(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone, welcome to our summer season
of In Wisconsin.
I'm Patti Lowe.
This week, our stories have a bit of a spiritual theme.
Meet an internationally renowned religious leader
who risked his life in a journey that ended in Wisconsin.
Find out what inspires this artist
to create his work using a 1500 year old tradition.
And visit a grotto in the southwestern part of our state
that gets thousands of visitors a year.
All that plus a visit to a state natural area
that has the largest natural tall grass prairie in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable, and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly,
a lion's energy, offering energy saving
ideas on the web.
And by the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center providing cancer research,
education, and treatment, UW Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Comprehensive as designated by the National Cancer Institute,
information available on the web.
- In our first story, we meet a man whose life experience
took him on an incredible journey.
Gayshe Sopa is a Tibetan monk and revered Buddhist teacher.
Under threat of death, he fled his homeland in 1959
during the Chinese invasion.
His journey eventually took him to a new home in Wisconsin.
(chanting)
Matasins Tibetan community gather every summer to
celebrate the birthday of their spiritual leader,
his holiness, the Dalai Lama.
They gather at Deer Park, a Tibetan Buddhist center
near Oregon, Wisconsin.
There is a very large Tibetan community here.
There are over 400 Tibetans now.
Deer Park serves as a very important place for them
because Buddhism is just an integral part of their culture.
- The Temple at Deer Park was built in 1981
for the Dalai Lama's visit to Wisconsin.
He came in part to visit a famous scholar.
He first met in Tibet.
Gayshe Sopa is the founder and abbot of Deer
Park Buddhist center.
At the age of 82, Gayshe Sopa has earned an
international reputation.
He's really very, very famous in many parts of the world,
but in Asia, I think he's just known for his
superior scholarship and teaching abilities.
Gayshe Sopa became a Buddhist monk when he was a young child.
His inspiration came when visiting the monastery
near his family's farm in Tibet.
- Deer, my young child, go there and morning every day
they have some kind of assembly hall.
I go to balcony and then looking down there
and little young children monks also down there sitting there
looking all the time and chanting and etc.
I always wanted to be like that.
So I tell my father and mother and there,
always I want to be monk.
- He entered the monastery at the age of nine.
At first the discipline was very hard.
- No, I don't want to stay there.
I want to go home and that kind of thing.
Gayshe Sopa became a teacher himself when he
was still quite young.
- So when I first saw him I was surprised to
see how young he was.
- Come Lung Trugu was one of his students in Tibet.
- He was very famous and he had a lot of students
and especially he was really good with
debating and philosophy.
- In addition to his fame as a scholar,
Gayshe Sopa had a reputation among his students for kindness.
- He also looked after all these students, especially
when they get sick.
He was very kind.
He would go around to try to help them out
because in the monastery he would be very simple.
So he would go and make sure they have enough food.
- One of the scholastic honors awarded Gayshe
Sopa was that of debate examiner of the Dalai Lama.
Gayshe Sopa was one of only 30 examiners selected
from thousands of monks from the three largest
monasteries in central Tibet.
- Yes, yes.
- The examiners debated complex philosophical
points with the Dalai Lama, somewhat like oral exams
at a Western university.
During the debates, Gayshe Sopa saw great potential
in the young Dalai Lama.
- Oh, he's very, very intelligent.
He had his own two teachers in background there and
then a lot of efforts at the Sura sitting there.
But among them, he has to answer each of them.
Whoever question made, he has to answer every of them.
So he was very, very good.
The piece of monastic life was shattered during the 1950s
when Communist China invaded Tibet.
- I have a memory.
Chinese first came to Tibet.
Time or more, they didn't.
That time invaded.
And they are saying we are coming to help to Tibet.
Under the guise of helping Tibet, the Chinese military
began to exert control, detaining, torturing
and killing people, especially outspoken monks.
The Dalai Lama decided to escape over the mountains to India.
He hoped that by leaving, he could prevent more violence.
Within 48 hours of his secret flight, the Chinese began
their attack on his home and other targets
in the capital.
- There was a lot of work in our day there,
and a lot of people were killed, and we had to run out
of them from the monastery.
- A few days after the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet,
Keisha Sopa, along with a group of his students and villagers,
escaped over the mountains to India.
- Come loom was 15.
- It's very scary because, you know, Chinese can
come with airplanes that happened a lot of times.
And also, Chinese army, they came from different
directions all over.
They tried to block the passage to India.
So, none of us will make it out from the bad news.
A lot of the bad news, whatever they have done,
won't be heard outside.
- It's estimated that almost one-sixth of
the Tibetan population, over one million people,
have died as a result of the Chinese invasion.
Keisha Sopa's initial feelings about the Chinese atrocities
have been tempered by his Buddhist beliefs.
- Fear and...
Of course, angry, same time.
But angry has no meaning at that time.
We are some religious attitude, and he's only using himself,
also teaching a lot of people, and people want to still
get fired or something.
He doesn't know that kind of attitude is no good,
so they have more to be peaceful, gentle, or
something like that to end.
- After living as refugees in India for two years,
the Dalai Lama asked Keisha Sopa to take some
of his students to America to continue their studies
while learning English.
They spent five years at a monastery in New Jersey.
Then Keisha Sopa received a very different type
of teaching offer.
In the mid-1960s, he took a job at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, in the first multinational
Buddhist studies PhD program in the nation.
They needed someone who knew the Tibetan language.
- He was invited here as a teaching assistant in Tibetan.
In the analog, I would say, would be if the
classics department invited the pope to come and be
and teaching assistant in the Latin course for a serial Latin.
Keisha Sopa scholarly skills were soon put into
practice in the classroom.
He added Tibetan Buddhist theory and philosophy
to his curriculum.
- His real skill would be to take a passage from a text,
and then zero in on the key words, and then zero in on
the meanings of the words.
And this essentially was the nature of his scholarship.
But to watch him take this and focus and focus and
focus was something that is a long-standing Tibetan
tradition and just very different from the way most
of us do our scholarship.
- Analyzing Tibetan texts may seem like hard work,
but Keisha Sopa often shows his students a softer side.
- Keisha Sopa was very funny, and that's part of his
wonderful teaching method, is his great sense of humor.
- You don't examine just to put there up.
- And so he loves to say to his students, "Now we're
chewing on the hard bones."
"Now you know what it's like to chew on the hard bones, and
students will laugh and laugh."
"It's a wonderful technique to help us along on the path."
- Annie Jampa was one of his graduate students.
During his lunch hour he would have the graduate
students coming by, and he would share
his lunch with them.
I remember the brown paper towel he'd give us each,
you know, little napkin, and divide his sandwich
up to share with us.
And he'd just with that twinkle and warmth of his
expression was just so kind to all of his students.
- Student interest soon overwhelmed the confines
of Keisha Sopa's classes at the university.
He founded Deer Park Buddhist Center, in part
to answer their needs.
Today's students travel from many nations to
sit in on his teachings.
- He's a spiritual master, and I think anybody from
any religious background could learn something
that would help them in their own practice.
So I've come here because he's a great scholar, one thing.
Secondly, because he is a person with great experience.
Keisha Sopa never intended to leave Tibet.
It was only due to the tragedy of war and exile that his
spiritual gifts have spread beyond the borders of his home.
He is said to be a very realized Buddhist, which
means he lives his beliefs, believes centered, on compassion
for the suffering of others.
His ultimate wish is for all living beings, well sentient
beings, to obtain freedom, and permanent cessation to
suffering and liberation and emancipation.
And that's his whole purpose for being, is for
him to try to bring about that and other people.
- That is the only way he is, that's the only way he is.
[Music]
We go now to Southwestern, Wisconsin.
That's where thousands of people travel each
year to walk through what's known as the Dickeyville Grotto.
The Grotto was created by piecing together interesting
items from around the world.
Sit back and enjoy the tour.
[Music]
The Dickeyville Grotto was built by Father Matthias Wunarius
in 1925 and was completed upon his death in 1931.
A good friend that had done a favor for, gave him a
statue of Jesus and Mary.
And he was wondering how to display it for the public to
see and being from Germany.
He decided to build a grotto to house the statue.
The word grotto itself means a small cave-like
structure. Grotto was very common in Europe.
And it comes out of the natural experience of some of the local
geography of the German people.
And they used to build little shrines, they would put a
statue with a saint or they would put a crucifix of Christ.
It was a way of invoking God's blessing on their
work, their labor, and their fields and their homes.
It was a time after World War I, a real time of fear and worry
about people who were German, who were Catholic as well.
One of the concerns that people had was that it was a
time for them to say that we can truly be good Catholics
and we can be as well, good patriots of this country.
And so, Father Wunarius built that into what the
Grotto was all about.
They really tried to stress their connection with liberty
and with unity and working together with all people.
To build up this nation.
He had a dream to build this.
It was his life's work.
And it sort of snowballed and he kept building and building.
Father Wunarius seemed to have this master plan that he held
in his mind and in his heart.
And there would never seem to be any blueprints.
There didn't seem to be any drafts
or drawings of this particular Grotto available anywhere.
He had this in mind and he knew exactly what he
wanted to do.
Probably like many of the great artists.
It was a community project.
People were anxious to help.
They were there to help.
We were in school and he would need help to wash rocks or clean
something. Kids could come from school over in the basement and
help clean up all that stuff.
Which was a big deal for us kids to get out of school, you know.
We were all winter in the basement of his house.
But his living room was, he hadn't a living room.
It was just rocks and rocks and smam and smore.
And he put that all together and in the spring he'd come out
and put it up and it all set.
And sometimes he'd work till late at night.
But he'd go right at the next day again.
And sometimes on a Grotto and he put stuff up there and if
he didn't like it, he'd put somebody with a cold chisel
on him and chisel it off.
So he'd put up what he wanted.
The father and her he used everything and anything
that anyone gave him, donated, brought to him.
He used even broken dishes and jewelry and things
of a personal nature.
The balls are around your shift knob.
Apparently they didn't work for Henry Ford, so we
sent them to father and her.
There are rocks from all 48 states that there
were then.
And glass from the kilns in Indiana.
There are things from all over the world, not only the
United States, plus things from Europe and the catacombs.
He had plans to do more because when he was working
on a patriotic shine, he told the boys, "Wait how
do you see the next one?
It will be even better."
The father, Wienerius, was out on a sick call
and it was cold weather and raining and sleeting.
And he got very wet, developed pneumonia.
He died quite suddenly, but the parish and the community
were just, you know, all very, very sad and by his death and
felt they lost a good friend.
Each year we have about 60,000 plus visitors and
they come with families.
They are senior citizens, people from all over the
United States, people from Europe, religious people,
people who have no beliefs.
Probably people looking for something a little
more in their life.
They are odd with the grotto, no matter where they come
from or what the reason is.
I think one of the real miracles of the place is
that people do find a sense of peace and contentment.
In many ways, a real sense of meditation here.
It seems to be a real place.
The God is present in that nature and people seem to unite
in a real sense of harmony.
I love the grotto and I think I know a little of what Father
Wienerius felt because the pride is there once you've worked
for it, you're very proud of it.
You just have a sense of pride of where you're from, Dekuville,
or home of the grotto.
You can find more information about how to visit the grotto
by checking out our website at www.orgslashinwisconsin.
Once there, you will also see more about all
of this week's stories.
You can access streaming video of past reports.
Again, the address is www.orgslashinwisconsin.
Time now to head into the Wisconsin Public Television
Video Vault for our next story.
This Wisconsin Retro Selection first aired in 1987.
It features a Madison artist who
paints in a 1,500-year-old tradition called iconography.
Well, iconography is a spiritual path.
Again, the life itself is a spiritual path.
And for whatever reasons I've found it
necessary for many years to try to pursue a spiritual path.
I have a real, my system of beliefs seems to have pretty
much always included the need to practice something spiritual.
I was a naive artist.
I had never studied art formally,
although I think that my years as a journalist,
photojournalist, and so forth kind of oriented
me to visual things.
But I didn't know anything about painting.
I was a sort of grandmother Moses.
And the first painting I made as an adult was a scene of
my "The Farm" on which I grew up in Fondle, like County.
I eventually phased myself out of naive art because I
learned how to paint.
There's no going back in a certain way.
The most important thing I learned from the monks of Greece
was to make myself available to learn how to paint in a
certain manner with certain materials, and also to learn
how to pray and meditate.
When I paint an icon, I do it in the manner in which it's
been done for centuries.
I make a drawing, first of all,
to determine the composition.
And then a cartoon or a sketch of the exact size that the
painting will be.
I transfer the sketch, the cartoon onto
the surface upon which it will be painted, be it canvas or
board or wall or whatever.
And then the painting begins.
This is liturgical art.
It has an absolute function.
It's not whimsical at all.
That's not to say that the artist doesn't have freedom.
I have to interpret what I do.
And I have to use my own limitations, my own
skills or lack of skill or whatever to produce this art.
But at the same time, it is liturgical.
It's an essential ingredient to Eastern Christian
worship. I've had people complain Americans who sort
of have lost contact with that part of Judeo-Christian
history ask me, for example, why did you paint Mary?
She has such a mediterranean face.
Her skin is so olive-colored.
As though she was supposed to
be Anglican, I guess.
The Orthodox Church in Madison is the only Orthodox Church
in town.
And so there's a pan-Arthodox.
People of all ethnic groups worship there.
My presence in that church initially was simply as a
parishioner. At that time, this was in the early 70s, I was
learning iconography myself.
And I really had no idea that I would eventually paint churches.
But coincidentally, that church was remodeled and rebuilt and
made into a very beautiful and traditional building with a lot
of white walls and ceilings.
And then as I grew in my proficiency and was able to
paint, it pretty much followed.
I ended up painting there.
And I hope to continue for many, many years doing small
portions of ceilings and walls in that church.
Because really, every inch of an
Orthodox Church is intended to be decorated with icons.
I remember the fact that I'm Irish and paint Greek Orthodox
churches and have done certain experiences in my life.
Maybe a bit unusual.
But for my vantage point, it seemed to be
absolutely natural and normal.
And so I don't find it unusual at all.
I would find it unusual not to do what I do.
This seems to be the natural outgrowth
of the whole combination of experiences and elements
that make up me.
And I can't explain it in any other way.
We recently spoke with artist David Giffey, who tells us he's
still painting churches and also public murals.
Among his works, Giffey created two large
murals in Madison's Aldo Leopold School.
And although they're not church paintings, they
feature the same techniques.
That's our program.
Thanks for joining us and thanks to
Ulbrich Botanical Gardens here in Madison for hosting us
this week.
We leave you with a walk through Avocca Prairie
State Natural Area in Iowa County.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next time.
[birds chirping]
[music]