Once at the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion, the Buddha will be protected by Mission Impossible-style security
I nside a shipping container encircled by ironbark trees, eight kilometres north-west of Bendigo in regional Victoria, there’s a special cargo: a million-dollar Buddha, carved out of jade, that has seen more cities and faces than you or I could dream of. Natural Marble Sink
He sits patiently in meditation pose, waiting to be unveiled amid great ceremony and carried into the gleaming white Great Stupa of Universal Compassion – the $20m Buddhist monument that rises out of the bushland next to the container. There, he will be protected by Mission Impossible-style security.
The Jade Buddha might sound like an episode of a Miss Fisher Murder Mystery but it’s actually a 2.5-metre sculpture that was carved out of what’s claimed to be the world’s largest boulder of jade, discovered in Canada 18 years ago.
The statue has spent the past decade on a world tour, visited by more than 11 million people. It might seem odd that its final home is in regional Victoria but since 1981 these 210 acres of land have been donated to the creation of a Buddhist centre by former advertising executive Ian Green and his family. Green was the Jade Buddha’s travelling companion across 130 countries and it’s he who bought the jewel after consulting with his teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
It started in 2003, when Green received a phone call from jeweller Cheyenne Sun Hill. Sun Hill had heard about an 18-ton giant boulder, “Polar Pride”, excavated in British Columbia. Being a Buddhist himself, Sun Hill felt that this rock ought to be carved into a Buddha, rather than whittled down into bangles. He tried to convince several large Buddhist groups before cold-calling Green.
“He spoke like a dude: ‘Hey man …’,” Green tells Guardian Australia. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. But there was a strange synchronicity – he was ringing from Santa Cruz and I was about to go to Santa Cruz three weeks later. So I said, ‘Why don’t we just meet for a coffee and have a chat about it?’”
Upon Green’s arrival, Sun Hill took him to a nudist bar. “I’ve no idea why,” Green says now. As they took a seat among people carefully drinking lattes, Green took a look at Sun Hill’s stretched earlobes and his back, with a mythical bird, the garuda, spanning its width. “He looked a bit wild but he was a lovely guy,” Green says. “We had a vegan burger.”
Maybe it was the environment, maybe it was Sun Hill’s enthusiasm but Green found himself agreeing to fly to Canada to see the boulder in person. Unpolished, it was a squat brown rock but he sat with it for a while and thought there was something special about it. “Maybe it was an energy that I could sense,” he says, almost apologetically.
Green made a bid for the million-dollar jewel, to be paid in instalments and funded partly by donations and partly by selling the off-cuts as smaller statues, to pay back the mining company. Unbelievably, the journey of the Jade Buddha for Universal Peace was granted. Was the mining company chairman swayed because his surname was Makepeace, and he enjoyed the spiritual serendipity of Green/Makepeace? Only the Jade Buddha knows for sure.
The statue slowly took shape in the oldest carving factory in Thailand and in 2008 it began its hectic tour. As of Friday 18 May, it can meditate in peace in the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion.
While the stupa is in daily use, there are a few years of work to go. When it’s finished there will be 80 shrine rooms around its six-storey perimeter and people will ascend through them as a form of meditation. Green’s masterplan is to have a Buddhist village on site. There’s already a monastery and the Atisha Centre, which hosts meditation retreats, but last year a spanner was thrown in the works: new fire regulations mean much more land has to be cleared for building to commence and consequently the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning must be appeased with $8m to $13m worth of offset planting.
Still, Green considers the stupa to be his life’s work and, he says, that work will continue after his death.
Green visited his first stupa quite accidentally, in 1971. During his years at an advertising agency he had been on a fast-track to a heart attack thanks to a lifestyle of adrenalin, late-night card games and women. He had his own Eat, Pray, Love moment when he decided to take a trip to India.
“I had known from a youngster that without the spiritual aspect I was an incomplete person,” he says. “In India I could see that every taxi, tree and shop had an altar. Even so, looking at all the Hindu deities, I mainly thought they were funky things to have on a T-shirt.”
While in Varanasi, he took a break from the heat and noise in Deer Park, where he found himself contemplating the Great Stupa of Sarnath. “I spent a long time looking at it, thinking, is this man-made or is a volcanic plug or something?” he recalls. “But the feeling of peace overwhelmed me.” At the nearby shop he bought a book – What Is Buddhism? – and read it on the plane home.
Green agrees that Buddhism tends to be the religion that high-flyers turn to in times of crisis. “Well, the Buddha was … I don’t know about rock’n’roll but he was a prince, he was a big deal before he gave the whole thing away,” he points out. “Once you go through that process of acquiring material goods you realise that it’s not going to provide you with lasting happiness. I know a lot of people in advertising who become interested in Buddhism and it’s true of lots of people in showbiz and, dare I say, journalism.”
Last year, the Atisha Centre and stupa received 26,000 visitors from around the world, with 60% being Buddh-curious. “We get lots of Probus clubs visiting and they’re keen to know about karma and the Dalai Lama,” Green says. “The questions are terrific.”
A new attraction is the interfaith Peace Garden, which includes a statue of St Francis of Assisi, donated by the Catholic diocese of Sandhurst, and other symbols coming from local Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Mormon and Indigenous organisations.
The garden and the stupa will be lit up during Illumin8, the annual festival of light and peace that this year also celebrates the arrival of the Jade Buddha. Thousands of lanterns and fresh flowers will garland the ground, to a backdrop of music, dancing and fireworks, all fuelled by the vegan and vegetarian food vendors. It’s a huge spectacle but presumably a doddle for a team headed by Green. In any case, he says jovially, “Nothing can go wrong with the Jade Buddha there.”
White Marble Virgin Mary Statue A festival celebrating the arrival of the Jade Buddha, Illumin8, takes place from 18-20 May at the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion in Bendigo