By Vanessa Walker
THE biggest Buddhist stupa, or shrine, in the West is being constructed in Victoria.
Called the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion, at 50m high and with a 50sqm base, the shrine in Bendigo will tie Australia into a global Buddhist connection that stretches back 13 centuries.
Stupas are among the most important symbols in Buddhism. They consist of a square base, a hemisphere and a pentacle, and represent the enlightened mind.
When it is completed in 2010, the Great Stupa’s creators hope it will become the centrepiece of one of the largest concentrated communities of Buddhists in Australia.
Set on 81 hectares, it will include a nunnery, a hospice, primary school and 40 houses.
There is already a teaching centre and monastery on the land, which was given to a Tibetan Buddhist organisation in 1980.
Called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, the group will raise the $15million needed for construction through donations.
Soon after plans for the stupa were announced, representatives of Melbourne’s Vietnamese community bought 18.2 hectares next door.
They intend to build accommodation that will allow elderly Vietnamese to live traditional lifestyles, close to the temple complex.
The director of the Great Stupa project, Ian Green, said its aim was to inspire people to follow a spiritual path.
“The key reason we are building here is because the West is in sore need of holy objects,” Mr Green said. “Most of what we look at, in terms of our landscape, are images and signs of materialism – buildings in cities or individual land-owning in the suburbs – so it’s incredibly important to have a visual statement of the spiritual path.”
The dimensions of the Great Stupa are based on the 15th-century Kumbum Stupa in Tibet, which is famous for its paintings of every manifestation of Buddha known by practitioners up until the time it was built.
Experts believe the Kumbum was in turn inspired by the 8th-century World Heritage-listed Borobodur stupa complex in Java.
Borobodur was hidden under a hill until the 18th century, in what scholars believe was an attempt by the region’s Buddhists to protect it from Muslim conquerers.
The building of such a significant structure in Australia comes as the number of people identifying themselves as Buddhists continues to rise.
In the 2001 census, 357,813 people said they were Buddhists, an increase of nearly 80 per cent from 1996.
A quarter of these are migrants born in Vietnam, and another quarter are people born in Australia.
NSW Buddhist Council president Graeme Lyall said many were people dissatisfied with established religions.
“They are looking for some alternative and they find Buddhism doesn’t demand blind belief,” he said.
