ABSTRACT
What are the effects of a project entailing the construction of a building, modelled on a fifteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist stupa, into a twenty-first-century rural Australian setting? How do the Anglo-Celtic adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, who constitute a religious but not an ethnic minority in Australia, position their stupa project in relation to the wider social context? Members of a large international Buddhist organization called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) are building their stupa at Atisha Centre, 14km from the centre of Bendigo in northwest central Victoria. Named the ‘Great Stupa of Universal Compassion’ (henceforth, the stupa), its builders promote this distinctively Tibetan edifice as ‘the largest stupa in the western world.’ This eight-storey structure, modelled on a 43 metre-high stupa consecrated in Gyantse in southern Tibet in 1474, fulfils its role both as a monument enclosing sacred relics and as a temple in which people can gather to hear dharma teachings and engage in related practices, a role made possible by contemporary building materials. In this chapter, I take this instance of the creation of a distinctly Buddhist built environment in a non-Buddhist society to explore how plans to ‘buddhify’ a particular piece of Australian countryside interrelate with Australian discourses, especially governmental ones, about immigration and multiculturalism.1 Despite governmental efforts to reinvent Australia as a multicultural society in recent decades, contemporary zoning regulations and planning application processes often make the establishment of new religious buildings by minority groups an expensive and difficult process (Vasi 2006; Skennar, this volume; Waitt, this volume). Neighbourhood opposition to visibly ‘foreign’ religious architecture in city and suburban settings has often been vociferous (Dunn, Thompson, Hanna, Murphy and Burnley 2001). This may be expressed in terms of religious prejudice, as in the case of the Nan Tien temple in Wollongong (Waitt),2 traffic and noise disturbances or subjective notions of visual incompatibility with the locale. Despite potential for major opposition due to its size and unusualness, the stupa project passed its city council planning application in 1999 relatively smoothly. My interest in this chapter is how the stupa proponents aligned the project with the kinds of discourse that local elites3 favour, that is, in terms of two kinds of ‘enrichment’ – in the metaphorical sense of multicultural diversity and in the literal sense of economic growth (McAra 2009). My focus here is the former kind.
I argue that the stupa proponents’ success thus far is a result of this alignment, alongside their access to significant social and cultural capital, which empowers them at a more implicit level. Before continuing, it is worth noting the religious motivation behind the stupa project. Alongside teachings about attaining enlightenment in order to benefit all sentient beings, the FPMT’s spiritual director, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, emphasizes the construction and veneration of ‘holy objects’ such as stupas, statues and prayer wheels. At one level, seeing holy objects helps dharma practitioners by inspiring them. But he also maintains that when dedicated practitioners sponsor or venerate holy objects, they receive spiritual purification that will assist their comprehension and realization of teachings. Further, even beings4 with no interest in or capacity to understand the dharma receive positive karmic imprints to be reborn as human, hear the dharma and ultimately become enlightened. Thus for Lama Zopa and his students, constructing holy objects brings great spiritual benefit for all. Benefits to Bendigo’s identity and economy, as discussed here, are seen as secondary.
