Buddha was a Hindu but he transformed Hinduism very deeply through his teachings, much as Luther transformed Catholicism. In the time the Buddha was born, Hinduism was very different from the way it is now. They worshiped many gods. There was the feeling in the culture that only priests could communicate with gods and people had to go to priests and buy indulgences, much as Catholic priests sold indulgences. Buddha broke this tradition, teaching that individual effort could produce enlightenment.

Some Buddhists do talk about reuniting with the cosmic mind, but this is different from the Hindu enlightenment in some sense because Buddha does not teach that there is a God. There are some teachers in Tibetan Buddhism in particular who believe that the cosmic mind that Tibetan Buddhism talks about is one and the same with that undifferentiated God in the Hindu tradition. However, many Buddhists would disagree with this. They would say that either there is no God or that whether there’s a God is secondary. They tell this parable: A man went to the Buddha and said he would not listen to him unless he first told him whether there’s a God. The Buddha replied that this is like a man with an arrow in his side going to the doctor and saying he won’t allow the doctor to remove the arrow until the doctor tells him what tree the arrow shaft came from, what bird the feathers came from, who shot him, why he did so, and so forth. “Remove the arrow, and then we’ll talk.”

The Buddha’s fundamental teaching is something everyone can benefit from. Buddhism 101 is that people suffer because they become attached to things. They feel everything needs to be their way, they have to control everything, and then once they do, it should never change. This, of course, is not the way the world works and so then people become dissatisfied.

I often tell the story when I do my big tours that when I was in my 30s I felt I had to own a Jaguar to be happy. Every time a Jaguar went by, energetically I connected onto it. It would drag me down the street, scraping my being away because I didn’t own it. On my 40 th birthday, my first wife gave me a Jaguar. It was a beautiful car. Eighteen months later, I couldn’t wait to get rid of it because I had spent $8500 in repairs and the transmission went out the next day. So I learned that much of what I thought about a Jaguar was in my creation of my own mind. It wasn’t the reality and that the reality was very disappointing. I came to recognize that my happiness didn’t depend on having a Jaguar, but the next step in the understanding was that I could appreciate that every time a Jaguar went by, first of all I could appreciate that it wasn’t mine, but secondly that I could appreciate its beauty without having to own it. If we get to a point of feeling that we are really one with everything then everything that we see is in some sense ours already. You don’t need to own it to experience it’s beauty. I eventually got to the point that I couldn’t care less if I had that Jaguar. So this is the fundamental Buddhist teaching. This applies not just to cars but to homes, jobs, spouses, boyfriends, health and even enlightenment itself. If you’re attached to something, it keeps you coming back (through reincarnation). The Hindu and Buddhist worlds both believe that we are here to learn how to become connected with this fundamental state of being and not to ourselves, our egos.

The tall standing Buddha is one of the most revered statues that we have here. This is a statue of the kind that you would find in temples in Thailand and Burma. The other altar pieces in this Sanctuary are, for the most part, Tibetan. The seated statue on the pedestal in the middle is from northern India in the Tibetan style.

The being with the many arms is a symbol for the Center in many ways. Many people in the West have a sense of Buddhism being a very cold tradition - there is a vision of people wearing black robes, sitting in a corner, staring into the corner of the room, disappearing into the void. But actually Buddhism in most of the Buddhist world is very compassionate. This is embodied in the Bodhisattva ideal. A Bodhisattva is a being who strives for all but the final enlightenment that would allow him to stop being reborn. A Bodhisattva vows instead to return to this plane of existence however many lifetimes it will take to assist all other human beings. So it’s the epitome of self-sacrifice and compassion for others. The primary Bodhisattva is represented in this statue. This is Avalokiteshvara, a being who incarnates in human forms and who also exists in etheric realms. I personally work with this consciousness. His best known incarnation is as the Dalai Lama. Another well-known past incarnation was Kwan Yin, a Chinese woman revered throughout eastern Asia and still experienced by many. She is revered in very much the way Mary is in the West. She is the divine feminine embodiment of this divine compassion. We have a lovely statue of her in the big meeting room upstairs and some in this room as well.

Avalokiteshvara also appears in the form with 1000 arms. Our statue here is a simplified version of this. The arms actually are energy tendrils. They are depicted as arms with an eye in the palm of each hand so he can see the suffering of all beings and then minister to them with the many hands, each of which has a different tool. This symbolizes that he will seek intuitively what each person needs and then provide. That’s what we’re trying to do here - to intuite or learn exactly what each person needs and then provide it through different tools, as many tools as possible. So, we’ve tried to gather as many tools for spiritual support as possible, within the limits of our resources.

This sanctuary is encircled by Tibetan prayer flags, which are usually hung outside. They contain various prayers and they’re activated by the wind. We’ve placed them in this room so that when the front door opens, it makes them move. Whenever someone comes in or out of this Sanctuary through the front door, the prayers are activated.

n the landing of the stairs is an altar to Manjushri. Manjushri is the other primary male Bodhisattva in Tibetan Buddhism. Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion. Manjushri is the Bodhisattva of wisdom. Then as you go up the stairs there is a statue of a male and female embracing on the right. This is the Yab-Yum, which is honored in both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions; this is a Tibetan Buddhist representation. It represents the reunion of all dualities into one. It has some very specific meanings as well. Every time I go by I touch one of the statue’s knees, and I find that this balances my male and female energies, so that might be something that you want to do when you head upstairs.