by Winton Higgins
I’ve been an insight meditation and dharma teacher in Sydney, Australia, since 1995. Since that time I’ve led and co-led retreats, as well as given dharma talks on a recurring basis to mainly lay Buddhist sanghas in Sydney and further afield. In the last two decades I’ve taken part in the emergence of secular Buddhism in the west – a current that arises mainly from the work of Stephen Batchelor, and contributes to the adaptation of Buddhist practice to modern western societies.
Secular Buddhism has thus inspired most of the talks I’ve given, after working through what I want to say in carefully written and annotated speaker’s notes.
Some of the people who have heard these talks kindly suggested that the notes should be collected and published as a book. But what publishing house would put out a book like this?
For decades now trade publishers (including ones sympathetic to the dharma) have stopped publishing books for their inherent worth or contemporary relevance, and instead only put out books that meet their commercial criterion. They’re wedded to works of any quality that promise high-volume sales in aid of their ‘bottom line’. Most potential books about secular Buddhism would fail to meet that criterion.
In 2015 I discussed this problem with my friend Ramsey Margolis in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we began to explore the possibility of establishing an imprint for high quality secular-Buddhist books, an imprint that sailed free of the business-model approach to selecting titles. We imagined a publisher that drew on crowdfunding and donations to cover production costs, and on the voluntary expertise in editing and publishing that the editorial board’s members commanded.
Winton Higgins teaching in Wellington in 2015
This way, unconstrained by the usual commercial criteria, we could offer quality books to potential readers with an interest in secular Buddhism. Whatever income we received from sales over and above our production costs for one book could help fund the production of the next.
With accounting help from Pete Cowley, Ramsey and I launched Tuwhiri on this model in 2016. My collected dharma talks from a particular series (After Buddhism: a workbook) became our test run. The model worked; since then we’ve ‘been in business’ – though happily not in the usual way.
Soon enough we took the opportunity to edit and publish Martine and Stephen Batchelor’s talks from a 2016 Sŏn retreat as What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds. And the rest is history.
Now I’m 83 years of age, and have recently stepped back from dharma teaching. But I remain on Tuwhiri’s editorial board as my continuing contribution to the vital enterprise of deepening and broadening dharma practice in the west.
Interested in joining Tuwhiri's editorial board? Have a read of this.