On a sweltering Sunday morning a bus pulls up at the base of a hill in front of a huge red gate adorned with Chinese characters. Out pour a few dozen elderly Chinese. They chatter excitedly as they hurry up the hill to photograph each other standing on the steps leading to a massive temple. The statues of a smiling Buddha and four bodhisattvas look down on the proceedings. Inside the scene is one of barely controlled chaos. Worshiper and tourists crowd into a large hall to bow in respect or simply to gaze at the 10,000 golden Buddha figurines. Many more dine on vegetarian dishes of tofu and fried noodles in the dining room. Children chase each other across the spacious courtyard. Nuns busily take donations, pass out sweet-smelling incense sticks, and give directions.
Not such a strange sight at a large temple in Taiwan, but this is Hacienda Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. The fifteen-acre complex looks distinctly out of place against the backdrop of stucco condominiums and mini malls. Welcome to Hsi Lai temple, built at a cost of US$26 million by Fo Kuang Shan, Taiwan's biggest Buddhist temple, located near the southern port city of Kaohsiung. Designed by Buddhist Master Hsing Yun, the Hacienda Heights temple is a replica, on a smaller scale, of the 3 million-sq. meter mountaintop parent temple, which he also designed.
The two characters "Hsi Lai" mean "coming to the West." Hsi Lai's patrons envisioned it as another foothold for Chinese Buddhism in the West, a place where Asian immigrants could worship and Americans could learn about the Buddhist faith. "In Buddhism, we say you have to plant a seed," explains David Lo, a Taiwan born Chinese and one of the temple's lay devotees. "That is what we're trying to do."
In the roughly three years since it was completed, the temple has become a center for the local Chinese immigrant community. It is situated near Monterey Park, California, which is home for the largest concentration of Taiwan Chinese overseas. The major Buddhist and secular Chinese holidays are celebrated at the temple, another reason for its popularity with the Chinese community. Over 10,000 people participate in Chinese Lunar New Year festivities. Even so, most people of the greater Los Angeles area are probably unaware of the Buddhist temple, or view it with bemused curiosity.
Master Hsin Ting, Hsi Lai's abbot, notes that Americans of European descent are deeply rooted in their own cultural and religious traditions. "While they may accept some of our theories, they won't necessarily change their lives or believe in our religion,” he says. The abbot, a forty-eight-year-old monk, has his hands full ministering to the faithful. His daily schedule is crammed with meetings, religious services, and lectures. He frequently travels around the U.S. giving lectures to other Buddhist groups as well.
The principle school of Buddhism practiced at Hsi Lai temple is Ching-tu, or Pure Land Buddhism. The followers of this school hope one day to enter the Western paradise of Amitabha Buddha. Like most Chinese Buddhist temples Hsi Lai is a bit eclectic, throwing in a bit of Chan, or Zen, Buddhist meditation for good measure. The emphasis at the temple is on good works: invoking the Buddha's name, chanting sutras, and walking and sitting meditation.
Meditation and introductory classes on Buddhism are offered for the novice or the curious each Sunday. Serious students can attend five-day intensive retreats to take religious vows such as the five precepts of Buddhism. The temple also has established Hsi Lai University, an accredited college dedicated to promoting Chinese Buddhism in the West. So far, only twenty students attend. Members of the local community also can take classes in everything from English to vegetarian cooking at the temple. Each Saturday dozens of Chinese children come to the temple for Chinese school. And in June there is summer camp. There's even a class for Chinese women who want to get along better with their mothers-in-law.
A museum located on the temple grounds houses a number of valuable Buddhist works of an. The most impressive is a reclining Buddha carved out of jade which is so heavy that it reputedly required three elephants to can it from Burma to India. The tiniest, but no less commanding, is a scroll just a half-inch wide on which is written the 152 characters of the Heart sutra, the shortest scripture in the Buddhist canon. The calligrapher used a single strand of human hair as a brush, and the visitor must look through a magnifying glass to see the work. Nearby is a small bookstore stocked with Buddhist books, tapes, and religious supplies. The hungry visitor can stop at the dining hall for a vegetarian meal served by the temple' s lay followers.
Despite the broad scope of Hsi Lai's activities and its impressive size, there are plans to expand. "We now feel the space isn't enough," sighs Master Hsin Ting. The temple has branches in San Diego, San Francisco, Hawaii, and Guam. Another is planned for Texas. There are also plans to open a branch campus of Hsi Lai University on the east coast of the United States.
None of this comes cheap. The temple estimates it costs more than half a million dollars each year to keep the temple running. In an average year, it provides free vegetarian meals for thousands of guests, burns tens of thousands of incense sticks and—according to official temple records—serves approximately 100,000 cups of tea. The temple parking lot on a Sunday resembles a weekday rush-hour traffic jam in Los Angeles.
Though it seems to be thriving and successful today, Hsi Lai temple has had its ups and downs. When the temple was first proposed in the early 1980s, many Hacienda Heights residents opposed it. Unfamiliar with Buddhism, they saw the proposed temple as an incursion into their town by a noxious religious cult. To complicate matters, some Chinese devotees who wished to live near the temple, offered local residents exorbitant prices for their houses. Of those days, Master Hsin Ting will only say, "It was very, very difficult."
As a form of public relations, residents of the neighborhood are regularly invited to major events such as Chinese New Year and the Buddha's birthday. When they do attend, they are plied with food and gifts and are introduced to temple members. In photographs taken at these lavish events, the neighbors look pleased, if somewhat dazed, by the attention.
Master Hsin Ting says most neighbors today regard Hsi Lai as a plus for the area. "Before, this city didn't have any special recreational places," he notes. "Now they have this big landmark." But the temple's acceptance by the community must be attributed to the public relations efforts of the temple's twenty-four resident monks and nuns and its many members. "We don't want to change American thinking," says Master Yi Ri, the temple's publicity director. "America is a very free country. We want Americans to be able to compare. Perhaps they'll make some discoveries."
Reaching out to the non-Chinese community has been difficult. Many of the nuns, fresh from Taiwan, speak little English. Until recently, they were issued six-month visas, scarcely enough time to become part of the community or learn English. A recent act passed by Congress now allows them to stay for as long as two years. Among their community outreach efforts is a prison program in Long Beach. Every Friday morning, Man Ya, a nun from the temple, teaches twelve prisoners about Buddhism and leads Buddhist ceremonies.
David Lo, a consulting engineer from nearby Irvine, California, is typical of the Chinese immigrants who worship at the temple. Born in Taiwan, he came to the U.S. in 1969 to attend college and graduate school. He is now married and has a ten year-old daughter, Stephanie. Although he tried other churches, he always felt out of place. Seven years ago, Hsi Lai's planners asked him to design the temple's electrical system. After that initial contact, he looked at a few Buddhist sutras, and was drawn to the religion of his homeland.
Like many immigrant parents from Taiwan, Lo does not want his daughter to lose contact with her roots. So he sends her to Chinese school at the temple. Many of the American-born children of immigrants come just to please their parents. Sam Liu, an impish nine-year-old, comes mainly to see his friends, eat, and make paper airplanes. "There's very little homework here," he says.
But Asian immigrants and their children are not the only people who have joined the temple. Since it opened in 1988, Hsi Lai has attracted a small following of Americans. Two men and one woman are currently in Taiwan taking their holy orders. Also a small but dedicated group of American adherents, which includes an Afro-American lawyer, a member of the Los Angeles County Coroner's office, and an immigrant from Malaysia, comes to the temple each Sunday. After sitting in meditation for half an hour, they listen to a religious lecture in the meeting hall.
Tanya Evanoff, a teacher at a local community college, was immediately attracted to the temple on her first visit. She has taken Buddhist lay vows and is quite active at the temple. She teaches English to the nuns on Mondays and Wednesdays. And on any given Sunday, beginning at the front hall under the watchful gaze of a smiling Buddha, you can see her, megaphone in hand, leading groups of English speaking tourists around the temple grounds. •