COMPASSION’S SHELTER (Nov. 19, 2005)
I had visited the Japanese peace pagoda in Leverett numerous times, passing the Cambodian temple along the way and recalling that an Amherst woman had been working with Cambodian refugee community, so I was eager to learn more about these people, who I found absolutely charming and welcoming. As a result of my interviews with the monks and nuns, I wound up visiting their temple and shrines numerous times, to meditate and just to share the prayerful spirit of these humble people.
There’s a glow at Watkiry Vongsa Bopharam.
A pair of flickering candles on the altar of the sacred space in Leverett is dwarfed by an encased, 6-foot-tall, bead-studded likeness of Cambodia’s mammoth Angkor Wat temple.
A majestic, saffron-cloaked Buddha oversees a dozen smaller statues of the prophet gathered from Sri Lanka, India, Japan and elsewhere around the Buddhist world.
Twin porcelain elephants hold candles waist-high. Oriental rugs cover the floor of the temple, where Cambodian immigrants from around the Pioneer Valley and beyond come to pray and listen to dharma teachings.
A flick of a switch turns on a dazzling display of lights equal to those on the Franklin County Fair midway.
Watkiry Vongsa may seem out of place in its secluded Cave Hill setting, except for the neighboring Japanese peace pagoda and the temple under construction there. But tranquility pervades this 20-acre prayer center.
A brief walk along a checkerboard concrete path leads a visitor from the red-roofed temple with finials and stone lion sentries, through the woods and to an outdoor Buddha, his head protected from the rain by a seven-headed serpent. Further on, inside a screened pavilion decorated with colorful cloth and hanging lanterns, a plaster reclining Buddha, more than 20 feet in length, is surrounded by flowers, candles and prayer rugs. He appears happily asleep, but Buddha is actually depicted having reached nirvana.
Deeper in the woods and up the hill is a stupa, or shrine, which holds the ashes of 20 or so cremated community members, near a memorial marker for Watkiry Vongsa founding president Boay Bu and his wife.
A neighboring parcel has been purchased for a meditation center, for which donations are being solicited independently.
The center of activity, however, is the temple, where a fragrance of incense greets visitors. Its side walls are lined with images of young Buddha before enlightenment, as well as those of local Cambodian families and Maha Gosananda, the world-renowned monk who founded this sanctuary. A statue of Gosananda, known as the Gandhi of Cambodia, graces a corner of the altar.
Everywhere, however, what fills the air here is a spirit of veneration and grace.
Innumerable bows, with palms pressed together, are the greetings to and from the two orange-robed monks, as well as from the nuns and women volunteers, dressed entirely in white. Watkiry Vongsa itself means “little white flowers on the hill” and, like most flowers, the nuns and attendants abound mostly in spring and summer, when this Leverett sanctuary feels most like that of Cambodia.
In the kitchen inside one of several huts and trailers on the property, Yea Pooung and two other cooks are busy preparing the 11 a.m. morning meal for the monks, made from offerings brought by community members. This day in October is the end of a two-week period honoring ancestors, and offerings are particularly plentiful: fish, eggplant, roasted garlic, vegetables and, of course, rice. The food is set out in bowls on the floor, where community members will be called to share their meal.
The monks must finish their second and final meal of the day by noon, after which they are allowed only tea and water.
As with all of the trailers, huts and other buildings at this Cave Hill compound, shoes and slippers are left at the entrance.
Sitting cross-legged in a small bedroom in the rear of the trailer, Sovoeun Szay of Belchertown takes a few moments from preparing the meal to speak with a visitor. She has come to Leverett to care for the temple and the monks — Phorn Peap, who arrived this February directly from Cambodia, and Thong Eait, who came a year or so earlier. (Neither understands much English and depend on volunteer tutors.)
The monks, who lead prayers at 5 p.m. daily, are not supposed to prepare food, she explains. “Like kings they are.”
In broken English, Szay says she comes to the Leverett temple often, sometimes for a week or more at a time. Days spent here, particularly the dharma teachings from the monks, she says, feel like medicine for her soul.
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The shadow of a terrifying past lingers beyond the peace of this sanctuary.
Cambodia, which became independent of 90 years of French colonial rule in 1953, turned into a casualty of the war in Indochina, when U.S. forces in 1969 began a bombing campaign against North Vietnamese bases there, and the country’s monarchy abdicated the following year. Following years of guerrilla fighting, pro-Communist Pol Pot seized control in 1975.
The dictatorship banned religion, abolished money and private property and moved the population from urban centers to forced labor camps. Nearly 2 million intellectuals, Buddhist priests and other “enemies of the state” roughly 30 percent of the population, died from starvation or were tortured and executed by Khmer Rouge forces during the regime, which lasted for more than 3 years. Cambodia’s 3,600 Buddhist temples were shut down — and the persecution of 60,000 clergy left only 3,000 by the collapse of Pol Pot in 1979.
“The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia to year zero,” according to the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, founded by the refugee journalist whose story was portrayed in movie “The Killing Fields.”
“They banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion and the family. Everyone was forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, every day. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or as soldiers. People were fed one watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice thrown in. Babies, children, adults and the elderly were killed everywhere. The Khmer Rouge killed people if they didn’t like them, if they didn’t work hard enough, if they were educated, if they came from different ethnic groups, or if they showed sympathy when their family members were taken away to be killed. It was a campaign based on instilling constant fear and keeping their victims off balance.”
Thousands of Cambodian refugees immigrated to this country in the late 1970s and 1980s, many of them flocking to Massachusetts. Franklin and Hampshire counties have a combined Cambodian population of nearly 500, according to the 2000 census, with most of the community clustered around Amherst.
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Inside the temple, Sovoeun and Maly Mel of Chelmsford, both dressed in white robes, sit cross-legged on the floor and recall their past.
They tell of fathers, brothers, husbands, daughters killed by the Khmer Rouge, of being uprooted from their villages, of carrying young children for days to reach the Thai border camps, and then of crowding into apartments here until they could get settled.
“My brother was a monk a long time,” said Maly Mel, who arrived here in 1982. “He wouldn’t take off his robes, (so) they shoot him.” Her father, daughter and husband were all killed by Khmer Rouge.
Sovoeun recalls crossing her country on foot with her seven children to escape the Khmer Rouge after her village was blown apart, making their way toward the refugee camp in Thailand where they stayed before immigrating to the United States in 1984.
Oul Chham, a Holyoke woman who arrived in Amherst 10 years ago and visits the temple frequently, sits nearby, nodding familiarly with what she hears. She remembers crossing the river with her four children, as well as her sister and brothers, to escape to Thailand.
“All the houses were burned down (by Khmer Rouge) Even the temple burned down,” she says, then she pantomimes taking aim with a rifle. “They shoot you don’t move. They said (they would rather) save the bullet: it’s worth more than my life. Would rather cut you with a bayonet.”
Vouch An, a former rice farmer and Cambodian soldier who arrived in Amherst in 1985 with his wife and six children, remembers his ancestral village being bombed by America forces searching for Vietcong in 1973 and houses burned by Khmer Rouge. They fled to a village in the northeast Battambang region, where most of the area’s refugees hail from.
His first wife, his parents and his youngest son died of illnesses in 1975. His second wife, Moeun Hen, saw her father die of starvation at the same time, relates her daughter, Lauren Wren’ Srey. All live today in Amherst.
“I didn’t really have a childhood at all,” says Srey, now in her 30s and speaking perfect English. She grew up in the war-torn villages and refugee camps. “All I’d see was war and destruction. I had never been in a school system until I was in a camp in 1979. I didn’t know another world existed, with other countries other races.”
When Vouch and his family arrived in Amherst, where his pioneer cousin had settled with the sponsorship of the Lutheran church three years earlier, about 15 Cambodian families were here and began meeting in houses and church spaces to mark the new year and celebrate their ancestors.
“It helps us emotionally and physically to come together,” said Vouch through his step-daughter. “We can share our common culture and understanding and we can take pride in who we are.”
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Stories of immigrant families with members left behind in refugee camps in Thailand convinced Elaine Kenseth of Amherst to join a “mission of witness” of pastors and other lay people in 1983.
“There were seven families, and each of them had members languishing in the camps,” said Kenseth, who repeated the trip twice more during a nine-month period and befriended Maha Gosananda, the senior surviving Cambodian monk, who had settled in Providence, R.I., and was leading the pilgrimages. (He now lives in Philadelphia.)
“In the same way that white-steepled, Congregational churches are on the commons of very many towns in New England, the temples are in villages of Thailand and Cambodia,” said Kenseth. “Here are people recovering from trauma of war and of refugee camps, and they go through resettling in a new country where everything is so different, and their spiritual leaders were not here, except for this one monk.”
The peace pagoda and temple built by the Japanese Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order offered a place for Cambodians to pray at first. But the refugees, visited frequently by Gosananda, sought a monk of their own, and began collecting money to support one, Kenseth said.
When 20 acres adjacent to the pagoda property became available in early 1987, Kenseth was approached by elders of the Cambodian community with $200 in hand, mounting a campaign to raise the $67,000, family by family, in a scene reminiscent from a Frank Capra movie.
“They’d say today we’re going to Holyoke, to Springfield, to Amherst Crossing,” she recalled. “They would all talk in Khmer people would get their purses and literally the money would go into a hat everybody emptied their piggy banks.”
It took 10 years to build the temple and to bring the community’s resident monk here, during which time a group of families started another Buddhist temple in an Amherst apartment. That temple has moved to a house in Pelham, with plans for a Cambodian cultural center.
Kenseth said she is sometimes asked why such a small community should have two temples.
“Amherst is a town that had five Congregational churches in the ’50s,” she said. “People split off. That happens in organized religions.”
Srey says she taught Cambodian to children in the community while a college student. Young Cambodians were helped, she said, by having a Khmer students club and after-school cultural lessons in the Amherst schools before budgets were cut several years ago. She said having a way to transmit the language and culture to young people is important. Srey acknowledged that the Pelham center attracts different families, but added with a smile, “They are related to us as well.”
The Leverett temple may be inconvenient for some elders, some of whom don’t drive and still struggle to adjust to American culture and forbidding New England winters, Kenseth acknowledged, but it was personally selected by Gosananda. The supreme patriarch of Buddhism in Cambodia and a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Gosananda lived on the property from time to time, and chose this place where the two great Buddhist traditions, northern and southern, could have homes side by side.
Besides, Kenseth said, “When people come onto the land, young and old alike, they say to me, “Elaine this reminds me of my country.”
Srey added, “At home (in Cambodia), it is very common to have a temple in the mountains.” She said its remoteness adds to its attractiveness for Cambodians, who come for summer retreats from Lowell and elsewhere.
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Dona Oduc, who moved to the Leverett area in 1992 after training to be a Buddhist nun in the Cambodian temple outside Lowell, remembers arriving and meeting Yae Won, a blind nun who climbed up into a tree to pray.
Oduc, who visits the temple for dharma teachings from the monks and to offer them informal English lessons, said the temple has provided a refuge for people who arrived in a strange land shocked and traumatized by a horrible war.
“They had a beautiful life in Cambodia, but it was completely disrupted,” she said. From the time it opened, she believes, “People coming through temple doors were really seeking to be counseled out of the insanity they’d been exposed to, back to some state that was calm and peaceful.
“They were not well,” said Oduc. “Their country had been torn apart, their lives were torn apart. Villages were burned, women were raped, their relatives were murdered. Their most immediate response was total forgiveness. That’s their wellness.”
At the heart of the temple is Buddha, whose central teaching of forgiveness and compassion is the glow of Watkiry Vongsa.
When she traveled to Cambodia with Gosananda, Kenseth said, “I saw how much reverence the people had, and I was always, always moved. I felt the anguish of what they had gone through, yet I saw how sweet they were.”
Although she has been less involved in the community in recent years, Kenseth recalls gatherings at which someone would quietly tell her, “You see that man across the room? That’s the one who killed my father.”
There have been isolated times, too, when Kenseth remembers witnessing anger well up in a community member.
“Others would surround them, say, It’s alright brother. We take care of you.'” – RICHIE DAVIS