by Ramsey Margolis
During 2015 and 2016, Winton Higgins had been giving a dharma talk each month to three of Sydney’s insight meditation groups, looking at successive chapters of Stephen Batchelor’s then-new book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age. After he’d given the third of these talks, he would email his script across the Tasman Sea to me in Wellington.
At some point I must have said to him something like, ‘Winton, you know these talks are excellent. You should consider bringing them together into a book.’ His response was, ‘Ramsey, go ahead, mate.’ Well, there you go. It became a project.
Until the end of 2013, I’d been working for Cooperative Business New Zealand (previously known as the New Zealand Cooperatives Association) as its executive director. As the new year started, I was looking for work as a consultant in the area of cooperatives. Living up to my reputation as subject-matter expert on cooperative enterprise in this country, I came to see how people who form cooperatives generally do so because they cannot bring together enough capital on their own to get the standard investor-owned firm off the ground. Instead, they discern opportunities arising from collaboration with other small enterprises in their sector.
Given my training as a compositor in the halcyon days of hot and cold metal type, followed by decades of experience in aspects of printing and publishing, the idea of starting a secular Buddhist imprint with Winton was a no-brainer.
The name we chose announced itself early on: Tuwhiri. It’s a word in te reo Māori, the language of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, which translates into English as ‘to disclose, reveal, divulge, make known, or a clue, a means of discovering or disclosing something lost or hidden, a hint, a tip, a pointer’. This resonated with our project of delving anew into the early Buddhist texts to retrieve their relevance to the human condition, stripping away the monastic dogmatic accretions that had come to obscure them in the intervening centuries.
We didn’t just want to publish a book, though. We wanted it to be an educational resource. So we asked Jim Champion, a school teacher in the UK, to devise a series of questions to follow each chapter – questions relevant both to our text and Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism. People from different countries also offered suggestions for questions.
After Buddhism: a workbook would be its title. Of course, we had no money to finance this project. But that wasn’t going to stop us. A crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter not only pre-sold lots of books around the world before they were printed, but brought in far more than we were expecting.
Within a short while, an opportunity arose to bring together in book from the text of all the talks given during a Korean Sŏn retreat in Devon, UK, which had been led by Martine and Stephen Batchelor. And so we edited and published Tuwhiri’s second book – What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds.
We were on a roll. We employed a part-time administrator but neither Winton nor I took a wage from Tuwhiri. At best, we recovered some of the expenses we had incurred.
We committed Tuwhiri to publishing texts that contributed to secular Buddhism as such, or to its central ethic of care. This led us down some interesting paths, with two books of poetry by the New Zealand poet, Bernard Cadogan, one of which was Crete 1941: an epic poem; Girol Karacaoglu’s Love you: public policy for intergenerational wellbeing – an unexpected best seller; and a second dharma book by Winton – Revamp: writings on secular Buddhism.
Our most recent book ventures into further new ground. Mike Slott’s Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue aligns secular Buddhism with today’s democratic socialism, including its analytical inheritance from Karl Marx. As the Greek economist and politician, Yanis Varoufakis, put it in his endorsement:
‘Whatever next?’ you may wonder. Well, a handful of manuscripts are being developed, and if you want to be kept in the loop as they are developing, I heartily recommend that you subscribe to News from Tuwhiri, our monthly newsletter.
And if you’d like to support Tuwhiri by paying for your subscription, we would very much welcome this. (It’s just what you’d pay for one coffee a month.)
Interested in joining Tuwhiri's editorial board? Have a read of this.
main photo: Ramsey Margolis (left) and Winton Higgins (right) discuss different possible strategies for promoting a secular Buddhist imprint over coffee in Wellington in 2017.