In this last volume of memoirs we find Sangharakshita arriving back in England after twenty years in the East. He has come back at the invitation of the English Sangha Trust and is expecting to stay no more than a few months. But the months become years and as he comes to know the as yet small world of British Buddhism, he begins to realize that after all it is here that he may best be able to 'work for the good of Buddhism', as his teacher exhorted him many years before. Making a farewell tour of his friends and teachers in India, he goes on to found a new Buddhist movement and to ordain twelve men and women into a new Buddhist Order. If you have ever wondered, 'Why did Sangharakshita found a new Buddhist movement and Order?' - here is the answer. Moving Against the Stream has for its backdrop 1960s Britain. The actors who walk on and off the stage, some with brief parts, others longer, have names as diverse as Harold Wilson, Prime Minister, and David Cooper, the 'anti-psychiatry' psychiatrist. In the world of British Buddhism there is Christmas Humphreys, founder of the London Buddhist Society, and Maurice Walshe, translator of the Digha Nikaya, his wife Ruth, and many others, known and unknown.

Unique to this volume is the story of a friendship that was deeply significant for Sangharakshita personally, even with its tragic end, and for the movement he was to bring into being. Seven chapters form a kind of travelogue. He and Terry drive across Europe in the Little Bus to visit the sites of Ancient Greece, and in Italy the churches, museums, and the great works of art that were the flowering of the European Renaissance. As Sangharakshita recalls his experiences, the role that higher culture can play in spiritual life is made vivid. This volume includes a short piece, 1970: A Retrospect, in which Sangharakshita tells of a year that begins with lectures in Paris and continues with three months in the USA as a visiting lecturer at Yale University, stimulating a new burst of creativity. He is there during student demonstrations and he visits an old friend, Geshe Wangyal. Back in Britain he resumes his work for the Buddhist movement - and experiments with psychedelic drugs. A new phase is beginning.