Dharmic Dawn

New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, a swath of rugged canyons and colorful wooded peaks, stretch north of Albuquerque and west of Santa Fe, New Mexico, dotted with small towns and ancient Pueblo Indian dwellings. Jemez Springs, a modest but healthy hamlet in its southern reach, lies along a loud creek near an extinct volcano, which accounts for its bubbling hot springs, one reason for the town's trickle of tourists. This settlement has also served as outpost for some noteworthy religious orders. In the sixteenth century, Franciscan missionaries ran roughshod over the Pueblo people, building atop their village. More recently, Catholic groups with curious names?Servants of the Paraclete, for example, and the Handmaids of the Precious Blood?have set up base in the valley. And, since 1973, so has Bohdi Manda, a Zen Buddhist compound established by a Japanese master, Joshu Roshi, who is now 97 years old.

At the end of summer, Jemez Springs is cool and star-flecked at night, and warm and bright most days. (For seven years now, the state has been in drought, but it doesn't show in this lush, hummingbird-infested dale.) A few buildings stand out in the landscape; one is the Zen center's new dharma hall, or foundation hall, a public place where the monastic and lay worlds meet. It is a platform for Buddhist ceremonies and training, as well as weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Its shell is exceptional: In ways both formal and experiential, the design transforms New Mexican light and earth to reflect the ritual life of Bohdi Manda.

5:15 a.m. Under a bright three-quarter moon, the foundation hall is easily visible. From the main canyon road, passersby glimpse a framed view into the hall, through a low, 36-foot-wide set of sliding wood doors. For an hour and a half already, meditation and chants have been underway. A few black-robed students sit on black cushions set in an orderly, 3-foot grid of rectangular tatami mats, next to drums and a gong. The donai, or students, occupy the north side of the room, and in the center?the Buddha space?is the "high seat," a large wooden chair left vacant for Roshi's eventual return. To the south is the joju, or teachers' area. And to the west, a triptych of recesses built from dark-stained wood functions as an oversized butsudan, or Buddhist altar, which, like the door, faces east toward the spiritual nexus of the faith in Asia. The votive areas contain an antique Japanese butsudan, some Chinese furnishings, and a Buddha and other religious figurines.

6:35 a.m. Dawn is breaking. A glow, and then direct sun, hit the westerly flank of the canyon, giving acid life to its cliffs of travertine and ruddy sandstone. The fast-brightening daylight translates into another glow inside the hall, in part from its glass clerestory and open front door, but mostly from the full-height polycarbonate walls on laminated-strand lumber enclosing its western half. It's bright enough to turn off the exposed light bulbs hanging from looped black cord. Above them, large glue-laminated roof beams converge in a dominant symmetry, supporting 2-by-12-inch wood purlins running perpendicular to the main axis. A sweet incense burns on the altar.

7:00 a.m. Breakfast is held in silence in the kuri (kitchen) next door, in one of the original tin-roofed wood cabins that once housed a boy-scout camp and a 100-year-old church, the latter now used as the zendo, or meditation hall. Like their new minimalist neighbor, these multipurpose buildings have gabled roofs of corrugated tin or steel?the norm in this hail- and snow-prone region?supported by narrow, exposed timbers. But where the older facilities are built upon stuccoed cinderblock and stone, the hall is cast in 26-inch-thick slabs of poured native earth and aggregate, sandblasted to a smooth finish. And rather than exposed log timbers, stout glulams support the long eaves that protect the building?and students engaged in kinhin, or walking meditation?from sun and precipitation. Still, the newcomer works hard to fit into its context.

The students and the vice-abbess, Jiun Hosen Osho, eat boiled eggs, granola, and orange slices, and then clean their bowls at the table. It was Hosen?an energetic, warm Montreal native who has taught here for 25 years?whose initiative led to the building of this half-million-dollar project. Her influence is everywhere: in its layout, for example, and in the double-sloped roof, which she felt was more in keeping with the Jemez Mountains vernacular than the architects' initial idea, a simple shed plane. Most Zen monasteries in the United States adopt literal Japanese imagery, explains Hosen, or simply occupy found structures, not seeking to explore their space. The Bodhi Manda foundation hall, while exuding a Palm Springs mod, conforms to traditional monastery planning and proportions inside.

7:50 a.m. The first rays of direct sun break over the east ridgeline and, upon hitting thin glazed slits in the sliding wood doors, reflect about 60 degrees northward and mark the floor with luminous beams that appear one at a time as the sun moves. Outside, the earthen walls brighten considerably, picking up the colors and textures of the canyon slopes; now it's harder to see from the road what's happening beyond the dark wood doors, which adds some intrigue. According to Hosen, this entrance remains open and unlocked for five months straight each year.

12:00 noon Strong afternoon light penetrates the layered translucent walls, and the foundation hall interior glows brightly. Its equalizing ambient light illuminates the faces of a couple that has come here to wed after 25 years together; while they are friends of Bodhi Manda, they are not Buddhist practitioners.

Neither are the architects of their temple, the Los Angeles?based team of John Frane and Hadrian Predock (son of Antoine), although they have worked on similar facilities for Buddhist retreats in the Mojave Desert and in Crestone, Colorado. But it didn't matter either way to Hosen; she simply sought an architect who wouldn't be "fixated" on anything. And for Frane and Predock, their client's honest naïvete opened doors. "It was more intuitive than working with typical clients," says Predock. "They said, 'Here are the rituals that take place here; how can we frame them?" Owner and architect considered some temple typologies in Japan, such as the tourist-attracting Ryoanji in Kyoto, with its famous Zen garden. They shaped a master plan with elements of Japanese monasteries: meditation halls, a cemetery, and dormitories. The compound's first new structure, the foundation hall, would be sited to create a central green space bounded by the zendo, the kuri, and the foundation hall. The resulting introverted garden is highly typical of a Buddhist monastery.

1:30 p.m. Twenty miles away from the Bodhi Manda, the sun peaks over a bowl-shaped valley?actually the crater of a collapsed volcano?called Valles Caldera, where steam rises from pools of earth-heated water. To the east, twelfth-century cliff dwellings vie with the U.S. Department of Energy's off-limits "tech areas" in Los Alamos to summon greater intrigue. For years, the DOE has studied ways to harness geothermal energy from the caldera, and for decades the buildings at the Bodhi Manda have piped hot-spring water through simple radiators for winter heat. For the new foundation hall, a more technical (and efficient) solution was employed: Just behind the Buddha altar, framed in the same dark wood, is a tidy mechanical room housing a pint-sized heat exchanger that warms a glycol loop for a perimeter heating element. According to Hosen, the Zen center spends about $30 per month to heat all six of its buildings.

5:30 p.m. Inside the foundation hall, the glow from the afternoon sun is starting to subside. Hosen, in her office that looks out toward the new building, busily fields phone calls from students and visitors. It was Hosen who encouraged Roshi to build the hall, and in the process, the pair unwittingly became patrons of a promising, emerging architectural practice. Stepping over the gravel moat and onto the Brazilian hardwood deck that encircles the foundation hall, she seems to breathe in the structure. "These beams are so perfectly positioned. I cried once last winter, because I was scared for the roof: We had 18 inches of snow?wet snow, not dry snow," she recalls. "But the roof made not one sound. This building is as solid as it can be. It's going to be here for the next millennium."

7:12 p.m. Students buzz around the campus, preparing for a group of 80 visitors on a yoga retreat and for their own trip to Los Angeles for a seven-day zazen, an intensive session of chanting and meditation. A thunderclap abruptly echoes through Jemez Springs, and a few drops of rain fall. Framed by puffy dark clouds just beyond the mountain ridge is a perfectly arched, brilliant double rainbow. A few students, wearing street clothes since mid-morning, gather in the courtyard to admire the view over the foundation hall roof. Sunset won't come for another hour or so, but the shadows are already long in the canyon. And the luminance of the foundation hall is inverting itself: rather than admitting light, it now reads as a glowing object?a lantern, perhaps.

9:00 p.m. The water in the hot springs feels about 90 degrees or so, perfect for a soak under the stars. A faint glow emanates from the foundation hall. It's unclear whether it's a celestial light or something burning within. The campus is quiet and, yes, monastic. Its purity of purpose seems even more evident under the cover of night.