SONOMA COUNTY, CALIF.

A golden stupa shimmers in the California sunlight, appearing like an Asian
mirage in the hills above the magnificent coastline north of San Francisco.

The traditional Buddhist monument, found everywhere across Asia, is only
one piece of a stunning complex of Buddhist temples opened to the public
this month.

The Odiyan Buddhist Center, which was more than two decades in the making,
is the creation of the adherents of a Tibetan lama. Designed as a monastery
and retreat for the study of Tibetan Buddhism, it is purportedly the
largest such structure in North America. A gleaming copper-domed main
temple, an 11-story pagoda-like temple, and four libraries filled with
thousands of sacred texts in Tibetan are set amid acres of flower gardens,
reflecting pools, and fluttering prayer flags. The air is filled with the
calming hum of more than 1,200 copper prayer wheels engraved with Buddhist
mantras.

From the plantings to the 108,000 images of the founder of Tibetan Buddhism
that fill the Vajra Temple overlooking the Pacific, Odiyan is the handiwork
of a small Buddhist community based in Berkeley, Calif. For 21 years, a
rotating group of people from diverse backgrounds, most of them teachers,
psychologists, and other professionals, built this retreat from the ground
up, learning construction techniques as they went along.

Equally monumental is the publishing work of this movement, which over the
same period has collected and preserved a treasury of Tibetan Buddhist
texts, many saved from the efforts of the Chinese government to wipe out
the rich religious and cultural heritage of Tibet.

The driving force behind Odiyan is Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, a Tibetan
scholar and teacher. Since fleeing the Chinese Communist takeover of the
Himalayan nation, Tarthang Tulku has devoted his life to the preservation
and dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism.

The temple complex is testament not only to the commitment of the small
band that built it but also to the growing popularity in the West of all
schools of Buddhism.

"Odiyan is a small piece of the spread of Buddhism in the West," says
Harvard University's Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and
Indian studies who chairs a committee studying Eastern religions in the
United States.

The Asian religion initially came to this country in the 19th century
through immigrants from Japan and China, followed in recent decades by
immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

This Asian diversity has grown to include Euro-American followers,
initially associated with the beat generation of the late 1950s but long
since spread widely across the country. "The Buddhist tradition in the US
is becoming an American religious tradition," says Professor Eck. Estimates
of the number of Buddhists vary from several hundred thousand to several
million.

"Buddhism addresses the question of 'what else is there?' in a culture that
is very fast-track and materialistic, and oriented toward ideals of
progress," Eck says. The tradition of meditation in Buddhism merges
religion with psychology.

"It stresses independent investigation," explains Sally Sorenson, a project
coordinator at Odiyan. "You're trying to understand how your own mind
works. You're not asked to believe. You're asked to discover something for
yourself. It's an individual pursuit guided by tradition." This may account
in part for its attraction to highly educated people.

Tarthang Tulku adheres to the Nyingma, or ancient, school of Buddhism which
traces its roots back to Padmasambhava, a Mahayana Buddhist master credited
with introducing the religion from India into Tibet beginning in the 7th
century. The Nyingma school is the earliest phase of a literary tradition
notable for its comprehensive and accurate translations of ancient Sanskrit
texts and commentaries.

"Tibetan Buddhism is a repository of texts that were otherwise lost because
Buddhism died out in India," says Professor Janet Gyatso, an associate
professor of religion at Amherst College and a specialist on Tibetan
Buddhism.

That heritage thrived in the relative isolation of remote mountainous Tibet
until the Communists came to power in China, leading to growing persecution
of Tibetans and their culture.

The Tibetan supreme leader, the Dalai Lama, fled in 1959, along with some
100,000 of his followers. According to human rights organizations, the
Chinese repression that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans
and destroyed all but 13 of the country's more than 6,000 monasteries,
along with their libraries.

Along with many Tibetans, Tarthang Tulku initially went into exile in
India, where he taught at Sanskrit University. There he began an effort to
collect and publish texts and sacred art carried out by fleeing monks and
others.

In 1968, the lama came to the United States, where he founded Dharma
Publishing and later the Nyingma Institute, a center for the study of
meditation and Buddhist thought. Odiyan, whose construction began in 1975,
was intended as a retreat for practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism as well as
for those engaged in serious scholarship.

Aside from a wide variety of publications in English popularizing Buddhist
thought, the core of Dharma Publishing's effort has been the painstaking
reproduction of Tibetan language texts, originally printed by hand-carved
woodblocks on thin strips of paper stored in wooden boxes.

In 1981, the group completed a 128-volume edition of the Tibetan Buddhist
canon. This was followed in 1993 by publication an even more ambitious
627-volume collection of the works of the Nyingma tradition, as well as of
masters of all four Tibetan schools, collected from refugees and libraries
the world over.

These works cover a vast range of subjects from philosophy to history,
medicine, and science. Large enough to fill the entire wall of a vaulted
underground library at Odiyan, the volumes are now being distributed back
to Tibet and to Tibetan exiles in India, Nepal, and elsewhere.

"Since the Chinese took over, there are two generations that don't know
anything about Tibetan tradition," says Dharma Publishing's Jack Petranker.

Now Dharma is embarked on translating these texts into English. Amid the
edifices and grounds of Odiyan, somehow this does not seem so daunting a
task.

     * If you are interested in visiting Odiyan, call (510) 549-9310. More
     information on Odiyan is available on the Internet at
     http://www.nyingma.org

PHOTO (COLOR): THE NEW AND THE OLD: The main temple of the newly opened
Odiyan Buddhist Center in Sonoma County, Calif.

PHOTO (COLOR): The complex was 20 years in the making and was designed in
part as a retreat as well as a repository for historical Tibetan Buddhist
texts, 3) TRADITION: The Enlightenment Stupa is part of the largest Tibetan
Buddhist center in North America