The largest public Vesak celebration in the USA is LA's annual Dhammakaya event (WQ).
AZUSA, California - The Dhammakaya ("Dharma-body") International Meditation Center (DIMC) offers classes and retreats on a special Thai Buddhist meditation technique [a combination of relaxation and guided visualization].It has proved to be both easy to learn and effective. It benefits everyone regardless of age, race, or belief. Those benefits include stress reduction, enhanced memory and mental clarity, body-mind harmony, and the cultivation of a calm and peaceful environment all around a practitioner. It is taught freely to all.
Yoga and Meditation
Gentle yoga stretches are instructed by a certified yoga expert. Following these gentle exercises, participants meditate together under the close guidance of an experienced Dhammakaya meditation instructor, often a Buddhist monk. Activities culminate with a short talk and uplifting sharing by participants. All drop-in participants are welcome to experience the peace and joy of Dhammakaya meditation, which is followed by lunch. Cost? Most classes are FREE. Donations are welcome. [Wear white.]
Sunday Schedule
- 9:00 am - Relaxation exercises
- 9:30 - Introduction to Dhammakaya technique, meditation practice [guided visualization], loving-kindness practice
- 10:30 - Group sharing, Q&A, meditation journaling
- 11:00 - Food offering to Buddhist monks
- 11:10 - Lunch
- 12:30-1:30 pm Buddhist studies (for interested persons)
Wisdom Quarterly editors, 2011 Vesak celebration
Dhammakaya is an amazing place, an oasis in the center of a former plant nursery, now a temple complex surrounded by a town within a town.(During the housing boom, the Monrovia Nursery sold its land to a developer who built an entire village surrounding the temple, between Citrus College and Azusa Pacific University. It is nestled at the main entrance into the East Fork of the San Gabriel River (and Morris Dam, which gives the Los Angeles basin most of its natural water, the rest of it being piped in from the distant Colorado river).
Buddhist monastics from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Japan, Korea, India, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Europe, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and Bangladesh attend. It is conducted in English under banners with a meditation for world peace and circumambulation with candles in an awesome spectacle.DIMC-Azusa is hard to find. But it is an epiphany with sprawling wooded grounds nestled among foothills and ridges in a residential area. Every year, Dhammakaya is the only Buddhist temple in Los Angeles to purposely invite every Buddhist community to its Vesak event commemorating the historical Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and parinirvana.
In Thailand, next to the Bangkok Int'l Airport, the original Dhammakaya center hosts tens of thousands of monks, nuns (mae chi), and white-clad lay followers. It is the heart of Thailand's mass meditation movement that has taken sitting from the temple into the world.
