The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya Which Liberates Upon Seeing
Rising among wooded hillsides, The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya crowns a meadow at the upper end of Shambhala Mountain Center’s main valley. Standing 108 feet tall, it is one of the most significant examples of sacred Buddhist architecture in North America. Built as a memorial to the Center’s founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya serves as an inspiration for peace and compassion throughout the world.
The Great Stupa is sited between two powerful landforms: the promontory known as Marpa Point and the steep cliffs opposite it. The power of the stupa balances and brings together the energies of the surrounding environment; at the same time, it embodies the wisdom and blessings of Trungpa Rinpoche, as well as the Buddhist and Shambhala lineages.
Stupas are said to promote harmony, prosperity, longevity, good health and peace. They bring blessings to the environment in which they are built, to those who build them, and to those who visit and venerate them. In this way, stupas ensure that the living quality of the Buddhist teachings will always be available.
Construction of the Great Stupa was initiated in 1988. It was built over a 13-year period, employing the generosity of several hundred volunteer laborers and craftspeople, with money donated through annual fundraising events. Additional contributions of expertise came from many different sectors of the technical industry.
The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya was consecrated during a ceremony lasting several days in August 2001. Since then, the Stupa has become the heart of Shambhala Mountain Center.
Maintenance and upkeep of the Great Stupa – its architectural elements, original statues, relics and paintings – is ongoing and supported through generous financial donations. The Stupa is open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. for public visitation
It has long been the tradition that wherever the teachings of the Buddhas have been revered and practiced, communities of followers have built reliquary monuments known in Sanskrit as stupas and as chörtens in Tibetan. And wherever they have been built, they have been regarded as sacred, for like religious images and scriptures, they represent aspects of enlightenment.
—His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya was built in honor of the great meditation master, author and artist, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche shortly after his death. The finest and most enduring materials have been used throughout the structure, which was constructed using concrete that was formulated to last 1,000 years.
The shape of the Stupa represents the Buddha, crowned and seated in the meditation posture on a throne. His crown is the top spire; his head is the square at the spire’s base; his body is the vase shape; his legs are the four steps of the lower terrace; and the base is his throne.
The Stupa stands 108 feet tall and contains three levels.
A 48-foot square base with gates, stairways and openings on all four sides form the lower level. Inside is an assembly hall 33 feet square and 24 feet high. In its center is a large, golden statue of the Buddha sculpted in the Gandharan style.
Most stupas are sealed monuments. A most unusual aspect of The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya is that the hall on the first level is open to the public.
The second level, reached by interior stairs, contains a small chamber, 32 feet square and 14 feet high.
The third vase-shaped level of the Stupa houses a round chamber 19 feet in diameter and 16 feet high containing a statue of Vajrasattva. This chamber contains a three-dimensional Chakrasamvara mandala, as well as statues, paintings and frescoes throughout.
On top of this level is the spire, which consists of 13 disks representing stages of enlightenment that narrow at the top, crowned by a golden moon, sun and jewel.
A terraced park, nearly 200 feet in diameter and adorned by green lawns, trees, gardens and walkways, surrounds the Stupa.
The Stupa of Dharmakaya is called a Lha Bab choten; it specifically commemorates the Buddha’s descent from Tushita heaven where he taught his mother. The steep stairway just below the big portal opening (gau) high up in the round vase chamber (bumpa) symbolizes this descent.
At the top of the stairway in the portal is a large sculpture of a standing Buddha. This is a unique feature of the Great Stupa not found elsewhere. It symbolizes Trungpa Rinpoche’s distinct ambulatory style of teaching in the West.
“The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya Which Liberates Upon Seeing” is the name given to the stupa by H.H. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. The stupa interior features extensive artwork, design and statuary styled to reflect Trungpa Rinpoche’s lineage, as well as his interest in Japanese aesthetics and his teachings on the ancient Shambhala kingdom.
The Great Stupa holds the entire skull relic of Trungpa Rinpoche. It is placed in the heart center of the 20-foot-high golden Buddha seated on the ground floor. In this manner, the Great Stupa retains its earliest symbolic function: a chamber or motherly womb that can transform the seeds of the past into the life forms of the future.
History of Stupas
The stupa is the oldest Buddhist religious monument. In prehistoric times, stupas were simply mounds of earth and stones (tumuli) – places to bury important kings away from the village. Twenty-five-hundred years ago, at the time of Shakyamuni Buddha’s death, a change came about in the way stupas were regarded.
The Buddha requested that his relics be placed in a familiar stupa, but with a shift in emphasis. Instead of being just a place of honor where the bones or relics of a cremated king were placed, the stupa was to be located at four corners (i.e., a crossroads), to remind people of the awakened state of mind. So, the stupa evolved from a mound of dirt (stup, Skt., “to heap up, pile, raise aloft, elevate”), to a king’s burial tomb, to a religious monument.
After the Buddha’s death, stupas evolved from being used as shrines to the dead and into places to honor the living. They were erected to remind people far into the future that they, while living, had the seed of enlightenment.
A stupa is intended to stop you in your tracks. It is an architectural representation of the entire Buddhist path. The body, speech and mind of an enlightened teacher is contained therein – a reminder of a timeless quality which one senses in old monuments. The Tibetan word for “stupa” is choten, meaning a receptacle for offerings and implying support for lay people to express devotion and connection to the Buddha mind.
Breathing Life into North American Buddhadharma
There are three basic reasons for building stupas. Burial stupas hold relics from the funeral pyre. Commemorative stupas mark the place of an event or occasion in the Buddha’s life. And, votive stupas are erected to make a dedication of good will or to accumulate merit. The latter type is a perfect outlet for lay people to connect with the Buddhadharma; in the past, it was primarily the laity who were involved in constructing stupas.
A fundamental significance of stupas in the West lies in the contrast between modern and ancient worldviews, specifically in how matter is viewed. Ancient people, living close to nature, viewed matter as living and fecund, as an accumulator of spirit. Modern people, cut off from nature, often view matter as dead, something mechanical to be used or manipulated. The stupa is monumental architecture, emphasizing our connection to the spiritual by both its mass and symbolic shapes.
The two most fundamental and enduring shapes in all stupas are the hemisphere (mound) and the cone, or spire. The hemisphere symbolizes an egg, womb or the fertile earth. This traces back to lunar religions, where the creative force of the earth (soil) as mother of all life was worshipped in caves and subterranean sanctuaries, and where the mysteries of life and creation were the center of religious attention. In this lunar type of worship, the mounds were placed away from the village.
The cone shape is symbolic of solar worship, wherein altars were placed inside the village as an important reference point for daily life. It seems natural to erect a vertical post, such as a May pole or flagpole, to mark the Sun’s zenith. It ties together earth with heaven and represents a unifying element – a center, the life force, an axis-mundi, the lingam, or gathering place.
The combining of the lunar and solar elements into the Buddhist stupa lies at the heart of the Buddha’s instructions to place his burial stupas at four corners. It represents a combining of opposites: night and day, matter and mind, earth and sky, unconscious and conscious, inner and outer, mysterious and obvious, female and male.
A square box called a harmika (Skt.) is placed on top of the hemisphere and below the cone. It is said to be the “dwelling place of the gods” and symbolizes a transcendent aspect of mind or aspiration – a transformation potential. In the earliest stupas, relics were found here. The harmika reflects the idea that stupas are a place where offerings can be made, blessings received and devotion practiced, such as by walking around the stupa in a clockwise direction. Circumambulating stupas is a very ancient practice that reflects the movement of the Sun, of ever-revolving seasons and the rotation of planets.
If you look down on a stupa from the sky, it always reveals a directional orientation such as South, West, North and East – a mandalic square shape. It has a central axis, the center of the universe, the axis-mundi. Two basic shapes – the circle and the square – are apparent, representing water and earth respectively, while the vertical shape – a triangle – represents fire.
The vertical shape of a Tibetan stupa evolved into a representation of the body of a Buddha seated upon a square throne. The pole inside some stupas represents the spine, an obelisk-shaped pillar made from a special tree that is inserted when construction is nearly complete.
From the very earliest days of stupas, Buddhists placed both scripts of dharani (prayers which energize the speech element, creeds, or mantra) and numerous miniature images of the stupa (tsa-tsas) inside these monuments. Vessels containing hair, fingernails, relics, and ashes of enlightened teachers were buried there along with jewels, seeds, herbs, and other earth-symbolic items.
