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Hoa
Nghiem Pagoda |
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The second temple that I visited was the Hoa Nghiem Pagoda, which is a Vietnamese temple. I was really surprised to see that this temple was a normal house, there were actually three houses all together that were part of the temple. I arrived there around twelve pm. on a Friday. I parked my car and I walked to the front door, but there was a note on the door that said to ring the doorbell at the side door. There's something about me going to temples and always going to the wrong door first :). So I went to the side door and rang the door bell. I was lucky this time and got the right door because seconds after I rang the doorbell a short Vietnamese man, around 50yrd old answered the door. Because of his clothing I guessed him to be a monk. I told him that I am a student at a college in Virginia and that I am taking a religions course in which we are now studying Buddhism. I asked him if I could look around the temple and also if he could answer some of the questions that I had. He said sure and invited me to go inside. I entered into a kitchen where there were three women and two other men seated at a table and they were eating. I realized that I had interrupted their lunch, so I apologized and offered to come back at a better time. They told me to stay and invited me to sit down and eat with them. I had already eaten so I thanked them and I asked if I could look around the temple while they finished eating. The temple was made up of a large room with the main shrine set against the center wall. There were four other shrines round the room, some had statues of Buddha, one had a statue of a woman and another had pictures of the master of one of the monks. On one of the walls there was a huge map with pictures of Buddhists, I noticed that only four out of the hundreds of the pictures that were on the wall were pictures of Americans. I walked around the room and took pictures and as I got closer to one of the shrines I noticed a symbol on a flag that look like the symbol [a swastika] that the Nazi party had. I asked the monk what that symbol meant and he told me that it is so old that they do not know for sure what it means. He also told me that Buddhism no longer exists in India, and that it came to Vietnam two thousand years ago. Since I was born and raised in a communist country I knew that they did not like religion, so I asked the monk if they had any problems with the communists in Vietnam because they practiced Buddhism. He told me that after the Vietnam war was over the communists put him in jail for fifteen years because he was a Buddhist. He said that he thinks that the real reason why he was put in jail was because he was a high ranking military officer in the South Vietnamese army, but they could not jail him for that so they used his religion as an excuse to do it. He said that when he got out of jail he went to study Buddhism in a temple in Vietnam and then he came to the States in 1993. He told me that the temple that I was visiting has been there for seventeen years and that they are trying to build a new temple, but they are waiting for Fairfax county to give them a permit to start building. He showed me the plans for the temple and how it will look like, and he also showed me a huge statue of Buddha that they had in their back yard that will be placed in front of the new temple. He told me that the statue was made in Vietnam and then it was shipped over here. He said that they have been waiting for a couple of months for the permit, but that one of their neighbors is giving them problems and that's why they can't get the permit. Their neighbor does not want a temple to be built close to him. He then took me and showed me the other two houses that were part of the temple. He said that one house was for the male monks and the other house was for the female nuns, because they were not allowed to live together. I went into the house that the nuns lived in and they also had a huge room with a beautiful shrine in it. The statue of Buddha that was in front of the shrine was huge and it was all gold. When I walked in one of the nuns was placing fruit in front of the statue and she was also cleaning it from dust with a fan made from feathers. This kind of reminded me of what I saw at the Sikh temple, where they were waving a fan made of feathers [actually horse hair] above their shrine to prevent dust from settling on it. Inside the women's house there was a wall covered with pictures from when the Dalai Lama had visited their temple in the year 2000, or that's what they told me. He also showed me a picture of one hundred thousand Buddhist monks and novices that had gathered together on Earth Day in 1993. It was a beautiful picture, it showed a huge crowd that were all wearing the Tibetan monk clothing. Then we went back to the first house and they gave me some books to read. Contrary to what I had been told at another temple, that we're not allowed to touch a monk because they are always in some form of meditation, this monk allowed me to touch him. I also noticed that only the men spoke English, whenever I would ask the women a question the men would translate the question to them and then translate the answer back to me. Before I left I asked them why Buddha statues sometimes depicted him as fat and sometimes as thin. They told me that Buddha was sometimes depicted as fat to symbolize that he is everywhere, he reaches everybody, he has a great mind and he is rich in wisdom and compassion. All together I felt like I learned a lot from this temple and the people were very nice, so I had a very pleasant experience. |
| Created by Laura Ellen Shulman |
Last updated: May 2002
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