Nearby Buddhist temple will expand

Not many students know that the home to the western hemisphere’s largest Samadhi statue of Buddha is located less than six miles from campus, right off Route 27.

On the same nine-acre property, owned by the New Jersey Buddhist Vihara, is a building the size of a one family house, where three Buddhist monks currently live.

This same building is also used as an education center for Sunday dharma school, which instructs its 12 school-aged students in the Buddhist way of life, including the teachings of Buddha, and how to practice meditation.

According to a monk at the temple who preferred to remain anonymous, the community is in need of a larger temple to accommodate six Buddhist monks.

The project, officially titled the “New Jersey Buddhist Vihara and Meditation Centre Project,” has been in motion since the construction of the Samadhi statue.

“The temples in Sri Lanka tend to have a statue. A statue like ours brings peace and happiness and is used to practice meditation,” the monk said.

The 30-foot depiction of the Samadhi was crafted by a young artist monk from Sri Lanka and is composed of 99 percent bricks, concrete and cement. It is now the destination for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike since being revealed to over 1,000 visitors in 2009.

“Some come, look and go. Some look and ask what it means, so we teach,” the monk said.

The second phase, a plan to create a larger temple as well as community facilities, is also in the works.

According to the monk, this new facility would contain a large prayer and meditation room for the colder months, a library, facilities for the dharma school to meet, a conference room, living quarters for the six monks and a meditation trail. Before this can happen, though, he said that the group needs to raise $2.3 million in donations.

He said they envision a yearlong process that begins with designing the center itself, then submitting the plans for township approval. Following approval, the center will start building immediately and hopefully be completed by the end of March 2012.

Amy Ridgeway ’12 took professor Jonathan Gold’s Tibetan Buddhism class her sophomore year. As a result, she is now a religion major and a scholar in the study of Buddhism, despite not being a Buddhist practitioner.

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“The project sounds incredible. The timeline and plans appear very well-structured and thought out. This will be a wonderful resource for the Princeton community,” Ridgeway said in an email.

“This project is in response to the requirements of a growing Buddhist community,” the monk said, adding that they have not been able to perform a lot of outreach to the community because of the size of their current facility.

Stephanie Miceli ’12, another religion major, said she had not heard of the project beforehand but added that she believes it is another step in a natural progression as more individuals are becoming interested in Buddhism for various reasons.

“There is the appeal of the exotic. And there are meditation practices taken out of context of Buddhist belief used by psychologists and health professionals as mindfulness-based stress reduction in a growing movement towards holistic healing,” Miceli added.

The monk said that as people are becoming more educated, they are also becoming more interested in Buddhism and visiting the statue and temple.

“In this country, there is so much focus on learning science. And that is what we do here and hope to do with the center too: Learn about the science of life.”