The Oddiyana Dharma Sanctuary
It is hard to say when the exact date the birth of The Oddiyana Dharma Sanctuary was as it has been a beautiful organic process.
Choeying was asked many years ago to start a centre here in Hervey Bay and declined as there was already a centre here and didn’t feel Hervey Bay was ready for two Buddhist Centres.
She chose instead to travel the world and sit at the feet (literally) of her various teachers, attending teachings and retreats to further her own knowledge and practice of the Dharma as a way of understanding her own suffering while traversing her own spiritual path. Along the way she was prompted by one of her teachers to teach others the Dharma which in the beginning she did reluctantly but now very grateful as she has enjoyed teaching for many years in many varied environments.
After becoming ordained Choeying had resigned herself to remaining a travelling nun thinking no one in Hervey Bay would know what to do with the strange bald women who only owned one strange dress due to becoming a Buddhist nun.
To her great surprise her first day out in Hervey Bay as a nun she was approached in the supermarket and asked for spiritual advice. This happens more often now whenever she ventures out from the temple. She has community members come to her with varying requests with anything from facilitating funerals to visiting the sick, counseling people in distress or to simply ask if she is a Hari Krishna, recovering from cancer or just something that has landed from another 
planet, to which Choeying often replies while laughing, “I often wonder about that one myself!” Choeying has shared with us in her teachings at The Sanctuary that she grew up thinking she came from another planet and was dropped on earth without a map or a guide.
Choeying is still pleasantly surprised each time she wanders out into the community and is given the opportunity to meet and share the power of Buddhist philosophy and meditation to help people find their own inner wisdom and through this having the ability to heal themselves.
Still thinking she would be destined to be a travelling nun as she started to prepare to attend the Winter Retreat at Plum Village in France with a teacher she highly respects the Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn or Thay as he is affectionately known plus travelling onto India and other places she had been asked to teach.
While in the process of organizing to go into retreat she was asked to facilitate a Calm Abiding Course which she was delighted to do. This time she was closer to going to France and India. In fact ready to book her tickets.
This Calm Abiding Course turned her life in a whole new unexpected direction when a few of us who attended the course again asked Choeying to formalize a centre here in Hervey Bay.
This was the conception of a new centre in Hervey Bay. It is in the process of being born with the help of some very enthusiastic Dharma brothers and sisters who are dedicated to The Oddiyana being a Sanctuary that benefits themselves and many beings in the community of Hervey Bay and the broader community, through meditation, Buddhist philosophy, yoga and other spiritual activities.
It was quickly named The Oddiyana Dharma Sanctuary.
Choeying said, “I chose the name Oddiyana because it appealed to my sense that love and life and everything in between was an intriguing mystery and that if we surrendered to the mystery of love and life there was a certain kind of magic about it.
Oddiyana, it seemed, was also bathed in mystery and magic and so it sparked my curiosity to find out more.
Never seeing myself as a feminist, at times I have made myself unpopular, by not adhering to the concept the feminist movement needed the pendulum to swing to the extreme in order to come back to the middle to achieve liberation. It seemed far wiser to me to see a coming together of men and women through deep understanding of each other. I love having both men and women boys and girls coming to my classes in the hope of promoting a coming together in a spiritual environment to add sacredness to their relationship through deep understanding of themselves and each other. I see this is so important in every relationship in whatever form it comes. To me this is a wise approach to true liberation.
For this to happen I felt I needed to study and practice more connected with the feminine aspect in Buddhism which seemed to be sadly lacking in the different places I have studied. So I had a deep sense that I had at last found what I needed when I read that Oddiyana was also known as “the paradise of the dakinis” lean more here, as it was reputed for its unique sisterhood of priestesses—ladies dedicated to wisdom and spiritual development. These priestesses were not nuns, and lived in sanctuaries or forest chapels. It became apparent I needed guidance and deep understanding of myself and the opposite gender in order to be able to be able to embrace my own female energy and come from a more balanced place to develop my skills of teaching both men and women how to better come together in a loving respectful way from a Buddhist perspective.
Before becoming a nun I had my own form of robes which were for many years were always, “all white”. I have had a dream of a line of large glass stupas by a river (or some body of water) so I was amused when I read that Oddiyana Buddhist texts speak of Oddiyana as a beautifully green and fertile kingdom, inhabited by gentle people often clothed in white, who had great respect for wisdom and learning. It was surrounded by high, rugged mountains, and in the broad valleys were towering white stupas and golden temple roofs. It seemed a paradise on earth and so was called “the royal garden”( from the Sanskrit udyana) I still feel more comfit able in white (especially in our climate) and our Sanctuary is surrounded by beautiful tropical gardens that many see as royal.
The first part of the name Oddiyana was given life and the rest naturally flowed.
Having a very deep love and devotion of the Dharma it was never a question for me if the word Dharma would be in the name . . . it was more a question of where?
Dharma; although commonly known as the teachings of the Buddha (the awakened one, or fully awake) it also has a deeper meaning such as; a phenomenon or constituent factor of human experience. This was gradually expanded into a classification of constituents of the entire material and mental world.
The word Sanctuary has always filled my heart with feelings of refuge, peace and bliss and seemed to succinctly support and complete the rest of the name.
Sanctuary; is also a multi layered concept such as; A sanctuary is the consecrated area of a church or temple around its tabernacle or altar. Its history is deeply imbedded with the scent of sacredness, safety and refuge.
The combination of these three concepts I felt was an apt description of what The Oddiyana dharma Sanctuary would represent;
“A safe, sacred refuge or space to find ourselves through meditation and study in order to enjoy a happier more peaceful life for ourselves and all beings.”
In later Tibetan traditions, Oddiyana is either conflated or identified with Shambhala, a land inhabited by dakinis and inaccessible to or by, ordinary mortals being a “Hidden Land”.
Dakini (Skt.): female spirits, witches and sometimes deities. The word is commonly translated from the Tibetan khandroma as ’sky-goer,’ thought to be someone that can fly through the air and possessed of special powers. A class of Buddhist tantric deities and Buddha emanations are modeled after the Dakini. In Tantric Buddhism the two terms yogini and dakini are used almost synonymously. Vajrayogini
Deity; These mythic figures are understood to arise out of, and return to, Emptiness; they have no inherent reality. They are not worshipped in the sense of idolatry, though certainly it may seem to be so, as for example, when one first encounters people doing prostrations before images on a shrine. That is one reason for not using the term ‘altar’, by the way.
Also, the expression ‘tutelary deity’ who is often used to translate the Tibetan word yidam is misleading as it implies a teacher-student relation. A yidam is a deity with which the practitioner has a special relationship. The deity is sometimes selected by the advisor or lama to balance or complement the student’s psychology.
