This will be the largest Thai Buddhist temple outside of Bangkok. It’s being built right now a little outside Boston, in Raynham, Massachusetts.
architecture
Massachusetts Thai Buddhist temple topped off
Monks in saffron robes chanted a traditional blessing as the uppermost steel girder was hoisted 100 feet in the air and placed atop what will be the largest Thai Buddhist temple outside of Bangkok and the tallest structure in Raynham. [See previous stories for the background.]
“As a Buddhist, there is great merit in participating in building this beautiful temple, not just for the Thai people but for all mankind,” said architect Been Z. Wang of Architectural Resources Cambridge at the “topping off” ceremony Thursday morning for the NMR Meditation Center at 382 South Street East.
Dignitaries from Thailand, members of the local …
East meets West: Thai Buddhist temple in Raynham will be biggest outside of Bangkok
Rebecca Hyman: Several years ago, one of the highest-level Buddhist monks in Thailand and an advisor to the king was driving around Boston looking for inspiration for a massive meditation center to be built in Raynham when he laid eyes on the Genzyme building on the Charles River and said, “This is the image of my temple.”
“He wanted East to meet West,” said Architect Been Wang, who designed Genzyme and the meditation center that broke ground on South Street East last week and will be the largest Thai Buddhist temple outside of Bangkok.
The royal temple, Wat Nawamintararachutis, also known as the…
Not a joke: Barbie’s 2011 dream house has solar panels, meditation room
The American Institute of Architects has announced the winner of its Barbie Dream House competition: a four-story, eco-friendly Malibu manse with signature pink sliding doors.
AIA hosted the contest to promote Mattel’s latest addition to its “I Can Be …” series, Architect Barbie, who can be seen here in full professional garb: chunky glasses, construction hat, and outdated, hot-pink document holder. Competition entries were winnowed down to five finalists before being put to a public vote, with the winning house, by recent Harvard master’s grads Ting Li and Maja Paklar, snagging 8,470 votes. In their submission form, Li and Paklar describe Architect Barbie as upholding…
Buddhist community opens new meditation centre in Brno, Czech Republic
The local Buddhist community has built a new meditation centre in Brno, the Moravian capital and the Czech Republic’s second largest city with a population of 500,000, Marketa Blazejovska, from the community, has told CTK.
The new building worth 24 million crowns, named the Diamond Path House, has replaced the Buddhist community’s old headquarters, situated elsewhere, that had run out of capacity and could not be extended.
A half of the new building’s costs were financed from a grant, and the rest from an interest-free loan from a private foundation.
The debt has been repaid through donations from the centre members and supporters from the…
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Its architectonic design “corresponds to the way Buddhism functions in Western countries at present. Modern people are interested in Buddhist ideas and meditation methods, not in the Tibetan culture. That is why we didn’t want to build our meditation centre in an eastern style. On the contrary, we’ve stuck to Brno’s tradition of functionalism,” said Buddhist teacher Veronika Cerna, whose lecture will open the centre to the public on Monday.
She said the number of Brno residents showing interest in Buddhism and meditations has been on increase. People are ceasing to feel they could do with material values only, they want to develop and live a rich internal life. Many of them are university students, but families with children arrive as well, Cerna said.
New eco-monastery at Buddha’s birthplace
On 4 April 2011, Dr. Trungram Gyaltrul Rinpoche will preside over the opening of the Lumbini Udyana Mahachaitya, World Centre for Peace and Unity, the latest and largest Buddhist temple and meditation hall complex to be built at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in Lumbini, Nepal. (Lumbini is the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal; Udyana is a Sanskrit word that means garden or orchard; and Mahachaitya is the Sanskrit word for Great Stupa.)
Mahachaitya is the latest addition to a master-planned monastic community that envisions more than 40 Buddhist temples in different national styles to be built near where Prince Siddhartha Guatama, the Buddha, was born in the year 583 before the common era (BCE). As a young man, Siddhartha renounced the comfort of royal riches and adopted an ascetic lifestyle to find a solution to end human suffering, a quest that led to his enlightenment as the Buddha 2500 years ago. His philosophical breakthrough of the “middle-way” and its tenets of non-attachment revolutionised Eastern thought.
While most other Lumbini structures are being built by governments, Rinpoche decided…
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to build a more universal structure that harkened to Buddhism’s educational and ecological roots. The World Center was built mostly by hand because of Nepal’s chronic power outages. At one point, workmen had to form a chain to lift heavy buckets of wet cement to the top of the structure’s dome.
The 4515-square-metre (48,600-square-foot) structure is the first modern Buddhist temple to be built as an eco-monastery, one that incorporates a green design that builds in extra insulation while relying on large-area solar panels to generate all of the building’s lighting needs. It will be the most environmentally friendly of all the buildings in the monastic zone of Lumbini. In addition, the complex also features an anti-earthquake system that can help the building resist temblors as strong as 7.7 on the Richter scale.
The central meditation hall and surrounding walkways are filled with more than 1000 custom-made copper statues depicting Buddha, his close disciples and various Buddhist deities in the style of the 7th to 13th centuries, considered the height of Buddhist classical art. By reviving the unadorned, balanced figures, the hope is to create an atmosphere of serenity and simplicity conducive to reflection and meditation.
“This is an effort to save the ancient arts and wisdom, to highlight the importance of our gentleness to the earth and to promote a sense of peace and unity for all,” said Rinpoche.
Buddhist monks meditate on the 37th floor in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Photo credit: Nacho Doce / Reuters
Buddhist monks from the Busshinji temple, meditate on the helipad of the Copan building in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, Feb. 18, 2011. Buddhist monks from the Busshinji temple in Sao Paulo meditate once a month on top of the 37-story high building, one of the tallest in city. Monks want to take meditation from the temple to the streets, and they consider the Copan building a Zen Buddhist mountain in the middle of the city.

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A rolling cube adds living and meditation space to a loft
There was a time when Liu Ming, a teacher of Chinese traditional medicine and feng shui in Oakland, Calif., did a few hundred prostrations a day as part of his practice of Tibetan Buddhism — full prostrations, that is, in which you begin standing and end with your head on the floor. That wouldn’t work these days, as Liu’s meditation area is on top of an 8-foot cube in his loft. Were he to stand up, Liu would hit his head on the ceiling.
To move about the meditation area, which also serves as a tearoom, Liu has to slouch or crawl. That’s fine with him: In a traditional Japanese tearoom, the ceilings are so low you have to crawl in, he says; you were meant to feel humble. Also, says Liu, who routinely goes into teaching mode, the doors of a Japanese tearoom were designed to be small, to prevent samurai warriors from entering with their swords, or at least to prevent them from drawing their swords.
All very interesting, but in a large, open loft, why would anyone want to build a cube that contains a sleeping area and a study as well as a meditation room?
“Having lived in a loft for five or six years,” Liu says, “I absolutely love it.”
When he visits friends who live in large apartments, he says, or “I get back pain, I think, ‘Why do you have such low ceilings?’ ”
But roomier spaces have one drawback…
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, he continues: “There is no cozy.”
Since when is “cozy” a feng shui concept?
“In feng shui, we talk about the harmony in the place that you live in,” Liu says. “The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big, open space at the same time. And we added wheels for feng shui purposes. Now that it is portable, I can spin it on an axis, I can point my head and point my desk in different compass directions for different projects. If I am writing something and feel blocked, I can get up and move the room.”
Now he’s got the writer’s attention. Does it help?
“Yeah, it does,” Liu says. “And it’s playful.”
Do not underestimate the importance of playful when talking to Liu, who is not of the deadly earnest school of Eastern teacher.
Can you really make a living by teaching Chinese medicine and feng shui? he is asked.
“Yeah,” he says, “Of course, you have to live in Berkeley.”
Liu is 63 and has studied Tibetan Buddhism and other Eastern religions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (which he dropped out of, in keeping with the spirit of the ’60s).
When you see him, it is immediately evident that, despite his name, he is not Chinese. His given name is Charles Belyea, and he was born in Boston, of French-Canadian parents. His father was a businessman, and his parents spent so much time competing as ballroom dancers that Liu tells people he was raised by Fred and Ginger. The name Liu Ming was given to him by a Daoist teacher who “adopted” him when he was 31. (In keeping with the Chinese custom, his last name, Liu, comes first.)
But back to the cube: Liu and his architect, Toshi Kasai, have come to regard it as a living thing and, indeed, it has an umbilical cord: a broad, red cable connecting it to an electrical source.
“The extension is the cube’s lifeline,” Kasai says. “We wanted that cable to look like a little tail. We wanted to make sure the cube looked alive, charged by something.”
Liu first became interested in the idea of using a cube to organize his living space a number of years ago, when he saw an article about a couple in Europe who had bought a barn because they needed space for a workshop, but who wanted a separate area for themselves and their children.
“They’d built a plywood cube,” he said. “There were touch doors you could open up, and a kitchen and a staircase that went to a second level, where the kids had their space. I thought it was brilliant, and it was so flexible, I tore it out and stuck it in a notebook.”
Liu moved into his apartment, an 1,100-square-foot loft in a former factory, for which he pays around $1,650 a month, about seven years ago.
Since the loft is used for living and teaching, he put up a shoji screen to separate his bedroom and private meditation space from his teaching area. But visitors, he says, were always poking their heads in, and he wanted something that would give him more privacy. Also, when classes were large, there was no way to increase the floor space.
“And there was that thing about being flexible,” says Liu, who also does translation work. “I couldn’t move the meditation tearoom. I wanted to design the work space so that it could also turn — turn it toward the light on a sunny day or in a different mood, turn it to the wall and meet a deadline.”
So Liu hired Kasai, who is 38 and owns SPACEFLAVOR (www.spaceflavor.com), an architecture and design firm, with his wife, Annette Jannotta. Kasai also happens to be one of Liu’s feng shui students.
Liu originally wanted to have shoji screens on the exterior walls of the cube, but Kasai told him that it would add nearly $10,000 to his $20,000 budget, and considerable bulk to the cube. Instead, he persuaded Liu to use simple roller shades, which cost only about $630. The open-wall design required a steel frame, which was the costliest element in the cube, at $12,000; the plywood and Plexiglas for the walls. and the woodwork, including the hidden cabinetry, cost $6,600, and the electrical work was $1,400.
For his design work, Kasai charged Liu only a token fee. “Ming is my feng shui teacher, and he retaught me how to design our physical environment,” he said. “And we loved the concept of the cube. How often does an architect get to design something so outrageous?”
Lighting was important in the little cube. Kasai and Liu wanted a design that would allow light to shine through, so that the cube would not appear too opaque or solid. In addition to the roller shades, a small shoji screen was added in the wall between the sleeping area and the office.
“It’s like a little eye,” Kasai says. “Basically it’s the heart of the cube.”
There are electrical outlets for lamps in the sleeping compartment, an overhead light in the study area, and outlets for plugging in an electric teakettle in the meditation space and tearoom on top of the cube. When Liu ascends the staircase, he can stash his shoes in a hidden compartment in the stairs.
One aspect of the design that the pair consider particularly important is its portability: If Liu moves, the cube can be taken apart and reassembled. And when it is broken down, no part of the cube is wider than 3 feet, so it can fit through a standard door.
For now, however, Liu seems most taken with the cube’s ability to turn in response to his moods, as well as the way it creates opportunities to appreciate beauty.
Before he had the cube, he says, he couldn’t see anything but downtown Oakland from his loft windows. Now, sitting on top, he can see the hills and the sunrise. And at night, when the lights in the cube are on and the shades are drawn, it becomes a lantern.
“I had a dinner party where it was glowing at the other end of the room,” Liu says. “Everybody was mesmerized.”
Kaiser’s new meditation room reflects shift away from chapels in U.S. hospitals
Roseville Press-Tribune: Books on Buddha, prayers printed in different languages, moveable chairs, kneeling stools, a glass prayer bowl, space for Muslim prayer rugs and a stained glass installation with a nature design fill the 180-square-foot room.
As intended, it’s a hodgepodge scene.
But for patients, visitors and staff of the hospital at Kaiser Roseville Medical Center, the room represents a quiet, sacred space where people of all religious backgrounds and spiritual beliefs are welcome. This meditation room also illustrates a growing recognition by health care providers throughout the United States that mind, body and spirit go hand in hand.
“Healing comes in many ways and we do a great job with the physical healing, but there’s the emotional and spiritual wounds, as well,” said Kaiser Chaplain Alice Anderson.
Gylnda Hardin happened upon the meditation room during its public unveiling Jan. 19. She traveled from Oakland to visit a family member receiving treatment in the hospital. As she tried reading her Bible in the patient’s room, she grew distracted by other family members conversing and noise from the television.
“I love it,” Hardin said of the meditation room. “It’s beautiful and it’s very much needed.”
Although Kaiser Permanente opened for public enrollment in 1945, their hospitals did not include chapels until about a decade ago. Now they have about 30 chaplains serving the northern California region. When Kaiser built the local medical center in 1998, they set aside a meditation room, tacking a sign on the door.
But no one oversaw the space and the room devolved into a waiting lounge.
“It felt like a conference room and wasn’t really meeting the needs of our patients,” said Keith Hoerman, director of continuity of care, during the opening ceremony.
In June 2009, Connie Johnstone, former spiritual care manager for Kaiser Roseville Medical Center, grew frustrated telling people there was no spiritual sanctuary on hospital grounds.
A particular family had struck Johnstone as one that could really benefit from the presence of a meditation room. She talked to her boss and got the ball rolling.
“There was a pastor and a retired pastor who had a loved one in the hospital,” she said. “They had huge spiritual resources available to them. They didn’t need me to gather at the bedside with them. They needed a place to go draw on their own strength.”
Everything about the meditation room is intentional. The stained glass gives people a visual object to observe. Chairs are arranged so visitors don’t sit looking at one another. The furniture is comfortable but doesn’t enable people to curl up and read a novel.
The prayer bowl gives visitors something to interact with — they can leave prayer requests and spiritual care volunteers will keep these in their reflections, Johnstone said. The room feels set apart from the rest of the hospital.
Most importantly, elements in the room don’t privilege one religious tradition over another.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Catholic, Baptist and Methodist churches built many hospitals, which typically incorporated chapels with crosses and pews.
“It’s just not like that anymore,” Johnstone said, adding that Roseville has a big Sikh population and many Buddhist practitioners.
Not to mention Muslims, including medical personnel, need a place to pray five times a day.
“The person brings their own resources, their own spirituality (to the room),” Johnstone said. “We understand this is a diverse world and we don’t want to diminish any one practice or put focus on any one.”
UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento made the transition to a nondenominational room recently with an “all-faith chapel.” Sutter Health’s Women’s and Children’s Center plans to open a 40-seat meditation room in 2013.
Closer to home, Sutter Roseville Medical Center has boasted a meditation room since 1996 when the hospital opened, although they call it a chapel. The interfaith space has a stained glass piece and nature motif, but Sutter uses “chapel” because people recognize the term’s meaning, said Chaplain Gerald Jones.
“It’s a place where anybody can come — religious or not — to feel connected with their sense of the divine,” Jones said.
Even people who don’t follow an organized religion may need spiritual renewal and reprieve from the surrounding stressful situation.
Prior to Kaiser’s meditation room, Anderson said intensive-care unit nurses came to her asking for a quiet place to recover from the illness and death they experience daily. Spending time in a hospital whether as a nurse, patient or visitor takes a toll.
“People are facing death and serious illnesses,” Anderson said. “There are many loses every day, so they’re dealing with these great emotional stresses, as well as spiritual stress, like, ‘Can I go on? Did I deserve this?’ They’re really wrestling with God during this time.”
The meditation room, she said, provides a place to seek wisdom, express fears, ask for mercy, grieve and find the strength to carry on.
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Buddhist temple project may begin in spring
A plan to build a Thai Buddhist temple in Columbus, Ohio, is far from dead. In fact, construction on the temple could begin in the spring.
Representatives of the Columbus Buddhism Center have submitted paperwork to the city requesting a lot split for property on Blacks Road.
They also have submitted new paperwork outlining possible plans for the temple.
John Tai, a representative from the Columbus Buddhism Center, could not be reached for comment on the temple project because he is out of the country, but Pataskala Planning Director Diane Harris said she has spoken to Tai and the project is moving forward.