A Lofty Vision

Atop the snow-covered mountains, the American Zen Buddhist monk awakens and begins his day with the morning bell chant, a series of 108 bows and the meditation exercises that are rituals in his continual search for true self. Korean chants echo from the curved roof of his secluded mountain temple, as if speaking to the wind.

After meditation, the bald, blue-eyed monk known as Mu Ryang Sunim sheds his gray robe for grease-stained mechanic’s coveralls, work boots and a pair of purple sunglasses. He heads down the slope to where Korean carpenters are working an electric saw, shaping pine tress into building beams. The monk gazes in awe as the wood chips fly onto the bed of snow.

Here, the quest for true self is taking form.

For six years, Mu Ryang has devoted his life to building a Korean Zen Buddhist meditation and retreat center 120 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

After buying 318 acres in 1994, the Yale graduate-turned-monk moved to the mountains, pitched a tent and began planning construction of the center.

Last year, more than 1,500 people, mostly members of the Southern California Korean community, attended an opening ceremony for the majestic temple at the Mountain Spirit Center. Since then, Mu Ryang has hosted curious visitors from as far away as San Francisco and Seoul who have climbed the mountain to meet the American monk. This month, two monks from Korea were staying at the center to meditate.

Mu Ryang, 40, is planning two more temple buildings on the property. Buddha Hall, which is under construction, will serve strictly as a meditation site for spiritual retreats. The other building will provide dormitory-style housing. When the project is completed, it will have cost an estimated half-million dollars.

Tonight, Mu Ryang will speak at a fund-raiser at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on his quest to complete the triangle of temple buildings. The title of his talk is unvarnished: “Why Is an American Zen Monk Building a Korean Temple?”

“Yes, I’ve been wondering that myself lately,” he said with a laugh. “The purpose is to create a place where people can come to leave behind their problems. To forget about whatever miserable situation is troubling in their life. It is a space where people can see more clearly what’s going on in their life.

“Zen poses questions. It deals with: What are you? Why am I alive? What is the truth? I see this project as a straight course to finding myself while helping others too,” he said.

He was born Erik Berall, a home-grown American kid, baptized in the Episcopal Church and raised in Connecticut. It was after he entered Yale that he was plagued by questions of his existence. He began meditating and met Korean Zen master Seung Sahn.

“It’s almost a universal question that young people have at that age. But most people don’t find the answer. I found comfort with my teacher [Sahn] in Zen,” he said.

Sahn was the first Korean Zen master to live and teach in the United States and became a pioneer in bringing Korean Zen Buddhism to Americans. He is the 78th patriarch in his line of dharma transmission in the Chogye order of Korean Buddhism.

After garnering a following among students at Brown University, he founded the Kwan Um School of Zen in Providence, R.I. Today the school is head temple for more than 50 affiliated Zen centers around the world, including the Dharma Zen Center in Los Angeles.

After graduating from Yale in 1981, Berall moved to Rhode Island to live and study at the Kwan Um School. His curiosity about Korean Buddhism brought him to Los Angeles, where immigrants were building temples to continue spiritual traditions of their homeland.

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In 1983, Berall was ordained a monk and given his Buddhist name. (Mu Ryang means “infinite”; Sunim is the traditional Korean Buddhist title for monks.) For the next five years, he traveled across Asia, learning of the different schools of Buddhism in Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and India. It was during these travels with his Zen master that he became inspired to build a Korean temple in the mountains of California.

“I really didn’t have a plan at first. I just wanted to buy land and meditate in the mountains. But over the years, the land spoke to me,” he said.

With donations and personal loans from friends and family, Mu Ryang raised about $100,000 to buy the land. He choose Tehachapi partly because of the mountains and partly because real estate was more affordable in the area. Using architecture books and his memories of Buddhist temples in the mountains of Korea, Mu Ryang hired a draftsman and designed the first temple building. Buddha Hall was designed by a team of craftsmen from Korea.

Mu Ryang hopes the Mountain Spirit Center can function as a bridge between Korean Buddhists and the growing number of American converts. As an American Buddhist building a Korean-style temple, he hopes to erase the ethnic and racial barriers that divide Buddhists. The focus should be on keeping Zen Buddhist teachings intact, he said.

“People look at me and say, ‘He’s American.’ They look at someone else and say, ‘He is Korean’ or ‘He is Japanese.’ If we keep one idea of what a person is, we will be divided. These are just temporary identities. If we let go of those notions, there would be peace,” he said.