Buddhist Temples in Los Angeles

I have changed the title of this thread to make it a space for discussing LA's various Buddhist temples, offering accounts of visits to temples, reflections on the temples and Buddhism in general, and practical suggestions about ways we can use these temples to engage our students in the rich history and literature of Buddhism.

This post is on the Wat Thai Temple of Los Angeles.

Dennis Colato has written about Wat Thai as an excellent, and inexpensive, Thai food source in the restaurant thread, and it is indeed a great place to eat on weekends. I'd like to present it here as a cultural resource, a field trip opportunity and a chance to experience a Buddhist temple with active worshipers set in the congested San Fernando Valley. My wife visited the temple as part of a multicultural LAUSD salary-point class and has been trying to get me to go there for years. Despite my interest in Asia in general, and Buddhism in particular, I've always found one reason or another to procrastinate. As Dennis notes, the Wat Thai temple is near the intersection of Roscoe and Coldwater Canyon (about half a block south on Coldwater) near the 170. The exterior architecture is stunning, with lacquered gold and red paint, while the interior is quiet and calming and open to visitors (but take your shoes off before entering). The type of Buddhism practiced at the temple is Theravada, or Hinayana, Buddhism. Hinayana (literally "the lesser vehicle") is the Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Cambodia, as well as Thailand, in contrast to Mahayana ("the greater vehicle"), the Buddhism of China, Tibet and Japan. Without getting into too many details, Hinayana or Theravada is based on the Tripitaka, the canonical texts in Pali containing the words of the Buddha, written down sometime in the Frist Century BCE. One of the many pleasures of visiting the temple is listening to the monks, in their safron-colored robes, chant passages from the Tripitaka in the ancient liturgical language of Pali. Behind the altar area a spectacular mural extends in vivid colors from red-carpeted floor to high-beamed wooden ceiling with expressionistic depictions of the Buddha and various avatars. In addition to the mural and the incense sticks and the statues of the Buddha that a visitor might expect to see in a Buddhist temple, there are other features to remind you that this is a real working temple, not a museum. Three money trees were mounted near the mural on the day I was there, with bills of various denominations inserted at angles to create the branches of each tree. A member of the temple explained that the trees were there for people to donate to less affluent congregations that were trying to start temples in their own communities. "This is a pretty wealthy temple," he told me, "very middle-class." I met this young man, Tim, when I was looking through the pamphlets on display, most of them in Thai, for one printed in English. He went through the rack himself, assuring me there must be at least one in English. When he didn't find it, he took me downstairs to the library and located a pamphlet, "Introduction to Insight Meditation," that contains a clear, conciise introduction to meditation (far superior to many detailed chapters in yoga books that I've read), along with sections on walking, standing and lying meditation (variations I was unfamiliar with) and additional sections on "Cultivating the Heart," "Choiceless Awareness," "Living Insightfully" and a guide to correct meditation posture with a series of useful illustrations, and, if that's not enough for a free pamphlet, the Panca Sila in Pali with an English translation.

Tim, a wonderful resource in himself, explained his view of Buddhism in a long, spontaneous monologue that was friendly, humorous, insightful and very accomodating to Westerners who might have no sense of what Buddhism is or means. I'm not sure that some of the more sober and traditional monks would have approved entirely of Tim's personal take on Buddhism. (Theravada is in certain ways more traditonal than Mahayana.) But he talked about the monks too and told me how they had been mostly poor boys in Thailand who had joined one of the monasteries there to receive an education that their poverty would have made otherwise inaccessible (much the same reason boys entered monasteries in Medieval Europe). Tim at one point compared an image of an avatar to an astronaut in a space helmet and he emphasized that Buddhism was not a religion with a god and a set of rules but a way of understanding yourself and recognizing that your present identity is one of a great many you have incarnated throughout the cycles of time and that what is important is understanding that you are part of a larger collective identity that is your real self--a pretty good synoptic, contemporary description of Buddhism. He also noted that more formal tours and lectures are available for groups, which would be ideal for students on field trips and an easy way to fill in the "educational objectives" section of the field-trip request form.

Did I meditate at the temple? In fact, I did. I had to sit cross-legged because I cannot, despite much practice, approximate the traditional Asian kneeling-on-your-heels posture assumed by most of the Thai worshipers in the temple. I sat and listened to the monks and focused on their Pali chants and the red carpeting and, although this may sound like a cliche, I left the temple feeling calm and focused and inspired and more energetic than when I entered. My wife bought a "give-back" basket of food and toiletries that you buy in order to give to the monks, who must otherwise support themselves through begging, according to Theravadic tradition. The temple grounds also contain a girls' school, which would be of interest, I think, to our students, many of whom are familiar with Roman Catholic parochial schools but not with schools inspired by Asian religious traditions. As the pamphlet says, "May all beings be at peace,/may all beings be freed from suffering." (And don't forget about the food, especially the spicy papaya salad and the sweet sticky rice with mangoes.)

Leigh Clark
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