Located at Margherita town in Eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district, Margherita Buddha Vihara is a spiritual haven that packs beauty, serenity, love, life, and spiritualism together. With a graceful pagoda, gilded Buddha’s shrine, dashes of green scattered across the courtyard, sacred Bo and Sal trees, an abundance of idyllic flowers and orchids, splashes of colours from the flowers, scrubby area of medicinal plants, a pack of pets, and a humble meditation hall with the soothing sound of guided meditation and occasional chants, the vihara is a blissful habitat that weds spiritualism and aestheticism.
Apart from being the residence of the monastics and a religious institution for performing various rituals, the vihara is serving society with the pragmatic teaching of the Buddha and humanitarian services.
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Like any other viharas, this vihara has also transformed from a humble cottage vihara (1975) to a well-constructed concrete one in 1995 with the assistance and offerings (Buddhist dana) of the devotees. This facelift of the vihara is quite usual in the Buddhist localities, for rich devotees often build beautiful monasteries for the monks as offering alms and providing shelter to the monks is a merit-making act in the Buddhist tradition. Then aestheticism, harmony, cohesiveness, and overall spiritual ambience prevailed in the vihara today is created by Venerable Gyanowada Bhikkhu, the abbot of the vihara.
Born in a Mann family in Meghalaya’s West Garo Hills district, Ven. Gyanowada was ordained as sramana by Nyanasara Mahathera in 1980. Later in 1985, he got his higher ordination from U Tissa Mahathera and took the charge of Duarmara Buddha Vihara in 1986. He stayed there for around 14 years until Ven. U Gunawantha Mahathera requested him to run Margherita Buddha Vihara in 2000.
A very kind and gentle man, Bhante always keeps himself busy maintaining his tranquillity garden, planting medicinal herbs, preparing herbal medicines, making cement statues of the Buddhist deities, and attending to the pets in his leisure time. Apart from bountiful local flowers and ornamental plants, the vihara has nearly a hundred species of orchids many of which, he said, he cannot even name. Bhante said, “I Google the pictures of them to find the names of the orchids”. Additionally, the vihara has a rare collection of two Sal trees that are species of the original Sal tree under which the Buddha was born.
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Bhante serves the devotees with the herbal medicinal practices he is skilled in. He knows various herbal remedies for arrays of diseases and health issues. During the Covid-pandemic, his health drink prepared with turmeric, cardamom, and clove relieved the affects miraculously from dry cough and loss of smell. The efficacy of these herbal medicines often attracts researchers in this area apart from the devotees who visit the vihara for health-seeking purposes.
The well-crafted modest meditation hall of the vihara with a joyful Buddha statue inside is another attraction for the seekers of mental calmness. The numinous aura that the evening serenity of the vihara emits provides the practitioners with a relaxing atmosphere to focus on themselves and forget the stressful day they might spend. It is indeed a blissful experience to tune in to the instructions of the meditation teacher after lighting candles and burning joss sticks before the pagoda and the main shrine. Every practice ends with a meaningful takeaway that incites the practitioner to continue with it lifelong.
Gyanowada Bhante’s care for animals is obviously a lesson for us regarding how to look at other beings. He has nearly 50 pets. Still, he would call them by their names. Mak (dog) mimics his master’s prayer, prostration, and circumambulation around the deities & pagoda. The bond among the animals is also lovely and deep. The dogs would carry the kittens on their back. It looks like the compassion that their master has for them has percolated through the older to the younger animals; and they are anchored with a loving thread of metta and karuna. It is the reason why they never attack visitors.
During Buddhist festivals, the vihara becomes the meeting ground for people of different faiths and cultures. Bhante says, during Buddha Purnima, nearly 2000 devotees belonging to around 25 different ethnic communities gather. In their traditional outfits, during these occasions, the gathering resembles a magnificent unframed canvas with a riot of colours.
Margherita Buddha Vihara has reasons to be visited. Being one of the most beautiful viharas in Assam it can be a tourist destination where one can spend a few hours of happy time soaking up in the spiritual environment of the vihara. For the researchers on herbal medicines and orchids, it may be a significant place of source data.
Again, the spiritual seekers will have a deep understanding to take home. For, with the harmonious cohabitation of monastics, animals, and plant world, Margherita Buddha Vihara is a spiritual sanctuary that epitomizes the Buddha’s teaching that our enlightenment consists in the realization of our existence as a part of the composite whole nature.