Amara, Shyena and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
by Stephen Kastner on 09/04/09 at 8:11 am
A little more than a hundred miles north of San Francisco in Mendocino County, there is a very unique community located within the town of Talmage, California. In 1974 the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association purchased the grounds and buildings of the former Mendocino State Hospital founded in 1889. The facilities included more than seventy large buildings, three gymnasiums, a fire station, a swimming pool and almost everything else required by a typical small municipality like fire hydrants, an underground water and electrical grid and a central heating and air conditioning plant.
Under the leadership and guidance of the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, an international Buddhist community and monastery was established on the 488 acre site. The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas as it is known today, is one of the first Chinese Zen Buddhist temples in the United States, and one of the largest Buddhist communities in the Western Hemisphere.
Into this pious realm, steps our heroes… Amara and Shyena, two westerners, lifelong students of eastern philosophy and yet advocates of the sensual life – ready to undertake a 7-day retreat, meditating and celebrating Guan Shi Yin, the Goddess/God who helps us cultivate compassion.
“I never imagined I would visit a Buddhist monastery, and to tell the truth, I often felt something too complex or grand in all of it for me,” Amara explains. “It took hearing Guan Yin’s name to lure me into the Dharma Realm, and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, after which, perhaps, nothing will ever be quite the same.”
Read all about her life-changing adventure in “How Lucky We Are… About the Guan Yin Retreat.”
Monks at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
It turns out that Amara has more secrets to reveal and what better place than at a Buddhist Monastery that was once an insane asylum to come back to one’s senses.
“Returning to our room after an entire day of recitation I am dying for a cigarette,” she reveals. “Of course there is no smoking permitted within the place, so I must go outside to sneak one. This is day one of seven. I’m thinking, God, this is awful. Ridiculous! I can’t do this here.”
Find out how she beat back the Nicotine Demons and rekindled her love of film making while you enjoy her latest online video production, a glimpse within the walls of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in “Two Confessions… on the making of this video.”
