Land of Beautiful Vision

Introduction

Introduction In August 1993, a group of convert1 Buddhists purchased a steep section of land in the enclosed, forested Tararu Valley, around 120 kilometers (75 miles) from New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. The purchase was the culmination of a decadelong search for a suitable place to build facilities for solitary and group meditation retreats. One summer weekend in 1997, I made my first visit to the property, arriving on the Friday evening before two days of rituals for their newly built stūpa. The glimpses I caught of the stūpa spire as I traveled on the winding dirt road up the valley and the colorful banners on bamboo poles near the entrance to the property hinted that this was no ordinary part of the New Zealand landscape. From the old farmhouse near the creek I walked up the hill for my first full view of the seven-meter-high (twenty-two feet) concrete-and-steel structure. Its whiteness and its geometric, sharp-edged lines and curves contrasted starkly with the ragged scrub and dark green ridge behind. In preparing the site, a digger had cut into the hillside, exposing rough banks of ocher clay. On either side of the muddy path leading to the monument two clusters of tall bamboo poles flew banner-style prayer flags that fluttered in the breeze. Shaped like a big white bell, the stūpa seemed almost to hover above the freshly disturbed soil on the rough, grassy slope. The next morning I visited the stūpa again. Final preparations had now been made for the weekend’s ceremonies. Strings of flags and colored ribbon ran up from stakes in the ground to meet at the stūpa’s spire (Fig. I.1). It seemed to me that these additions somehow helped integrate the structure’s stark shapes with the broken ground and bright sky around it. Representing the enlightened mind, stūpas often contain relics of the Buddha or other revered teachers and are traditionally objects of devotion. A stūpa generally consists of a dome sitting on a base and topped with a spire, and variants on this style are a familiar part of the landscape in many parts of Buddhist Asia. However, they are not a familiar sight in New Zealand, and in 1997 there were, as far as I was aware, only three or four others at Buddhist venues around the country. The people who designed, built, and dedicated the stūpa in the Tararu Valley were of Anglo-European cultural origins and affiliated with the British-based 2 • Introduction FIGURE I.1. Stūpa with flags, immediately prior to dedication ceremony. (Photographed by S. McAra in 1997.) international movement known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO). Their decision to construct the stūpa at all may seem something of a puzzle to people familiar with the literature on Buddhism’s modern and Western interpretations . The FWBO had initially purchased the 86-hectare (214 acre) property with the intention of building a retreat center, a place where people, alone or in groups, from near or far, could spend quiet time in a natural setting, undertaking meditative practices and seeking stillness. What they most needed in a practical sense to bring about this vision was accommodation: a large facility that could host up to fifty retreatants, with a shrine room, kitchen and dining space, bunkrooms and chalets, and an ablutions block. While they had fulfilled part of this vision by constructing four self-contained cabins for solitary retreat and were able to accommodate group retreats of less than fifteen people in the old farmhouse, they had continued to defer the construction of the purpose-built retreat facilities. When they needed facilities for larger gatherings they either hired larger venues or used tents and other temporary shelters. Indeed, when they constructed their stūpa in the southern summer of 1996–1997, the lack of facilities meant that people vol- Introduction • 3 unteering on the project stayed in bunkrooms in the house or in old caravans set in clearings around the property, and on the weekend of the dedication ceremony, the overnight visitors slept under canvas. By early 2006, the first stage of the retreat facility was in fact under construction . The delay was the result of a significant shift in priorities in which participants began talking about developing a new relationship with what they had...