Land of Beautiful Vision

7 ‘‘Re-visioning’’ Place

7 ‘‘Re-visioning’’ Place I was staying at Sudarshanaloka for research in February 2000 when Taranatha, a visiting Dutch couple, and Satyananda decided to drive up to the stūpa after dinner to watch the sunset. I walked up the hill with Satyananda’s dog and joined them standing on the scrubby piece of land where the retreat center was later to be built. The evening air was clear and still, with morepork calls sounding from time to time. Taranatha and Satyananda were chatting amicably as we watched the changing colors in the sky over the Firth of Thames. They reflected on the six years since they had first stood at the place they had designated as the retreat center site and speculated about what it might be like to stand in this very spot after the buildings are finished, saying they wanted to keep the view. Then we turned around to look at the stūpa. The warm afterglow of the sunset stained the west side, while the east side was bathed in a cold, bluish light. One of the bronze rings in the spire was catching a radiant white light from the full moon rising above the high bush-clad hills at the top of the valley. From where we stood, though, we could not see the moon—it seemed instead as if the light shone from within the spire. During the day, the stūpa can look stark against the rugged surroundings, but at this moment it was beautiful, melting into the shifting colors of the dusk. I began this book by raising a question about the stūpa. Given the characterization of the FWBO as resembling certain key aspects of Protestantism (Mellor 1991), why would they want to build a stūpa at Sudarshanaloka? Why did they change their priorities, since from the outset they intended to construct a purpose-built retreat center? In an ensuing chapter I raised the related question: given that the FWBO, in its own literature, proclaims itself a movement that seeks to jettison ‘‘cultural baggage’’ and return to the essence of Buddhism, how did they come to perform a ritual aimed at appeasing the local spirits? After the crisis point I discussed in chapter 4, the trustees and Friends of Tararu began to articulate the notion that the project of building a retreat center needed to be preceded by the establishment of a harmonious relationship with existing conditions on the land. Denis’s death and Vessantara’s encounter with the ‘‘Re-visioning’’ Place • 153 local spirits highlighted the need to integrate the trustees’ plans with the locale. The increased use of ritual, highlighted by the construction of the stūpa and relocation of the Buddha statue, provided an opportunity to bring their Buddhist ideals together with what they deemed to be the existing needs of the locale. Praj- ñalila said that it was as if ‘‘having dared to do such a spiritually significant thing on this piece of land, . . . and completed it despite all the set-backs that you could imagine,’’ the ‘‘energy’’ of the place had indeed changed. In this book I have followed my interlocutors’ stories about transforming and healing a damaged place, embarking on ritual activities and creating visual reminders of their transcendental ideals. All of this has become part of a process of linking meanings to things and place in order to rework them. The pūriri tree, kauri log, and stūpa all played a big part in this project of transformation. REDEFINING THE LAND The FWBO is a doubly or triply foreign arrival in the Tararu Valley. First, the ideologies of Buddhism carry material cultures and practices that are visibly different from either the Anglo-European or Māori strands of identity in New Zealand . Second, the forms of Buddhism practiced and taught in the FWBO entail a British Buddhist phenomenon taking hold in a small, countercultural sector of New Zealand society. Third, Pākehā New Zealanders, including those adopting Buddhism as their religion of choice, lack indigenous status in New Zealand, despite stories about being shaped by the land. Their interactions with the land and their discourses about those interactions seem to me to be a way of transforming a place with an uncomfortable and unsettling past into their own ‘‘land of beautiful vision.’’ This transformation was not all one way, however. The very material fabric of the valley, with its torrential downpours and flash floods, its 150-year history of destruction, and its...