The mysterious California town with 10,000 Buddhas

Much of the magic in Mendocino County is that marvels often await you at the end of any road splintering off Highway 101. Talmage Road, for example, cuts east from Ukiah’s downtown and delivers drivers to a surprising city that appears to have been dropped into the Northern California foothills from a faraway land.

At first blush, the two-lane road is your run-of-the-mill route through the bucolic North Coast valley. After scaling over the Russian River, Talmage continues past a concrete supplier, a meat market and a general store before arriving at a two-story landmark that’s unlike anything else in the county.

A palatial, three-arch gate topped with beige roof tiling marks the transition from Talmage Road into Bodhi Way, one of the main access streets for a thriving community beyond the gateway. The trio of colors reflects the region’s earth tones while perfectly bilateral symmetry instills a sense of harmony. From a balcony between the arches, a sprawling campus is revealed below. Numerous oak trees cast amorphous rings of shade for students of all ages shuffling to class or monks sauntering toward temple. 

The saffron arches symbolize the passage from Ukiah, a city of about 16,000 people, into the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, or CTTB, an international and public monastery with around 350 residents. Although the property contains a discomforting past, a holdover from the 19th century, it’s since gone through a metamorphosis to become the largest monastery of its kind in Northern California. The city was reborn. A fundamental Buddhist belief in bare view.

It’s hard to imagine how a campus teeming with life at the foot of Wonderful Enlightenment Mountain was formerly a state asylum for the criminally insane and home to some of the most violent inmates ever to have ever been committed in California.

A haven for education

Nearly 50 years after founder Master Hsuan Hua left San Francisco to establish the monastic sangha in Mendocino, the Buddhist city remains committed to his vision: educating students while expanding the campus — tripling its size since it was established in 1976.

Seventy buildings are spread across the 700-acre site, which is open to the public to freely visit. From prayer halls to classrooms and even a popular vegetarian restaurant, Ten Thousand Buddhas is a self-contained universe for the spiritually enlightened. It has a senior home, a roster of doctors and practitioners, and both its own water supply and its own composting program.

Less than five minutes from Highway 101, Ten Thousand Buddhas is a unique opportunity for travelers on the corridor to stretch their legs and eat a distinct meal from a kitchen that eschews some common ingredients, including meat.

Students there span the ages from kindergarten through high school and college. Some of the roughly 40 university students are in pursuit of a Master of Arts in Buddhist classics from the Dharma Realm Buddhist University. Elsewhere, about 45 high school students take classes among the grade schoolers.

The university has no lecture halls; instead, classes foster roundtable discussions. Inside a dormitory lounge on a recent visit, three students openly debated the merits of their education and what was more valuable: academics or personal development. 

To a visitor strolling its several quads, CTTB seems like a typical liberal arts school, but unlike those other colleges, this one is also home to about 150 monastics. 

Wrapped in golden and brown robes with heads tidily buzzed, the monks rise at 4 a.m. each day for their first prayers in the main hall — adorned with the city’s namesake: 10,000 miniature golden statuettes honoring the Buddha.

It’s believed that Master Hua made each statue in the hall by hand, casting them in gold from a basement in a Sacramento temple. Bhikshuni Jin Jr Shi, the university’s associate dean of academic affairs, told SFGATE that a strain of the master’s hair is planted within each golden Buddha. 

The statues are stacked on shelves against the four walls inside the main prayer hall. In the foyer is a lifesize statue of Master Hua, who died in 1995.

Outside among the sidewalks, the monks’ benign and colorful presence is matched by the muster of peacocks roaming the grounds with a unique immunity. All life at Ten Thousand Buddhas is revered, and any killing, even of the tiniest of insects, is kindly forbidden.

Distinct duality

Well before Master Hua arrived in Ukiah to transform the space into a mellow monastery, the property was the site of the Mendocino State Hospital. Also known as Mendocino State Asylum for the Insane, the psychiatric hospital and surrounding complex was established in 1889. Luther Burbank, a pioneer in agricultural science who lived in Santa Rosa, designed the original landscaping. 

About 1,600 people died on campus during the hospital’s years in operation. Its tenure ended in 1972, when Gov. Ronald Reagan gutted funding and emptied psychiatric hospitals in California.

The stately administration building was razed in 1952, but several others remain. Some were built using Tudor architecture and have gradually adapted, undergoing a renewed life cycle after Master Hua’s Sino-American Buddhist Association purchased 237 acres from the state, including the old hospital buildings, for $1.8 million in the mid-1970s.

From the beginning, Master Hua’s mission was to promote an ethics-based education and cultivate a community that could house thousands of people once more — this time without the bedlam. 

Speaking to the Ukiah Daily Journal in 1979, just as the archway gate first went up, a spokesperson for CTTB relayed that 150 people lived there at the time, when it was a smaller campus. But Ten Thousand Buddhas was already envisioning space for 3,000 more residents. “We’re still preparing,” David Rounds told the Journal. “We’re building the blocks for the future.”

Today, a former gymnasium has been transformed into the Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas, where monastics gather to recite the Shurangama Mantra, one of the longest mantras in Buddhism. The Rebirth Hall adjoins it while a nearby boiler room is sometimes used for badminton. Around lunchtime on a recent afternoon, a pounding rhythm was pouring out from what used to be a firehouse but now contains an enormous drum.

More growth is on the way, as a new school is under construction on the eastern half of campus. The International Institute of Philosophy and Ethics East Campus was envisioned decades ago and recently reached the second phase of development. IIPE plans to accommodate up to 500 more residents with a 1,000-person hall.

It’s expected to be completed in 2026, exactly 50 years after Master Hua planted the first seeds among the fallow fields. Although vestiges from the hospital’s past lurk on the campus — asylum architecture remains inside some of the buildings — the atmosphere does not induce shuddering. It would be difficult to assume the city’s past with all the monks and peacocks roaming around.

In 2002, when the Mendocino County Planning Commission decided on Ten Thousand Buddhas's expansion for IIPE, Rounds wrote a letter to the editor at the Ukiah Daily Journal pleading for public support, noting how the property’s past was sanitized by the Buddhists. The spokesperson described it as a “white elephant” after the state hospital closed and said that both the county and Mendocino College declined ownership because “the property was unusable.”

Facing neglect, the campus found redemption in Master Hua who, as preached in Buddhism, recognized the continuous cycle of life, death and rebirth. With this samsara in mind, a disregarded hospital reawakened into a city of 10,000 Buddhists — give or take a few thousand.

“Truly, if there was ever a perfect illustration of the old saying, ‘To make silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ this is it,” Rounds wrote.

Food for health 

The day begins before sunrise at CTTB with the ringing of the ceremonial Shurangama Mantra Bell promptly at 3:30 a.m. It’s perfectly placed in the heart of campus. Beneath the bell are cracks and fissures in the cement due to its weight pulling it down to earth. 

Eight hours later at 11:30 a.m., the Jyun Kang Vegetarian Restaurant opens. One of the more popular ways to attract outsiders to Ten Thousand Buddhas, the restaurant is open only for lunch and is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It’s destination dining for folks living in the Ukiah Valley or passing through it on Highway 101.

Shi said that Jyun Kang translates as “to your health” in Mandarin, and the Chinese menu lives up to the promise. The single-room banquet hall holds a dozen circular tables, and the walls are mostly bare, except for a vertical poster with calligraphy by a window.

A petite casement the size of a porthole is in the wall behind the host. It connects with the kitchen, which cooks free of onions, garlic and other alliums because in Buddhist philosophy, pungent plants can lead to interstitial irritation or emotional upheaval that could interfere with spiritual energy by disrupting the calm. 

Nonetheless, the dishes are appetizing and flavorful. One of Jyun Kang’s most popular items is the golden tofu roll, which wraps dried tofu skin in seaweed. It comes gilded from frying and lightly topped with sesame seeds. The kitchen prepares many items with a generous amount of basil, and portion sizes easily filled a small group. 

The highway beckoned following the meal, and it was back onto Bodhi Way to pass through the archway. This time, with an appreciation for how places adapt and renewal’s availability to all.