or another, then we are only two handshakes away from about 90,000 people and, by extension, in a world of six billion, only four handshakes away from any one in it that you care to name.

This calculation is based, however, on the assumption that the connections between our friends and acquaintances are utterly random, so that we are all as likely to know Presidents as we are to know Amazonian Indians, and bus-drivers as Inuit people.

Since most of us tend to move within a small cluster of people, who are not very obviously linked to everyone else, this dearly cannot be true.

If, instead, we presuppose complete regularity in place of utter randomness within the network, so that each the world's inhabitants only knows the 300 people who live nearest to them, which is likewise obviously not the case, the vast majority would tend to be about ten million handshakes away from, for example, the President of the United States.

In the real world, however, networks are neither entirely random nor entirely regular, but in fact lie somewhere in between.

What is more, computerised investigation of the underlying mathematics, which control the interactions between the different parts of a network, has recently shown that only the addition of a very small number of random connections, within an otherwise regular network, is needed to make the number of steps required in order to reach any other part of the network, not merely fall, but plummet, towards the very small number required within a totally random network.

These abstract, mathematical analyses of the nature of networks have subsequently been tested in the field and have been shown to work in the context of large and complex human social networks.

We are saying much more than most of us realise when, in unconscious alignment with folklore and science alike, we observe, in the course of some chance encounter, that "it’s a small world".

If we take these observations concerning the nature of networks and the small world phenomenon in conjunction with the shrinkage of the real world in terms of travel and of the worldwide web and information technology of every kind, it is evident that there are no reasonable grounds at all for thinking that the significance and importance of personal encounter has diminished in the modem world.

On the contrary, it is more important than it ever was.

However, it is also true that the vast majority of the untold numbers of encounters taking place at any given moment in the modern world, whether person to person or through such media as the internet, are extremely superficial.

When the repercussions are so incalculable and so widespread, each of us has a greater responsibility than ever before for seeing that we do the best we can in each and every one of our encounters, and not merely in those that we consider, for one reason or another, to be important.

In a previous talk, I spoke of the duty of a teacher in respect of each and every student with whom he or she comes into contact, however briefly.

That duty is not confined to the class-room and the lecture theatre, to teachers in schools and universities. For you as Buddhists, in particular, it seems to me that this duty is especially onerous in one sense, and full of joy in another, since the deeper meanings of encounter lie at the very heart of your tradition.

Nevertheless, what is most familiar is often most easily overlooked.

As all of you here, who have contributed to the creation of a London offshoot of Shogyoji in the form of Three Wheels, well know, the importance of a wider network of encounter for the future of Shogyoji itself lay in the forefront of Chimyo sama's mind.

The very concepts of Three Wheels and of encounter are inextricably. intertwined and I would therefore like to repeat, in the context of this talk some things which I have said before in other contexts, and with which some of you are undoubtedly all too familiar, about what seem to me to be their meaning.

The three wheels are, of course, the giver, who gives without thought of return; the gift, which is pure, in the sense that it does harm neither to the giver nor to the receiver, and the receiver who, whilst appreciating to the full the value of the gift, accepts it without incurring a feeling of indebtedness.

But what about encounter, a subject on which, in the presence of all of you, I am even less qualified to talk?

An encounter between two people can and should, it seems to me, be a process of discovery in which each, in discovering the other, at the same time, discovers himself or herself.

In such an encounter, both are givers and both are receivers.

The gift which each of them gives to the other, and which each of them receives from the other, is a part of themselves.

There can be no greater gift, and of all gifts, it is both the hardest to give and the hardest to receive.

The great majority of all encounters are no more than skin deep, since the giver is not prepared to give or to reveal more than a tiny fraction of the self, and even when that little is offered, the receiver is often so engrossed in himself or herself that it is neither recognised nor appreciated for what it is.

If, on the other hand, the gift, however great or however small, is freely and fully accepted, that in its turn is a gift to the giver, and for the receiver is the first part of the giving of his or her self.

A true encounter at the deepest level is therefore something that is for the most part, and for most of us, seldom approached, and even in love, perhaps never in practice achieved.

Yet, if we never attempt to reach the unreachable summits of the mountains, we may not even succeed in climbing the foothills.

Without an encounter, at whatever level, there can, of course, be no three wheels. Conversely, without the three wheels, there is in a deep sense, no encounter. So it is, that where there is true encounter, the three wheels are the one wheel, and out of diversity, unity and harmony are born.

The world of the Shin Buddhist is, however, in many ways quite different from the one inhabited by most of those who surround you.

There is always the temptation, not to give, but to withdraw the self, and encounter can therefore, in the ordinary sense of the term, be a dangerous thing. It is in relation to these considerations that the physical Three Wheels in London, however unimportant in itself, is a symbol of the road which you in Shogyoji have chosen to travel.

It is you who make it, in the Buddhist sense, truly a place 'to be'.

It is a physical reflection, but no more than a reflection, of the Shogyoji sangha's desire, under Chimyo sama's leadership, for perhaps a deeper, more highly tested, as well as a wider, form of encounter.

You have chosen Taira and Hiroko Sato, with what is so clearly their wholehearted commitment to the deep meaning of encounter, to make of that physical reflection spiritual reality.

But the continuance of that reality, long after they, and you, and I have gone, depends on the depth and quality of the encounters between all of you and all of those who have visited, now visit, and will visit, what is, after all, no more than a small, suburban house, a Buddha shrine, and a garden.