Maitreya Project tackles the engineering challenges involved in building a statue to last for 1000 years

by Peter Kedge

Work moves steadily on the Maitreya Project, an ambitious plan to build a 500-plus-foot statue of the future Buddha Maitreya in the holy place of Bodhgaya, India. It is planned to have a shell form of the statue ready in six years and to meet this time line, detailed designs will have to be complete by the end of 1998.

In May, Lama Zopa Rinpoche set out a number of requirements for the project, three of which set the work in a very definite direction. Rinpoche now wants the statue to be more than 500 feet tall and has reiterated that it last at least 1000 years.

He also wants the entire site laid out according to the principles of the science of fung-shui. Already, Rinpoche had met in Bodhgaya in March with fung-shui masters. Lillian Too and her teacher Master Yar, worked with Rinpoche and others to determine the key orientations of the statue and other elements of the plan.

To assist the design, a brief has been drawn up that decides the key features of the site, the principal one, of course, being the statue itself, seated on a throne which itself will be the height of a seventeen-story building. It is hoped to acquire more land for the project, which has forty acres at present, which will be transformed into a magnificent park that will include 100,000 stupas, meditation areas, shrines, prayer wheels, statues, fountains, children’s playgrounds, restaurants, shops and guest houses.

Singaporean Kathrine Carlisle has been appointed the interior designer for the temples, prayer halls, shrine rooms, libraries and other facilities to be built within the statue and throne.

There are a number of engineering challenges involved in building the statue to last for 1000 years. Statues that have lasted this long have usually been made of stone or bronze and have been nowhere near 500 feet tall. Even the Statue of Liberty looks small beside the proposed Maitreya statue!

Common building materials like steel reinforced concrete and structural steel have been used for a few decades only, and there is no indication that they would provide the necessary durability for 1000 years.

In addition, whilst we are familiar with weather patterns around Bodhgaya for the last fifty years, it is likely that they could change over the span of 1000 years. The massive structure will therefore have to be designed to withstand not just current temperature changes, wind loadings and rainfall levels, but virtually any extremes of weather hurricanes and earthquakes.

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