Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of This Land.
In 563 BCE, on the full moon day of April, a prince was born, named Siddhartha Gautama, who would leave his kingdom and abandon the material world in pursuit of freedom from old age, sickness, and death. At 35, while meditating beneath a bodhi tree, Siddhartha conquered the demons of his mind, liberated himself from the cycle of reincarnation, and achieved a complete awakening. After that, he became known as Shakyamuni Buddha, the father of Buddhism, and he spent the rest of his life leading others to the path of enlightenment.
In May of this year, 2,639 years after Buddha’s birth, around 200 Vietnamese Buddhists celebrated the event with a ceremony and festival at Chùa Tam Bào, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s only Buddhist temple. (Chùa means “temple” in Vietnamese. Tam Bào means “three jewels” and refers to the three jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.)
Tam Bào was established in 1993, when Buddhist Vietnamese refugees, who began to settle in Tulsa after the fall of Saigon in 1975, pooled their resources to buy five acres of land in east Tulsa, at 16933 E. 21st Street. The property included a house—where the temple’s abbot, monks, and nuns live, and where community gatherings are held—and a 3,300-square-foot metal building, which was converted into the temple. At the time, the Tulsa World reported that roughly 1,700 of Tulsa’s 2,500 Vietnamese citizens practiced Buddhism. But Buddhism doesn’t require temple attendance, and the temple’s abbot, the Venerable Thich Duc Tri, said between 70 and 80 people participate regularly in Sunday services. Upwards of 300—from Tulsa and across the country—attend special events, like the Buddha’s birthday festival, called Dai Le Phat Dan in Vietnamese.
The temple added an English-language service in 1998, and the abbot was appointed to the temple in 2005. Sunday services are held in English at 9 a.m. and in Vietnamese at 10:30, and the temple is open every day for chanting and meditation. In fact, the temple is rarely closed. The doors stay unlocked; anyone can come in and meditate or chant the sutras anytime they like. And the gates of the grounds are open to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike who might want to wander among the 18 arahan—statues of historical figures that represent virtues that Buddhists should try to attain.
Many of the random daily visitors aren’t Buddhists at all, but gawkers, admirers of one of Tulsa’s lesser-known roadside attractions: a 57-foot-tall granite statue of Quan Âm (commonly known by her Chinese name, Kuan Yin), a bodhisattva who represents mercy, compassion, kindness, and love. A bodhisattva is a “being of bodhi or enlightenment—one who has earned (the opportunity) to leave the world of suffering and is destined to become a Buddha, but has forgone the bliss of nirvana with a vow to save others,” explained the temple’s secretary, Uyen Nguyen.
The 400,000-pound Quan Âm was sculpted in Vietnam and shipped to Tulsa in 12 pieces, which represent her 12 vows, and erected on the temple grounds in 2011. The process of fundraising, permitting, and logistics for the statue took two years and about $350,000.