City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
Report by David Anderson
Founded by Hsuan Hua in 1976, The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB) is a Chan monastery in Talmage, California.[1] With more than 80 acres of developed land and more than 480 acres total, the CTTB is one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the Western Hemisphere and houses an active monastic community as well as lay workers, students, and visitors. The site includes a Book and Gift Store, a vegetarian restaurant open to the public, an organic farm, and acres of fields and meadows complete with peafowls, deer, and other wildlife. Of the monastery’s dozens of buildings, the Jeweled Hall of 10,000 Buddhas stands out with a 20-foot statue of a thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara and 10,000 molded Buddhas along the walls. Other buildings include various educational institutions, administrative buildings, and dormitories for the monastics. The monastic community is primarily Asian, but more Caucasians have been fully ordained in recent years.
Daily and Yearly Activities
The CTTB’s schedule is active and up-to-date with consistent daily and annual activities for monastics and laity alike. For monastics, the day begins at 3:30 a.m. with recitations, bowing, and meditation until breakfast at 6:15, and the rest of the day is broken up into meditation, sutra and mantra recitations, lectures, and classes. Lunch is at 10:30 a.m., a dinner for the laity is held at 5:15 p.m., and lights out are at 10:30 p.m. The CTTB’s annual events and special sessions in 2017 illustrate the monastery’s Mahayana heritage and focus. The overwhelming amount of scheduled time is set aside for Chan meditation: the 2017 calendar includes three Chan meditation sessions, including one for beginners, that total 58 days. The rest of the calendar is divided unevenly between four figures. The first, Gwan Yin Bodhisattva, is the Chinese form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion in the Mahayana tradition.[2] The CTTB devotes more scheduled time to Gwan Yin than to any other individual and has days set aside for the celebration of her birthday, her leaving home, and her enlightenment each year. The monastery, furthermore, has three Gwan Yin recitations totaling 21 days scheduled in 2017. The second figure, Amitabha Buddha, is the Buddha of the Western Paradise and is also highly regarded in Mahayana Buddhism.[3] The CTTB sets aside one day per year to celebrate Amitabha Buddha’s birthday and has one seven-day recitation session for him in 2017. The last two figures, founder Hua and Shakyamuni Buddha are each only allotted one day of celebration per year and had no recitation sessions in 2017 highlighting the community’s focus on traditional Mahayana figures.
Founder, Affiliated Traditions, and Teaching
Hua’s influence on the CTTB cannot be overstated. Born to a peasant family in northeast China in 1918, Hua followed his mother in only eating vegetarian food and reciting the Buddha’s name daily. Hua resolved to become a monk at the age of 11 after seeing a dead child, and when he was 12, he obtained his parents’ permission to search for a spiritual teacher. Having a photographic memory, Hua had extensively studied the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism, traditional Chinese medicine, astrology, divination, and physiognomy by the age of 16. For the next 13 years, Hua spent time studying under various masters and meditating in solitude before finally receiving full ordination as a monk in 1947. One year later, Hua received the mind-seal of the Guiyang Chan lineage from the master Hsu Yun. Hua taught in Hong Kong for 13 years before travelling to San Francisco to teach starting at the San Francisco Buddhist Lecture Hall, moving to the Gold Mountain Monastery in 1970, and then settling down in the newly-established CTTB in 1976. Hua was inspired to bring correct Buddhist doctrine to the West and expected purity, discipline, and asceticism from his monastic disciples. In 1969, he sent two American women and three American men to be fully ordained in Taiwan.[4] Hua was interested in education and the dissemination of Buddhist texts and worked extensively throughout his life to translate and provide Westerners with traditional Buddhist scriptures.
While Hua was of Chan background and the CTTB is generally Mahayana-oriented, Hua expressed hopes that the facility would be a step towards bridging the gulf between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. In 1976, Hua presented K. Sri Dhammananda, a prominent Theravada monk, with an honorary PhD upon the opening of the Dharma Realm Buddhist University, and just three years later, the monastery’s third threefold ordination ceremony included Mahayana and Theravada monks among the transmitting masters.[5] In a 1990 talk given at the Theravada Amaravati Buddhist Centre, he stated, “The southern tradition shouldn’t keep going south; the northern tradition shouldn’t keep going north. Everyone should walk toward the middle,”[6] and one year later Ajahn Amaro offered robes and alms bowls to the CTTB on behalf of the Centre and proceeded to lead a Theravada meditation retreat at the monastery.[7] The monastic community at the CTTB upholds traditional rules such as only eating one meal per day at noon, separating the sexes (both men and women make up the monastic community), and forgoing social lives, and most of the monastics “sit up and rest, not lying down to sleep.”[8]
Even though it has made efforts to bridge the gap between the Mahayana and Theravada traditions, the CTTB is steeped in Mahayana, specifically Chan, Buddhism. Hua focused heavily on Chan meditation, but he offered an ambiguous understanding of peoples’ Buddha-nature. Hua’s fourth characteristic of Chan states that, “Through [Chan], one sees one’s own nature and becomes a Buddha.”[9] The use of the word “becomes” here is interesting because it implies that the person was not a Buddha before. Hua, moreover, advocated hard work and dedication in pursuing Enlightenment: he wrote, “There is nothing of value obtained without working for it,” and in his poem “White Universe,” Hua praises those who “[spare] no blood or sweat, and never pause to rest!”[10] With this in mind, the CTTB makes every attempt to make the precepts, literature, and history of Buddhism available to the public. Regarding literature, the CTTB website provides all 28 chapters of the Dharma Flower Sutra, all eight volumes of the Shurangama Sutra, all 13 chapters of the Kshitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra (listed under “Earth Store Sutra”), all 10 chapters of the Platform Sutra, the entirety of the Amitabha Sutra, the Sutra of 42 Chapters, the Heart Sutra, and most of the Flower Adornment Sutra among others. Additionally, one may find a 7-unit introduction to Buddhism, a history of the first six patriarchs of Chan Buddhism, various talks and lectures given about the Dharma, and recordings of recitations. The CTTB has published a “Monthly Journal of Orthodox Buddhism” since 1970 called the Vajra Bodhi Sea in English and Chinese, and article titles from June of 2017 include “The Most Precious Thing in Life,” “Reflections in the Water-Mirror: Adolf Hitler,” and “Why is Bowing So Important?” The CTTB also houses the Buddhist Text Translation Society, founded by Hua in 1972, which is “dedicated to making the principles of the Buddhadharma available to Western readers in a form that can be directly applied to practice.”[11]
Relationship With Other Organizations and Institutions
Continuing with the theme of education, the CTTB serves as the headquarters for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association (DRBA), also founded by Hua. Among other things, the DRBA is “dedicated to preserving the Sangha tradition by training and ordaining monks and nuns [] by guiding lay people who wish to study Buddhism,” and it strives to accomplish this by operating more than 20 branches on three different continents.[12] These branches include monasteries, lecture halls, book distribution centers, and an international translation institute. The DRBA, in addition to being headquartered at the CTTB, houses and operates kindergarten to graduate-level educational institutions through the monastery. Instilling Goodness Elementary and Developing Virtue Secondary Schools offer students moral education in a unique setting that meet the academic expectations of Californian public schools: the high school, Developing Virtue Secondary School, has been fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges since 2007.[13] The schools’ curriculum includes courses in Chinese, Virtue Studies, Meditation, and Religious Studies in addition to courses typical of public schools in California.[14] The schools draw in more Caucasians than the monastic community, but the more than 200-person student body is still “predominantly of Asian or mixed Asian-Caucasian origin.”[15] The CTTB, in partnership with the DRBA, moreover, offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs through its private university, Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU). Founded by Hua through the DRBA in 1976, DRBU operated by authorization given by the California Postsecondary Education Commission from 1977 to 1984 and has since maintained approval by the state of California to operate its degree programs.[16] DRBU offers a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts and a Masters of Arts degree in Buddhist Classics.[17] Students in both the university and the secondary school, furthermore, can participate in the Chinese Orchestra.
Overall, Hua’s influence on the CTTB is immense, and the institutions he founded continue to exert a massive educational, spiritual, and intellectual output. The schooling system continues to draw in students from diverse backgrounds, the Buddhist Text Translation Society is still working to provide access to Buddhist texts in the West, and the CTTB’s website itself is a veritable trove of Buddhist literature. The DRBA, furthermore, continues to operate on multiple continents throughout the world. The CTTB is a tower of Western Buddhism and is likely to remain so for decades to come.
Sources
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all information is obtained from http://www.cttbusa.org.
[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Avalokiteshvara
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amitabha-Buddhism
[4] http://www.drba.org/our-founder.html
[5]http://www.advite.com/sf/life/life9-2-7.html; http://www.cttbusa.org/founder3/ascetic_monk17.asp
[6] http://www.goldwheel.org/data/201301HQe.asp
[7] http://www.drbachinese.org/online_reading/drba_others/memory1/life4b_english.htm
[8] http://www.cttbusa.org/cttb/history&background2.asp
[9] http://www.cttbusa.org/buddhism_brief_introduction/chapter6.asp
[10] http://www.cttbusa.org/founder/whiteuniverse.asp
[11] http://www.buddhisttexts.org/history.html
[12] http://www.drba.org/branches-and-monasteries.html; http://www.drba.org/about-drba.html
[13] https://igdvs.org/accreditation/
[14] https://igdvs.org/curriculum/
[15] https://igdvs.org/about-us/school-profile
[16] https://www.drbu.org/sites/default/files/Presidential%20Review%20Report%202016-17_3.pdf