Yesterday we celebrated the day the Buddha began teaching the Dharma, or to put it another way, the first time Buddha turned the Wheel of the Dharma. Here at KSC a few of us took sojong vows and worked on painting and rolling the zungs that go inside each tsatsa that will go inside each stupa. So what does all this mean? It means that -- in answer to a question sent in -- when you build a stupa, there is a lot more to it than just building the outer structure.

The stupas built after the Buddha passed into parinirvana were reliquaries to house the physical relics of his body, which makes these structures very powerful spiritually. In our four stupas here at KSC, the relics Lama Norlha Rinpoche has been kind enough to offer have been put inside what's called a tsok shing, or life force wood/tree. This in turn is put inside the spire part of the stupa (called chusam) and reaches down into the rounded part of the stupa (called the bumpa).

To return to what goes inside the stupas, the tsatsa look like this:

The ones we are making are about 3" high. The impressions around the top are of all eight different kinds of stupas and a mantra ring appears underneath. Each tsatsa holds one copy of the Zung Chen Dey Nga or the 5 great zungs which are mantras printed on paper. That paper is first painted yellow with saffron water, dried, then rolled into a little cylinder, covered with plastic wrap and inserted into the tsatsa before the cement is completely dry.

Still, the tsatsa are not ready to be placed inside the chambers of a stupa. First they will be consecrated with days of chanting, about 6 hours a day. The KSC stupas will each hold about 6,000 tsatsa so we have made almost 25,000 at this point and are in the process of painting them. For Florida stupas the tsatsa had to be made out of a special cement that wouldn't deteriorate after a few years in the tropical heat and humidity.

Lama Norlha Rinpoche has been instrumental in this process. He brought the statues of Shakyamuni Buddha from Asia and consecrated them; once we got cedar tree posts to the monastery he oversaw their cutting, carving and painting; and now, he is working on finding KSC the mandalas -- one for each stupa. This world is so blessed by his presence!

Tomorrow we'll get back to stories of the actual pilgrimage and soon I might be able to write about the next leg of this journey to find every stupa in North America.

In Dharma,
LKC