A treasure of Buddha

After a trip to India in February, Cambodian Buddhist monk Sang Moeng returned to Watt Munisotaram, his home temple near Hampton, Minn., practically bubbling over with excitement.

The Maha Bodhi Society of India, a group that oversees many Buddhist shrines, including the Tree of Enlightenment, offered to help find a relic of Buddha -- remains believed to be perfect proof of enlightenment, and symbols of wisdom, love and compassion -- for the rural Dakota County temple.

This weekend, Watt Munisotaram hosts a festival to celebrate the arrival of the relic from another temple in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

"We were fortunate to find a temple willing to share a relic with us," Yanat Chhith, a leader of Minnesota's Cambodian Buddhist community, said. "It's a very small piece, but that's good enough."

As many as 2,000 people from around the country and world, including monks from as far away as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, are expected to participate in ceremonies this weekend as the relic of Buddha is enshrined in the temple, located among nondescript farm fields a few miles east of Farmington.

They will also be celebrating the 21st anniversary of the Minnesota Cambodian Buddhist Society, the groundbreaking for a building called a stupa that will eventually house the relic, and a flower festival to raise funds for construction. The celebrations runs through Sunday and the general public, Buddhist and otherwise, is invited to participate.

"Our world is so divided, but here we're all working together," Chanda Sour, a temple board member, said.

Just preparing for the festival has drawn dozens of volunteers to clean, cut grass, prepare food and decorate the temple. There are between 7,000 and 8,000 Cambodian Buddhist in Minnesota.

Peace and stress

Moeng, the abbot at the temple and monastery, watched cheerfully over the preparations last week.

When he speaks of the relic, the way it was offered to him amid music and ceremony in Sri Lanka, and the trip he and five others made to bring it to the rural Minnesota temple, he radiates enthusiasm.

He explains that it is a rare opportunity -- he knows of only one other Cambodian Buddhist temple in the United States, in Maryland, that has such a relic. The experience was exciting, staggering, an honor, and full of great joy, he said through an interpreter.

While transporting the relic on one bumpy return flight, he spent much of the time meditating to calm his nerves.

A group of about 20 people greeted him and the other travelers -- a temple board member and four lay people -- at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and others joined in a procession when Moeng stepped out of the bus at the end of the temple driveway on County Road 50.

"You can feel the energy," Sour said of the build-up to the festival. "Once it arrived here, everybody got a second wind."

Going forward, that energy will be focused on building the stupa. The building will likely take years to build, but when it is completed it will house the relic of Buddha on its third and uppermost level.

The $1.5 million stupa will have a square base measuring 60 feet on each side and taper to a point more than 100 feet in the air. Like the ornate temple, it will be decorated from the top down with carvings and moldings by Socchea Yav, a Cambodian artist whose work covers the buildings at Watt Munisotaram.

"We build this as a memorial to remind us of the achievement of humanity," Chhith said.