Khmer Samacky Monastery
Reported by Benjamin Maytan
I’m driving through the rural countryside of Virginia, wishing that I had spent more time last night thinking of interesting questions to ask. I’m half focusing on my driving, half on how to word, “How do you get your funding?” as politely as possible. As the GPS tells me that I’m getting close, it strikes me how surprising it would be to find a monastery intermingled with these spread-out farms, rusty tire change stations and tractors which take to the streets like Honda Accords. I make a left, and I shake my head at myself as I begin to suspect that, in my absentmindedness, I’ve made another wrong turn. My GPS hasn’t worked the best out here, but no, still no “recalculating.” This is ostensibly the right way. The road looks seldomly used, and the surroundings look more like a national parkland than a public roadway. The double yellow center line is faintly visible in some spots but is almost entirely worn away. The surface of the blacktop has been weathered into a warm and inviting shade of brown. I continue down the winding and solitary road and begin to feel as if I’ve shut the door behind me, and now it’s quiet, and I’m alone.
The GPS shows that I’m only a few hundred feet away, but I see nothing but dense forest on both sides. The screen shows a dotted line leading away from the road, so I suppose the monastery must be a walk from the road. I see a gravel pathway and decide, “Yep, that must be the monastery,” a little too late. The road is too narrow to turn around conveniently, so I keep driving as I look for a place to stop.
I come up to a little plaque with an even smaller swath of pavement. There is another car already parked in it. “If I’m getting a ticket, we both are, I guess,” and I get out of my car. I read over the plaque. It commemorates an old civil war battle and victory by a General O.C. Ord. “Empty Victory Richmond national battlefield,” tThe plaque reads. Looking at the small lot behind the sign, I only see someone’s rural backyard. I eagerly remember that I left a cereal bar in my little messenger’s bag and opened it up to find the dejected bar hiding in the corner of a pocket. I was expecting to stop at a convenience store and pick something up once I got into the area, but there wasn’t anything out here. I stand on the little apron of concrete that amounts to the national battlefield, and I realize that I hear nothing, just birds off in the distance, not just songbirds. Some sound quite large and loud.
I leave my car behind and start walking back along the narrow roadway. The surroundings look like an illustration of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The tall trees enclosing the road gives the feeling of a tunnel cut through a monolith of forest. There is a deep gulley on my left, likely dug to help with drainage for the crowned road. Strangely, the opaque, green surface of the shallow standing water flicks and gurgles as if there are feeding fish hidden beneath, but it doesn’t seem deep enough for anything to be living it, and I question what aquatic life could be living in such an artificial and likely impermanent waterway. Still, I don’t hear anything except the nearly constantly audible wildlife. The animals don’t seem shy here.
I rediscover the gravel driveway I had originally noticed. A little way down the gravel path the road forks. One way leads to a residential looking house tucked back in the trees, so I continue down the other. Just a few hundred feet away from my destination, I finally find the first indication that I’m in the right place, A sign nailed to a tree emblazoned with a foreign language. I trod along carrying my worn leather bag and feeling somewhat over dressed for the middle of the forest, but then, like a mirage, I see a bright, ivory-colored Buddha statute stick out from among the trees up ahead. The bright Buddha waits, sitting in a circle of grey paving stones in front of two modestly sized buildings.
A man in a truck drives up to me. He rolls down his window and asks me if I’m the man who has come to talk. I reply that I am and say that I’m the one who called a few weeks ago and spoke with Sopaul. The man says he remembers and says he’ll give Sopaul a call. I look over to the towering Buddha, which is now just about sixty yards away, and I see a nicely dressed man standing near the statue pull out his cell phone. The man in the truck tells Sopaul that the man who wants to talk with him has arrived. I look back and forth between both halves of the conversation. The man tells me to go meet him over by the Buddha statue, and I thank him before heading over.
I greet Sopaul, a friendly looking Cambodian man probably in his fifties, and I tell him I’m the man he spoke with on the phone. One of the first things he asks me is where my car is. I tell him I left it at the battlefield memorial a little bit down the road, and Sopaul insists on driving me back to get my car. He says he wouldn’t want my car getting towed. I assure him that someone else was parked there and that I think it will be fine, but he assures me that it’s no problem, and I hop into his truck. Immediately as Sopaul starts driving, he begins to tell me about his monastery, and I hurry to start my audio recording.
“Oh, Ok, so you say the temple was founded in 2015” I reiterate onto the beginning of my recording. “You mentioned you guys are from Cambodia, what tradition of Buddhism do you follow and teach here at the temple?”
“We call, Theravada Buddhist.” He says with an authentic pronunciation of “Tay-WaRrr-dah” which neither English letters, nor my American tongue could give the proper respect. “The one, Mahayana, is tough. They don’t eat meat or anything, but we do eat meat. We believe in the Buddhist scripture and chanting in the Buddhist voices of 2,565 years ago. We just do by the Buddhist scripture and chanting, but different from the Mahayana, they are stricter than us-you parked a very long way away.” He interrupts himself to joke with me.
“It was a very pleasant walk though.” I add.
“And you walk from here all the way over there, ohhh.”
“I’m originally from New York, I’m not used to this much pristine forest, this is really nice.”
“Ohh.” Sopaul responds.
“The listing I found for the temple online has you guys listed as a monastery. Do you have any monks here?”
“Yeah, got two monks, got three but one went to Cambodia. Park right here?” He asks, as we pull up to my car.
***
We arrive back at the monastery. The second building, the one which is pushed further into the background of the clearing, is being expanded and I see a worker or two busily going about their work. I find out later that second house is where their two monks live, and where they seclude themselves during their rainy season meditation retreat. The construction is them adding on a bathroom for the monks. Sopaul asks me where I want to sit to talk. He points out a beautiful red and gold wanto just behind the Buddha statue. I tell him we can talk wherever he would be most comfortable, and he says we should take a look inside the temple, if I’m willing to take off my shoes.
We enter the spacious, one-room temple. The first thing I noticed was the alter with a large, gold statue of Buddha, Sopaul would later tell me that they made the statue themselves. The wall behind the alter was entirely covered by a vibrantly colored depiction of the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment. Equally colorful and padded rugs covered the ground in front of the alter where the lay members of the temple sit to perform their chants or to pray to the Buddha, and to the left of the alter was a slightly elevated platform with microphones and highly decorative mats for the speakers to sit on when they addressed the temple members.
Sopaul tells me, “This is where the people come in here, sit down, or sit on the chair, and some people sit down over there,” Sopaul gestures towards the ornamented, padded rugs, “and cross legs and pray and chanting, the blessing.”
We walked to the far end of the rectangular temple, the opposite end as the alter. Sopaul pulls over a foldable picnic table. I sit down. The colorful room is filled with natural light from the many windows and glass doors. Sopaul asks me if I would like a water or a soda. I thank him for some water and restart my recording.
“How many members do you have here?” I ask.
“Oh, a hundred-and-fifty. A hundred and fifty lay people come maybe new year’s or maybe, in September we call Ancestor Day, it’s similar to Thanksgiving, that’s a lot of people right here. ”
Sopaul tells me that they have seven yearly festivals where their community gathers to celebrate.
“Most ceremonies start from nine o’clock to one, ten o’clock to one. Ten o’clock we come in chanting. We give the monk the food. The monk finish before twelve and then we have dinner.”
The festival which stuck out to me was Grateful Day where the children bring their parents up to the Buddha statue and thank them for being loved unconditionally. The next generation was one thing which Sopaul was especially concerned about.
“The youngs also welcome but the young don’t want to come and sit and pray, plus they don’t speak Cambodian they cannot chant in Buddhist voices in here so just fifty, sixty years old mostly come in here. That’s why we have Fourth of July steak. Even if they not come in here they can enjoy the music, the band. Theravada Buddhist is not strict like the other one, Mahayana, so we allow that the young people can come, enjoy or play something, cook something, but not allowed alcohol, anything alcohol.”
“Is alcohol completely forbidden?”
“Yes, forbidden. When the old aged they come in here, but when they young they not come. I mean when they go home they can do whatever they want to do,” Sopaul says, breaking into laughter.
Sopaul pulled up the spelling of “Theravada” on his phone in case I wanted to write it down.
“Like I say it depends on the people to go be stricter, accept it, but the Buddha, he has not got from heaven anything. He was the king. He was so rich, but he was just tired of his life. He found something else. He went to become a monk. He was born in the forest. He reached enlightenment, see the picture with the circle on it, (Sopaul points to the part of their mural which shows Buddha meditating with a glow of light behind his head.) He reached enlightenment in the forest. He passed away in the forest; so that’s why this place is ideal. It’s good in the forest; so we know. He taught us to do the middle way, not too tight, not too loose. So that’s what Theravada is talking about.”
“Yeah, something I’ve read is that there can be a disconnect between the older generation at temples and the younger generation often don’t speak the language of the temple’s home country.”
“Yeah, you’re right. We’ll have a difficult time finding the next generation coming up. A lot of my children don’t speak any Cambodian, very little they speak and its hard to do, but we just hope that we keep bringing the monk from Cambodia to speak and teach them. We haven’t figured that out yet. There’s a big step right there, but I’m not gonna force my children, you gotta be a Buddhist or Buddhist can be just stay home too. You don’t have to come out and pray… So, I’m just hoping we look unto that day, if they want to spell in alphabet in English, but still sound similar to Khmer.”
Sopaul explains to me how he would like if the younger generation could learn to speak like the Cambodian language by using the English letters they are more familiar with to create sounds similar to the sounds of Khmer. Sopaul taught me their chant, “Nuk mo tasa“, which he told me means, “Pray to the Buddha.” He explained to me that we could spell “Nuk” N-U-K and “Mo” M-O, the “Tasa” T-A-S-A.
***
“One of the things they wanted me to ask was how do you get your funding. So how do you guys get the money you need to stay open.”
“This temple, we are blessed. Even we have Covid 19 we have managed. The people still donated and then plus the mortgage… We’re blessed plus we have a hard time to bring people in during Covid, but anyway, people still donated. They see what we’re doing. We work to help to community.”
“So you’re completely funded by your community then?”
“Yeah”
Sopaul explained to me that just in the six years they have been opened that have already managed to pay off half of their mortgage.
“I’ve heard that with monasteries here in the U.S. their monks will sort of stay here for a little bit and then go back to their home country after-”
“Ahh, before we tried to keep on bringing, but it costs a lot of money, now we try to sponsor green cards so the monk can stay here. Before he had like six months and, back and forth, but then sponsored a different visa stay for thirty months, but now two monks we like. We work together OK. So we want them to stay and get a green card. So, we are in the process so we don’t have the back and forth. Sometimes, you go back to Cambodia and then you don’t pass the exam to come back, and then the temple has no monk.”
“When you bring a monk over here from Cambodia, their housing, their food is that all payed for by the community?”
“Yeah, by the offering, by the community. They turn to give the monk. The monk only has breakfast and lunch, two meals and not evening. Not evening, only drink water or tea. So we take turns. They don’t eat a whole lot.”
“How often do the laity come here to offer food?’
“We take turns, we take turns. A group of people, some Monday, four or five people. Some Tuesday, it depends on the group. My turn is today, Friday, with only three people! It’s OK, two monks, two bowls of rice, and they cannot complain. If you complain food is not good, it is not a real monk. Whatever they put in there, they cannot complain… I cannot be a monk really.”
“I certainly couldn’t be either. Sounds very difficult.”
“Hahaha, difficult yeah. No wife-”
“Oof!”
“No nothing, no money. Cannot except too much money, cannot be greedy for anything, no.”
Sopaul made it clear how important the monks were to the community.
“We believe if we offer to monk, the monk enchant it, chants the blessing. The blessing go through because we cannot give the food to the spirits, to the passed away, you know, through the monk. We believe in hell and heaven, so if one of the family mistakenly when in life he didn’t do a lot of good deed, he has a chance to go to heaven. So we bring the food to the monk, or the food to the poor, or the food to somebody else so people can come back up in good life. We believe in being born again.”
Sopaul mentioned that the monk’s housing is also completely off limits to the lay people.
“The monk is more respected, more than anything.” Sopaul said.
***
I ask if we can walk over to the alter, and Sopaul explains to me the life of Buddha and the different points in Buddha’s life depicted on their wall art.
“The Buddha work hard. It not easy. A lot of people that Buddha, or Buddhist monk don’t do anything; it’s no. The Buddha was bare foot. He walked for forty-five years from village to village in everywhere in India, Nepal, all that, to teach. So if He lazy he wouldn’t go from here to over there. You would see him fat, the Buddha is not fat.”
After having read some of the accounts of push back against the founding of Buddhist temples in Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge, I wanted to ask Sopaul if he has had any issues with the local government or the locals themselves.
“Have you had any issues here with the locals that aren’t part of your community.”
“Yes, when we first start, for four years. I just became president two years ago and they just re-elected me to another two years, but before that because they concentrate on the culture and all that, but when I became president, I focused on American values. I walk. I meet all the people here. I become a good neighbor. Two, three, four times before when we turn the music on, they call the county, but now I said if you hear anything from us let me know and I’ll work with them. You know we the Buddhist religion. We want the same thing you Christians. We work hard so we can go to heaven. We believe in heaven. They say Buddhist should be quiet, not have music at all, but I told them because we now American and when we were in Cambodia under communists, you probably heard of communists, Saigon and all that, we couldn’t say anything. Say something wrong they kill us. You cannot have anything, dancing, but now we American so we want our music, so we work with them to respect.
The Buddha told us you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else. That’s what he thought of. If you don’t love yourself you just cannot love somebody else. Love yourself, love your family, and then you start loving everyone, and you treat them just like you want to be treated by the other people. I told them that. So, so far, the neighbor mowed the neighbor mowed the lawn. If my lawn tractor broke, ‘Hey, Sopaul. Bushwhack behind here?” I say “Go ahead.” So I invite them to come to some picnic ceremony. They have food. They come. We were OK, but you gotta be, you know, work with them. When they know who we are they not very bad. They good people.”
***
As I wrapped up my interview, Sopaul handed me his business card. It had a pink lotus flower and the monastery’s name and address in white.
“You see a lot of lotus, lotus flower; that’s Buddha. He sat on the lotus flower. He told us if you have any doubts on yourself, how good, how anything, you not feeling up to it, sad or anything, he said just look at the lotus. Do like the lotus. Lotus flower grew in the mud goes through the dirty water and everything but what emerged out of the water, beautiful. That’s what he told us.’
My last question for Sopaul was what he would tell, not just his community, but all of America, if he could say one thing.
“I would say, just like the Buddha say, love yourself. Love your family. Make sure you love your family, and then get in to love your community, your state, your government, and then you love everybody. If you don’t love yourself, you’re not gonna, you can’t love other people without love yourself.”
***
I left Khmer Samacky Monastery with an invitation to come back for their new year’s celebration, not to my own credit. From what I saw and heard, I think most anyone would be welcome. After I put my recording device away and Sopaul walked me over to the door, he asked me where I was staying in Virginia, he asked about my schooling and how long I had left before I graduated. The microphone was put away, but luckily my tablet was still recording from within my bag as we said goodbye. Sopaul added:
“Don’t be too hard to yourself. You know something, it happen, it happen; we believe in bad karma. but don’t be too hard. You breathe every day that means you blessed. That’s all, keep on going.”
And I’ll leave you with his words, among all his others that I’ve copied down, trying my best to remain verisimilar to his English, though sometimes one word could have easily been another. I refrained from adding too much of my own characterizations, my little walk through the woods being the one exception since I was alone in my own world at the point of my trip. I hope that by reading the interview you felt like you got some idea of what it would be like to meet Sopaul, and you don’t need my butting in or my summarization for that. The one subjective description I gave of Sopaul was “friendly,” and no one could have interpreted that in any other way, but the rest, I leave up to you. The only thing I would point out is that they are there in the forest of Virginia. You may not know it if you weren’t looking for them, but they are there, and they are keeping their tradition alive here in Virginia. With how little I would have expected to find a Cambodian Buddhist Monastery behind those trees if I was driving through unaware, I now wonder where else there is a vibrant, Buddhist community not intermingled with but exemplifying our current American society.