The Standing Buddha at Monywa is 33 levels and 427 feet high.
With Choden Rinpoche at the Shwedagon Pagoda.
life-size sitting Buddhas in meditation”. It was an amazing story. And
then he told us that the statue was 33 levels and 427 ft high. And there is a wonderful relic of Shakyamuni Buddha placed in the crown of the Buddha’s head. Every floor of the statue is decorated with gigantic Buddha statues. Some fl oors had been “sponsored” by Buddhist organizations from Korea, Japan and so forth. But mainly, the fi nancing came
from donations from local and overseas devotees. In all, the standing statue cost US$3 million. We thought the fi gure was incredibly low! I had thought it would have cost at least US$100 million… all of us whistled in admiration as Ven. Eindhobhasa explained all this to us. T e project to build the standing
Buddha was started in 1995 and completed in 2007. A year before its completion, U Narada passed on… Later, we watched the sunset and then felt the twilight engulf us. It was an incredible moment for me, for us. T at we had had the great good karma to be there and to be shown round by such a senior monk who could chat with us in a language
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we understood. How cool is that… defi nitely a miracle of sorts. We left the Standing Buddha to motor on to our hotel, and that night we enjoyed our fi rst amazingly delicious meal. I guess we all felt really and truly blessed. But that is not all. T e following morning, for some reason, we decided to go back to the Monywa monastery and guess what? Ven Eindhobhasa was waiting for us. This time he invited us into the private chambers of U Narada and it was there that he gave me so many relics of his Master, and his Master’s Master. I was overwhelmed at this level of generosity. He told me that the relics keep multiplying… and no matter how much he gives them away, the relics never run out. I had made a secret wish that he would off er me relics of his Master because it has to be an enlightened being who can successfully build this complex of Buddha statues. I know because I was once a
Director of the Maitreya Project, the heart dream of my own precious guru Lama Zopa Rinpoche who has been working so hard to build the 500 feet Maitreya Buddha statue in Bodhgaya in India - a statue that is
to last a thousand years. T at project too started in 1995, but to date not a single stone has been constructed, so I know just how difficult it is to build gigantic-sized holy objects. T is is why in my heart I rejoice so much that here in Burma, a land so poor and so terribly hurt by the trade sanctions imposed upon it, an enlightened being must surely have lived among them and achieved what we still have not and at a fraction of the cost that we thought such a statue would cost. Surely this must tell us so much about the genuine purity of the devotion of the people and monks of Monywa?
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 | F ENGSHUIWORLD 51
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