Looking for the sacred at Land of Medicine Buddha

Against the deep oceanic blue of a California springtime sky, the gold of the pinnacle seems to radiate its own aura of light. And why shouldn’t it? A radiant glow around the head has for centuries been a captivating visual metaphor for the Buddhist idea of bodhi, or enlightenment. And, in this case, the pinnacle is the top piece of a 39-foot-tall temple-like structure known as a stupa on the grounds of Land of Medicine Buddha near Soquel. 

The stupa at LMB is a replica of the 1,500-year-old Mahabodhi Temple in eastern India at the site where it is believed that the Buddha famously achieved enlightenment sitting under a bodhi tree. (For the record, the local stupa is much smaller than the Mahabodhi Temple, which reaches 180 feet.) 

Last week, several local people from the LMB community gathered for a two-day “Stupathon,” to raise funds for the project, during which donors sponsored people to circumambulate the structure in prayer and meditation. One of the devout walked around the stupa carrying a container of about 500 worms, purchased that morning from a local bait shop. As a gesture to the sacred nature of all sentient life, the worms were blessed and later released on the grounds, escaping their fate as bait.

The new structure at Land of Medicine Buddha has been a long time coming. Construction began at the site in 2014, and though it is structurally complete, it is not a finished product, with much design and decoration work still to come. (The project’s director predicts maybe two or three years before it can be formally consecrated.) But it symbolizes a kind of comeback for the famously beautiful Buddhist retreat center situated on 108 redwooded acres in the Soquel hills. LMB has been a kind of welcoming haven — for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike — for decades, but during the pandemic, it closed its gates to the public for about six months. Since its reopening, it’s been a long climb back to pre-pandemic normal.

A place for holy relics

A stupa is not merely a building (and it’s not always immense; it can be as small as a bowling trophy, or even a figurine). It’s also a shrine and a depository for holy relics. One of the reasons it has taken a decade (and counting) for the LMB stupa to be finished is because it has been lovingly filled with such relics from the devout. 

Within the pinnacle, the gold piece at the very top, there lies hair and nail clippings from His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Also included are the ashes of Lama Thubten Yeshe, the Tibetan-born monk and teacher who lived and taught in Santa Cruz and who helped found Land of Medicine Buddha. The larger structure contains more than a million images of the Buddha and other deities, more than 6,000 statues and sculptures, and countless books, publications, recordings, musical instruments, toys, clothes, weapons, currency, jewelry and other tsatsa offerings. Also included are items and soil gathered from Buddhist pilgrimage sites all over the world and various gifts from the Dalai Lama and other high priests. 

But most precious of all the relics to be contained in the stupa are the mortal remains of those in the community. LMB’s former director Denice Taylor Macy is now the project manager for the construction of the stupa. On the morning of the Stupathon, she walked with me around the new stupa, stopping at a spot in which her name (and the name of her dog Muni) is engraved. It is here, in a smaller stupa, where her ashes will one day rest.

A few feet from her eternal resting place stands a tree, young, barely 6 feet tall. Technically, it is Ficus religiosa, the same species of fig tree under which the Buddha was resting when he attained enlightenment. That means, LMB now has its own Bodhi tree, planted four years ago at the height of the pandemic shutdown. It’s barely a sapling now, but such trees can grow to be almost 100 feet tall in time, and can live for hundreds of years.

“The good news is,” said Macy, “they have a good tap root. So we’re not worried about it being so close to the stupa.”

A quasi state park

For years, LMB has committed to remaining a public resource, which means it’s open to the curious public in daylight hours seven days a week, albeit at the end of a sometimes tricky one-lane road, with limited parking. 

There are a number of serene hiking trails on the property, including a rugged 6-mile loop trail, and the popular Eight Verses trail, an easy-to-navigate redwood-shrouded trail enhanced by eight spots where the hiker can meditate on a plaque containing a Buddhist thought or idea. There’s also a small glade in which visitors often leave mementos for lost loved ones.

Aside from the trails, LMB maintains a number of sacred sites, including three large Buddhist prayer wheels and the Wish-Fulfilling Temple, which functions as a kind of memorial for the dead. The business of the place is in offering classes and programs in meditation and other Buddhist practices, as well as talks by visiting scholars and lamas (On June 3, LMB will welcome H.E. Ling Rinpoche, one of the most eminent figures in Tibetan Buddhism, who will be on hand to bless the holy relics at the LMB stupa).

Michael Falco is the new director at LMB, on the job now about three months. He said that the property not only serves as a getaway for Santa Cruz County nature-lovers and a touchstone for local Buddhists, but as a pilgrimage site for Buddhists from around the world.

“It’s a lot,” he said of the responsibilities of running the site, which includes managing the 108-acre property, maintaining the trails and the holy buildings, leading the programs and overseeing a paid staff of 15 with about a dozen or more other volunteers and a handful of Buddhist “monastics” who live on the site. “We’re really managing a whole forest, and there’s a big forest management plan that I won’t bore you with.”

Falco said that after the pandemic, it felt a bit like visitors had “forgotten about” LMB. But since he took over as director earlier this year, “it feels like we’re catching our stride again. We’ve got a full docket of programs, got a full staff. We’ve got people coming here every day of the week to hike, check it out, visit the gift shop. It just feels really good here right now.”

One of Falco’s missions as the head of LMB is to make the programs more widely accessible to the general public, to help demystify Tibetan Buddhism. “As each year progresses, there are more and more people that learn how to meditate, learn how to recite the mantra and the significance of reciting the mantra, or the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path,” he said. “And no matter what you’re doing in your life, you can benefit from knowing about these things.”

In her time as director, Macy would often give informal welcome talks to visitors about LMB and its unique status as both a natural resource open to the public and a space deeply sacred to many people. “I would say things like, ‘We don’t kill, not even bugs. We don’t steal or use intoxicants here on the land.’ But I think the most important thing I would like to tell people is that when you come here, you really do have a chance to unplug. I know it sounds crazy, but you can really feel the energy of everybody that came before with an intention to really have an experience that’s not mundane, not plugged in to commercialism, like everything else in our life is. It’s a place where you can leave that part behind.”

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