By RON SEELY
Geshe Lhundub Sopa, the abbot at the Deer Park Buddhist Center outside Oregon, remembers when Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, first visited Madison in the late 1970s.
Some who saw him, Sopa recalls, mistakenly thought he was a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement, whose members were much in evidence then in airports and on city streets.
But today, when the Dalai Lama arrives in the city for his fifth visit in three decades, he is known not only as a revered spiritual leader of the world’s Tibetan Buddhists but also as a political figure and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
Tibetan Buddhists believe Gyatso, 71, to be the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama, and an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion.
Links
In Madison, the Dalai Lama will speak and teach over the next four days.
And he will visit Deer Park near Oregon, one of several significant Buddhist centers in the nation, which was founded by Sopa in 1975. There, the Dalai Lama will see for the first time the center’s new temple, a sturdy stone and steel testament to the long years of hard work in Madison by his old friend, Sopa, and the result of a long-ago request from Gyatso that the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism be brought to North America.
It may seem unusual to some that such a world leader would take the time to come to a modest Midwestern city. But he has close ties to the city. Those connections begin with Sopa, whose friendship with the Dalai Lama goes back to Tibet and the late 1950s when both were young and Sopa, now one of the country’s most respected Buddhist scholars, was among the debate examiners who tested Gyatso during his final examinations to become a monk in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
Since then, much has happened. Both Gyatso and Sopa escaped Tibet in 1959, fleeing over high mountain passes to India when the Communist Chinese invaded their homeland. The Dalai Lama became a leader in exile and settled with other Tibetans in Dharamsala in northern India.
In 1962, the Dalai Lama asked Sopa to travel to the U.S. to help introduce Tibetan culture, religion and philosophy.
Sopa made his way to Madison, where he had been invited by UW-Madison professor Richard Robinson to join the faculty of the newly formed program in Buddhist studies. Sopa would spend 30 years teaching at UW-Madison and became the first Tibetan tenured at an American university.
But Sopa did not come to Madison alone. With him came a number of students, including several Americans who had studied with him in Dharamsala. They, too, settled in Madison.
In 1975, Sopa founded Deer Park in the town of Dunn about 10 miles south of Madison as a home and a place for study and meditation for the area’s growing Buddhist community.
Since then, Deer Park has come to embody the Dalai Lama’s request. In a historic visit in 1981, Gyatso came to Deer Park and performed the first Kalachakra ceremony for world peace ever performed in the West. That ceremony, one of Buddhism’s most significant rituals of initiation, was performed in a wooden, open-air pavilion that became the monastery’s temple.
Now, however, that temporary structure has been replaced by a stone temple that, in design and appearance, is similar to the traditional temples in which Sopa studied and worshiped in Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s visit to the temple, rising now from an oak-covered hillside after two years of construction, is an important moment in Sopa’s life.
On Saturday, Deer Park was alive with activity as monks and staff members painted and raked and cleaned in preparation for the Dalai Lama’s visit. Several worked in the new temple. Sopa, seated in his residence not far from the temple, spoke of the importance of the building and of how he is looking forward to walking with the Dalai Lama through the impressive structure. The Dalai Lama, who stays in an apartment at Deer Park during his visits, will return to Madison in July to inaugurate and bless the temple.
On the outside, the temple is nearly identical to the traditional Tibetan temples with their massive, sloping stone walls and deeply inset windows. But, as was Sopa’s wish, the temple was built with the most modern and long-lasting of materials and so has a skeleton of steel. It also features a geothermal heating and cooling system and numerous other energy-saving features.
Traditional Tibetan decoration, much of it created in India and shipped to Madison, adorns the temple and is painted in bright hues of blue and red and yellow. Inside is a two-story assembly hall and high windows that flood the hall with light.
The towering front wall of the hall, painted sky blue, will be the backdrop for a 15-foot tall Buddha, which now rests in several wooden boxes on the lower floor of the temple, awaiting assembly and the move upstairs.
For Sopa, the temple is much more than a building. It is as much a symbol, he said, of a permanent home for the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. He looks forward, he said, to safely housing Deer Park’s extensive collection of Buddhist texts in the temple’s library.
But mostly, Sopa said, he sees the temple as assuring a future here for Tibetan Buddhism, for the study of the old, old teachings, in the heart of North America.
It is in that spirit that he will walk with his friend, the Dalai Lama, through the building this week.
“Now,” Sopa said, “even if I’m gone, it doesn’t matter.”
