Land of Beautiful Vision

5 The Stūpa Is Dhardo

5 The Stūpa Is Dhardo We thought . . . the best thing to do is to actually try and arrive, put ourselves on the land, and get some sort of spiritual center [on the land at Sudarshanaloka]. So, that’s what we did. And initially we thought we’d build a little stūpa, . . . [which ended up being] seven meters high! . . . So the whole process for us, from the moment we decided to build a stūpa, became more of a mythic journey, one that involved a lot of ritual, and a lot of symbol. And in a way, we’ve been working like that ever since. —Satyananda, speech given at the FWBO’s North London Buddhist Centre, 1999 Although a popular notion of Buddhism paints the religion as seeking to transcend the ‘‘material’’ world, in another sense of the word, material culture is the necessary medium through which people interrelate with the ideologies they hold. For the expression of beliefs, the physical world is the ‘‘only medium available to us, our physical surroundings organized by internal narrative’’ (Pearce 1997, 2), so we communicate abstract religious concepts through the mediation of the material world. Buddhist sacred sites, including stūpas, can provide a place for people to interact with what might otherwise be abstract, intangible ideals. Indeed, many Westerners initially became interested in the Dharma through visiting historical Buddhist pilgrimage sites in Asia, or through an aesthetic response to Buddhist art. In the ABC’s newsletter Sangha Scene, a Western Buddhist Order member talks about how, before he had become a Buddhist, he was ‘‘affected by the peaceful atmosphere’’ at the Buddhist sites he visited in Asia, which he had ‘‘never experienced before. I thought ‘How do they create this?’’’ (Guhyasiddhi 2005, 12). Places, then, can have a powerful effect on people, and his experience of certain sacred sites awoke his desire to learn about the Dharma. The stūpa at Sudarshanaloka paradoxically embodies a transcendental ideal through the medium of a seventeen-ton concrete structure. Sue Thompson writes that the stūpa ‘‘helps us to value spiritual qualities; in fact it reminds us of them’’ (1996a, 3), and Prajñalila writes that the stūpa is ‘‘intended for devotional practice alone’’ (Tararu Transformer 1996, 1). According to Adrian Snodgrass (1985, 353), stūpas have three primary purposes: as reliquaries containing relics of the Buddha 102 • The Stpa Is Dhardo (or saints), as memorials marking the location of an event in the Buddha’s life, and as votive offerings. Paul Mus argues that they model the cosmos and refashion the Buddha in the image of a royal god (1998, 342ff). Besides the intended religious effects, stūpas also have social efficacy. In marking their presence in a place, whether they inscribe the walls of a cave, fly a flag, or construct a monument, people not only give a site special significance, but also claim a connection, control, or even ownership of it. In this chapter, then, I investigate how the Sudarshanaloka stūpa was designed, built, and consecrated and the effects, both intended and unintended, that this had. I also ask how the construction of the stūpa came to be represented as an act that healed the land and channeled its energies. I explore meanings and interpretations of the stūpa, address the ways in which its particularities encapsulate and constitute aspects of the FWBO/NZ, and investigate the ways in which members use conventional Buddhist symbolism and re-imagine themselves as a community undertaking a ‘‘mythic journey,’’ as Satyananda calls it in the epigraph that opens this chapter. The stūpa helps people to think about enlightenment, a paradox because the statement is made in the material world, while intending to point to something beyond it. Beyond its intended dharmic symbolism, the stūpa participates in the mundane, social realm. They are not just static symbols, but rather operate in human ways and have considerable social utility and local relevance in the current flourishing of Buddhism in the West. Anthropologist Alfred Gell contends that humans ‘‘form what are evidently social relations with ‘things’’’ (1998, 18), resulting in these things having social agency. As Tim Dant notes, when appropriated into human culture, objects ‘‘re-present the social relations of culture, standing in for other human beings, carrying values, ideas and emotions,’’ and some objects, like the stūpa, do this more obviously than others. As such, they provide ‘‘a means of sharing values...