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New Buddha Three Times the Size of the Statue of Liberty British engineers have been given the task of designing the world's biggest statue, intended to stand well into the next millennium. The 150-metre bronze Maitreya, or Future Buddha, will be three times the height of the Statue of Liberty. It will be built at Bodhgaya, in northern India. The world's tallest Buddha, in Tokyo, is 118.2 meters high. The plan is to make it from 3,000 1.8-metre square bronze panels, each weighing about half a ton, bolted and welded to a tubular steel skeleton 30 meters in diameter. An international consortium is funding the construction. The engineers will also have to calculate how to deal with extreme temperature variations between the midday heat and the chill of night. The statue will expand and contract up to a third of a meter each day. The new Buddha was a dream of the late Tibetan Buddhist master, Lama Thubten Yeshe, who died in 1984 after establishing a worldwide network of Buddhist centers. It was taken up by Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, a Buddhist master and the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. The planning began in 1996, and the statue could be completed by 2005. The statue of Buddha will be constructed in Bodhgaya, India by a firm in Sheffield, England will be three times the height of the statue of Liberty. It will be seated on a throne 17 storys high, housing a huge temple with the feet resting on a lotus, touching the earth and forming the entrance. The
Canada Tibet Committee Editorial Board: Brian Given, Conrad Richter,
Nima Dorjee, Tseten Samdup, Thubten (Sam) Samdup |