Home Temples Trouble Neighbors and Governments

Everything about the Lien Hoa Temple evokes sublime tranquillity.

There are jacaranda and fig trees whose knotty trunks are stakes for two low-slung hammocks. A sloping cement bridge graces the man-made lotus pond. A statue of the Buddha Goddess sits at the center of the verdant courtyard.

“A place this like gives real meaning to the word peaceful,” said Serge Lenestour, who was here during a lunch break to pray and meditate. “I feel like all my troubles are gone.”

Yet it hasn’t always been so serene in the neighborhood around the temple, a salmon-hued structure the size of a double-car garage in a most unlikely place--the backyard of a four-bedroom house.

Lien Hoa is but one of many “home temples,” maintained primarily by Vietnamese monks, that in the past several years have faced complaints from neighbors and government inspectors for operating in residential areas or without proper permits.

“In Vietnam, we can build a temple, big or small, anywhere,” said Thu Van Nguyen, the head monk at Lien Hoa Temple, which was cited recently because ceremonies drew more than the 64 people allowed under city codes. “So, many of us just automatically assumed in the beginning that we can have our houses also be temples. Zoning ordinance? We only learn about them later.”

Generally, private homes cannot operate as places of worship without conditional use permits, which are only issued if the property meets safety requirements like adequate parking and emergency exits. But enforcing the law can be problematic because officials must weigh individuals’ constitutional right to assembly.

“It’s a gray area,” said Don Anderson, community development director of Westminster, which has several Vietnamese temples but has received few complaints. “If somebody says, ‘It’s my home and I will have an occasional religious gathering,’ do you define that as . . . a place of worship?”

There are 44 Vietnamese Buddhist temples from San Diego to Sacramento--most in Garden Grove and Santa Ana--listed in the 1996 Nguoi Viet Yearbook, a directory of Vietnamese businesses and organizations in California. No statistics are available for the number of home temples, but local monks say there are at least a dozen in Orange County.

A Communist government crackdown on religion in the early 1980s caused many Buddhist monks to join the wave of refugees. Orange County now is home to at least 100,000 Vietnamese expatriates, the largest such population outside Southeast Asia.

Many of the monks recalled arriving with merely the robes and sandals they had on. Vietnamese Buddhists in the community pooled their resources to buy houses for the monks.

At first, the home temples were more a curiosity than anything else. Officials generally left the monks and their worshipers alone. As the crowds grew, however, so did complaints.

Usually, it is during Tet, the celebration of the new year on the Lunar Calendar--when thousands come to pray and pay respect to ancestors--that neighbors speak up. But even in normal times, some object to the traffic during services, which mostly are held on Saturdays and Sundays but sometimes during the week.

“I don’t want to stop anyone from worshiping, but there just are so many people and they block my driveway, make a lot of noise and just come and go at all hours,” said Betty Parker, who lives three houses from Thanh Tung Duong, a monk who was sued by Garden Grove in April for holding services without a permit.

Parker said that for two months after Tet, she took pictures of religious goings-on at the dwelling and handed them over to the city. Duong has since agreed to limit the number of worshipers.

The city also settled a case against Lien Hoa Temple last spring after a promise to keep down the number of people there.

“What can we do? The people in the community need and want temples where they could go and worship,” said Dao Van Bach, the head monk at the Vietnam Temple, whose Garden Grove house in 1989 became the first home temple in Orange County to be sued for a zoning violation. Bach has since razed his house and built what is among the largest Vietnamese Buddhist temples in the U.S.

Some monks insist their homes are not really temples, though they draw many guests for prayer. “This is where I work and live, where monks come to pray or live,” said Duong (Thich Quang Thanh), one of the two monks sued by Garden Grove earlier this year. “Yes, it has an altar, but I am a monk, so my home will have one.”

When Duong applied for a permit to build a patio and raise his ceiling to accommodate a 30-foot altar for the Buddha, city officials asked if his home would be used as a place of worship. “I said no,” the monk recalled. “I meant it then, and I mean it now: This is the home of a monk and not a temple.”

There was never a debate over Lien Hoa Temple. The sign “Lien Hoa Temple” is as plain as day.

Nguyen, the head monk, said he has violated his permit allowing up to 64 worshipers many times since 1987, when the temple opened.

Other monks said they have found local officials generally accommodating. “The city just looks the other way most of the times,” said Bach, the Vietnam Temple monk. “They just have to respond to complaints, we know that.”

Bach said Garden Grove officials, by allowing him to continue to hold services, gave him time to appeal to his 2,000-family membership for the $2.6 million necessary to build his imposing pagoda, scheduled to open early next year.

“We just need to do everything we can to meet their standards if we want to continue our services,” Bach said. “Or else, we can just hide--hide and continue them illegally. Most of the monks here do that anyway.”