Sukho buddhānam uppadoSukhā saddhammadesanā.
Sukhā sanghassa sāmaggī
Samaggānam tapo sukho.
- Dhammapada 194
Happy is the arising of the Buddhas in the world.
Happy is the teaching of pure Dhamma.
Happy is the coming together of meditators
Happiness is meditating together.
Nearly 10,000 meditators practicing Vipassana together is a rare Dhamma event. Even more so is nearly 10,000 Vipassana practioners in a Dhamma pagoda, under the relics of a Sammāsambuddha. The Global Pagoda that has enabled such beneficial gatherings is a rarity. Such a monument does not exist anywhere else in the world, and has not existed before in history.
At the apparent level, more than three million tonnes of grey basalt stones from Rajasthan fill the historic structure and foundation of the 325-feet high Global Pagoda. At the actual level each of the voluntarily donated stones is filled with deep gratitude - gratitude to Dhamma, the sammāsambuddhas leading up to Gotama the Buddha, the Sangha, and the chain of teachers leading up to Sayagyi U Ba Khin and Sayagyi U Satya Narayan Goenka.
Construction started in 1997. The Global Pagoda's main meditation hall was completed in 2008 as the largest hollow stone dome in the world without any supporting pillars. The President of India (who is a Vipassana student) inaugurated the completed first phase of the Global Pagoda on February 8, 2009 - the first milestone in its destiny to serve all beings.
"No force on earth can stop this Pagoda from being completed," the Principal Teacher of Vipassana Goenkaji had declared over ten years ago at the Global Pagoda site. His compassionate prophecy has inevitably come true, while being an inspiring guidance. The next phase of the journey begins to share the priceless benefits of Vipassana.
The next Global Pagoda phase continues with gratitude to Burma (Myanmar), where Goenkaji was born in Mandalay and his Dhamma birth in Rangoon by learning Vipassana from Sayagyi U Ba Khin. The Global Pagoda in Mumbai connects the history of Vipassana returning to India, the land of its origin, when Goenkaji arrived from Burma and began teaching Vipassana in Bombay in 1969.
From the project phase, the Global Pagoda has moved into the developmental phase to serve each of the thousands of visitors arriving every week. Pure drinking water, inexpensive food outlets and clean washroom facilities are available. Landscaping and gardening works are underway. Parks, roads and water lines are being laid.
Two smaller pagodas 60-feet high (the height of the Dhamma Giri pagoda) exist beside the Global Pagoda. The smaller South Pagoda houses 108 meditation cells and the central cell for Goenkaji and Mataji. These cells are ready and being used by meditators taking Vipassana courses at the adjacent Dhamma Pattana.
A 70-feet parikrama (circular pathway around a Dhamma pagoda) is surfaced with a special marble stone donated from Burma. This marble changes in temperature - turning cool in hot weather and warm in cold weather - to ensure the comfort of visitors walking barefeet in the parikrama.
While Gotama the Buddha’s relics are enshrined atop the Global Pagoda, the basement celebrates his life. A vast, information gallery houses paintings accurately depicting important events in the Buddha's life. These paintings by a leading artist comprise the single largest collection of thematic paintings in the world.
A splendorous Myanmar Gate is being constructed at the outer entrance to the Global Pagoda. This is similar to the Myanmar Gate entrance to the Vipassana International Academy (Dhamma Giri, Dhamma Tapovana-1, Dhamma Tapovana-2, Vipassana Research Institute, Sayagyi U Ba Khin Village) in Igapturi. The ‘Burma Guest House’ and other accommodation facilities for workers are being built.
Dhamma Pattana Vipassana Centre
Initially, there was no plan for a Vipassana centre to be built within
the Global Pagoda premises. Around 2005, Goenkaji expressed the wish
that there should be a Vipassana meditation centre here. This
was the start of the Dhamma Pattana Vipassana Centre.
Dhamma Pattana (meaning ‘Harbour of Dhamma’) was established to serve as
a Vipassana centre primarily for senior corporate executives, professionals and
governmental administrators. This was both due to its limited accommodation
capacity as well as being located in India’s financial capital Mumbai.
As a successful former businessman himself, it was always Goenkaji’s cherished wish that the business community should benefit from Vipassana to come out of the stress and other extreme challenges in the corporate world. Dhamma Pattana was to serve this compassionate purpose.
The initial layout for Dhamma Pattana was worked out. It followed the coastal regulation zone condition that no construction should be within 150 meters of the oceanography line.
Given the topography of the Global Vipassana Pagoda, the building of the Vipassana centre here raised unprecedented challenges.
Building the first multi-storey Vipassana centre
Dhamma Pattana is the first multi-storey building Vipassana centre in the
world - a unique exception to the essential requirement in Vipassana centres that
meditators' residences should be only on the ground floor. This is to ensure that
Vipassana students during a course are not residing one on top of the other.
How to segregate the male and female residential sections was one of the challenges. Initially, the plan was for 60 per cent male accommodation and 40 per cent female. However an adjustable dividing participation between the male and female residences allows accommodation for the male or female sections to be allotted according to requirements of a course.
The Dhamma Hall and two dining halls of the Dhamma Pattana centre were planned as they are today.
Then came the question of building the Principal Teacher’s Residence. During the initial planning for it, the architect reminded that the beauty and majesty of Pagoda would be ruined “if any structure was constructed above plinth level (107.1m) of Pagoda".
Construction engineers expertly removed the soil near the Pagoda and made room for the present structures of the Dhamma Pattana Vipassana Centre – all of which are below the plinth level of Pagoda.
Meditation cells
In the unique multi-storeyed Dhamma Pattana, how to accommodate 108 individual meditation cells with proper segregation for male and female students? This was a challenge in building the Dhamma Pattana pagoda.
The entire Dhamma Pattana Pagoda was to be constructed in stone. The initial plan was for the walls to be approximately 10 feet thick. This was redesigned and adjusted, with the first and second-floor layout to accommodate the required number of cells. The walls were reduced to five feet thickness and adjustments accordingly made. The brickwork on each cell was designed such that the thickness will be minimum, thereby saving substantial cost.
Goenkaji entrusted senior Vipassana acharya (teacher) Mr M.M. Khandhar (one of the key people involved right from the start of the Global Pagoda project and the teacher serving Dhamma Pattana) with the responsibility of installing the crystal and umbrella atop the Dhamma Pattana pagoda, above the Principal Teacher’s central meditation cell. The crystal and umbrella came from Jaipur, Rajasthan, in northern India.
It has always been Goenkaji's guidance in allotting accommodation for Vipassana courses that new students should be subject to minimal discomfort. as much as is possible, as compared to their living standards in daily mundane life. Dhamma Pattana was to serve corporate executives and senior professionals who are used to a more comfortable life. So with Goenkaji’s permission, it was decided that this Vipassana centre should be air-conditioned.
Now the question was whether Dhamma Pattana should be centrally air-conditioned. After consulting electrical experts, the decision was made not to have a central AC system. The Dhamma Hall, meditation cells and student rooms were to have separate air-conditioning units. A trustee suggested an efficient split air-conditioner brand and the contractor was soon paid for the purchase. Within a week, air-conditioning units were installed in each room. Each room is provided with the AC remote so the student could choose when to use or not use the air-conditioner, as per his or her comfort.
The garden was next developed.
The compact Dhamma Pattana Vipassana Centre was ready for the first 10-day Vipassana course within the Global Pagoda premises.
Since October 2007, the Dhamma Pattana meditation centre has been functioning adjacent to the Global Pagoda. The twice-monthly 10-day Vipassana courses conducted here for business executives and government officials are fully booked weeks in advance. Since 2008, Goenkaji and Mataji have also been sitting their annual 15-day Teacher's Self Course in Dhamma Pattana.
Asoka Pillar
As a lighthouse of liberation from suffering, the Global Pagoda now shines forth in the morning and evening rays of the sun with the gold paint (donated from Thailand), just like the famous Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, on which the Global Pagoda is modeled.
Early years of the Global Vipassana Pagoda
Multiple challenges
When Goenkaji first declared the Global Pagoda project, the biggest stone dome worldwide was India’s Bijapur dome 130 ft. diameter high. The Global Pagoda dome is over twice its size - and with no supporting pillars. Top architecture firms in India and worldwide had declared such a construction as the Global Pagoda to be impossible.
The Global Pagoda was made possible. A Gujarat-based architect Chandubhai Sampura devised an interlocking system with grooves cut in the stones, whereby each stone supported the weight of the pillar-less dome.
While thousands of Vipassana students inside the Global Padoga dome support each other by meditating together, the thousands of massive stones over them support each other in an inter-locking system. The architectural wonder has been achieved of the stones - each weighing nearly a tonne and the 4-tonne central locking stone - seemingly floating in the air unsupported by any pillar.
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| 3.87 million man-days needed to complete the Global Vipassana Pagoda. |
The first phase of the Global Pagoda involved other unprecedented logistics: creating a foundation 24-feet deep with a 20-feet wide wall; transporting 2.5 million tonnes of Jodhpur stone whose source is 1,200 kms away from the project site; carrying 3,000 truck loads of sand and work involving 90 million man hours.
If conventional construction methods were used to carry and lift the millions of tonnes of stones, it might have taken a generation to complete the Global Pagoda. But an alert meditator discovered an abandoned three-storey high construction crane. It was refurbished at a cost of a few hundred thousand rupees, and served to complete the first phase.
Other problems were resolved in time. Litigation by a few environmental activists (the Mumbai High Court declared that the Global Pagoda conforms to all laws), echo problems in the sound system of the main dome, ventilation for thousands inside the Dhamma Hall, lighting of the pagoda were among challenges that were successfully faced.
Another recurring problem was funding - but meditators stepped in at crucial times to ensure the Global Pagoda work could progress and be completed. Dhamma worked! Many giving dana of Dhamma service, money and material realized with happiness that such a beneficial opportunity to be involved in a Dhamma project of this magnitude is very rare in human history.
For this rare opportunity to serve, we express deep gratitude to the Buddha, the lineage of Vipassana teachers and Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Our gratitude particularly goes to our most compassionate Dhamma father Goenkaji from whom we received the priceless Vipassana path of real happiness. All the merits earned belong to revered Goenkaji and Mataji.
But most of all, one expresses deepest gratitude to Dhamma, the omnipresent law of cause and effect that brought the Global Pagoda and each of us to this moment in time.
May all beings be happy, be liberated from all suffering.
[This is updated from the original article in January 2010 by a senior Vipassana teacher serving in the Mumbai-based Global Vipassana Foundation (GVF), and written on behalf of all Dhamma brothers and sisters serving worldwide in the Global Vipassana Pagoda Dhamma project.]
* The Global Vipassana Pagoda has been built at an estimated cost of US$ 22.3 million (Indian Rupees one billion). The entire cost and the land for the project is from voluntary donations from Vipassana meditators and yet-to-be meditators from across the world. It is Goenkaji's compassionate wish that more people - particularly old students, Dhamma workers and assistant teachers - gain all benefits by making use of the rare opportunity to give dana for such a rare Vipassana project and earn much merits.
Costs for the Global Vipassana Pagoda project have also been considerably reduced by voluntary services of many Vipassana teachers and Dhamma workers selflessly donating their professional expertise for more than 10 years - for the happiness, benefit and liberation of many.
Design of the Global Vipassana Pagoda
When the Buddha sits cross-legged, the width and height of the body are nearly the same. The Pagoda is a symbol of the Buddha in meditation. The Buddha's body was of golden color, so the pagoda has been colored gold. An extremely delicate soft crown (parasol) is placed atop the Pagoda.
Each part of the Pagoda's design has a deeper meaning. From its broad base, the Pagoda moves elegantly upward in an increasingly refined way culminating at the top in a single pointed diamond. In the same way, progress on the path of Vipassana is accomplished by the gradual elimination of impurities starting with the gross ones and then removing more and more subtle ones. Thus, the Pagoda symbolizes the entire path of Dhamma, i.e. morality, concentration and wisdom.
Square Terraces: This broad base of the pagoda signifies suffering, i.e. Dukkha resulting from ignorance, the stage which most of humanity occupies. Moving upward, the square terraces represent the causes of this suffering: craving, aversion and ignorance (ignorance of the actual reality of what is happening within oneself, at the mind-matter level).
Octagonal Terraces: They represent a person's first steps on the Eight-fold Noble Path i.e. morality and the preliminary understanding of the true nature of the three causes of suffering. Here one begins to appreciate there is a way out of this suffering.
Inverted alms bowl: It signifies renouncing worldly life. The shape of the overturned bowl represents the stage of Dhamma practice where one refuses to create new suffering, i.e. creating a new sankhāra. Girdling the inverted alms bowl, are three bands that represent the fundamentals of this path: sīla, samādhi and pañña.
Seven Bands: These seven rings represent the seven stages of purification. This section represents seven graduated stages of Vipassana practice culminating in the total purification of mind.
Banana Bud: A banana tree can give fruit only once. This section represents the stage where the meditator has passed through higher stages of development and has reached the point where all saṅkhāras have been burned off.
Lotus Petals: The lotus section is divided into lower lotus and upper lotus. The lower lotus symbolizes how one is still capable of creating new sankhāras, but in the upper lotus (representing the fully purified mind), this is no longer possible. Thus the important transition point, represented here as a necklace of orbs, is the nibbanic experience - the transcending of mind beyond the entire 31 planes of existence. Like the lotus which flowers in muddy water but blossoms above it, a Vipassana meditator at this stage remains still tethered to the world but is now decidedly free from craving, aversion and ignorance.
Seven-tiered Umbrella and Diamond Bud: The ornamental, crown-like umbrella pays respect, reverence to this pinnacle of human experience. Atop the entire edifice sits the diamond bud, signifying the ultimate goal of the purification process: the total eradication of all defilements, to full enlightenment.
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* Directions to reach the Global Pagoda
* Vipassana meditation courses worldwide, course venues, online application for beginners' 10-day residential Vipassana course
*Serving in the Global Vipassana Pagoda
*Gaining boundless Merits of Dana
Photograph by Amit Kumar
Global Pagoda is lit up by flood lights at night. Photograph by Hitesph