Author William Sun — better known by his spiritual name Climbing Sun — completed his 4th publication with us, an array of prose poems revealing the more daring side of this multi-faceted human being known as Sun.  He is an architect, poet, novelist, adventurer… the quintessential example of a Consciousness Explorer of our generation.

This compilation, while a relatively short work, took us many months to complete as we massaged the details and images to make sure the book included everything Sun wanted to say.  For example, the Design-Build piece documents the extraordinary structures that Sun has built over his lifetime.  That piece is marvelous…

The cover includes images that represent some of Sun’s peak experiences in his life journey. Melanie employed her expertise until we had something that Sun was happy with!  Sun reports that everyone loves the cover…

Now, for sharing, is this piece on Sun’s project to design and build the Stupa at Land of Medicine Buddha.  If you visit this sacred place, perhaps you will ponder this when you walk the grounds:

A Most Magical Manifestation
(The Mahabodhi Temple Shrinks and Lands in Coastal California)

Age 66-72. Be aware. A phone call might change your life—or your afterlife. It may offer you a way to step off the Wheel of Birth and Death—if you so desire. More on that later.

“We’ve been directed by our head monk in Nepal to build a stupa on our land. We want you to be designer and builder. Drop by my office. I have a book of Buddhist architecture for you to get some ideas.”

“What’s a stupa? Oh, a shrine! (Silent gulp.) Sounds like either an immersion in great joy or a gamble for an epic wipe out. I’ll come by soon.”

How does the Land of Medicine Buddha Community Director know I am ripe for such a project? Walking below a field one morning, she’d glanced up the hill and saw the stupa shimmering there in the ethers. Because I’d rescued their illegal campground from demolition a year before, she thinks I am some sort of magical thinker as well. Birds of a feather?

Turns out the magic is all hers.

I propose a simple stupa reinterpreting the original built on the spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree. The image is based on a picture stamped into an ancient coin. A tribute to the long-demolished first take. How cool to resurrect the very original built by the disciples who’d erected it one hundred fifty or so years after Buddha’s transition. Surely his expanded awareness was still present and within them!

She sends the idea off to the head robed one in Nepal who nixes it in favor of a miniature replica of the massive Mahabodhi Temple. Like, “Honeys I wanna shrink the shrine.”
While conjuring the design, I realize there are no images of the sides and rear of the grand edifice in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. So off jets Director Denice with a camera and an open heart. While she circumambulates the full-size stupa snapping pics of the unseen sides, she falls into step with another pilgrim. Apparently, they can converse and orbit at the same time. By the end of their moving sacrament, after having shared our vision—for which we only had funds for the design—her pro-temps companion takes out a checkbook and writes a fifty-thousand-dollar, no-strings donation. That is the moment Denice realizes her coastal-California sighting in the ethers is going to manifest.

Still it takes over 550 tons of concrete, miles of reinforcing steel, months of hard labor. It means surfing through more than one ocean of enough bureaucratic waves to anchor the four-story creation smack in its resting place. A camouflaged hillside meadow, atop an ancient landslide overlain with a sixty-year-old trash dump to show that everything—even earthly flaws and violations—is impermanent—and all made possible by the seed money which bloomed into more whole baskets of the green stuff.

The Buddhists want simply to solidify the presence of their avatar. Want to be there having a front-row stroll in the concentric mimicking of creation around the Stupa and, if in tune, to witness the end of the collective moment.

The Officials want the meadow wheel-chair accessible. Want to know how strong the earth is, so deep down, it’s probably a sin to tickle that part of the Mother. They don’t want the Stupa to get its feet wet in the rainy season. In their way the Officials are all about tough love disguised as regulation—eventually softening to the point where they are caught masquerading their ordinances as respect. They even get away from their comfort couch, eventually calling the edifice a stupa, rather than the less ethnically-loaded “shrine.” We were educating each other across a divide, dissolving it organically.

Ancient texts proclaim the navel of the earth lies at the sacred spot in Bodh Gaya. No other place can support the weight of the Buddha’s attainment. Another Buddhist tradition claims that when the world is destroyed at the end of a long period of time called a kalpa, the birthplace of enlightenment is the last spot to disappear—and will be the first to appear when the world re-emerges into existence.

When The Big One comes for the West Coast—and thence The World—all Buddhists (closet and professed), temple builders, townsfolk, countryfolk, citizens, and officials of all persuasions will also be welcomed in collective circumambulation to be suspended in the aura of this mini-navel which vibrates in synch with a most humble reflection of its Asian parent.

Personal Afterword
Tradition dictates that those who take part in manifesting a stupa, achieve, upon transitioning to whatever comes next, a no-strings ride into an enlightened eternity—with no need to return to the wheel of birth and death. I especially love that my selfless concrete contractor and her brilliant, expert Hispanic crew will enjoy this divine perk as will many of my own supporting cast. As for me, if given the choice, I’ll return earthside to help rebuild our demolished climate, decontaminate the seas, and convert the strip malls back to pastures and gardens.