Gateway to Buddha

This story is about another immigrant group in this country, one many of us hardly even know is here. These Cambodian Buddhists in Oregon have built a new temple for their community. DP

Cambodian religious center in Oregon is a concrete achievement, in more ways than one
By David Tenenbaum

It's early summer, 2008. I am perched on a scaffold 25 feet above a driveway just outside the village of Oregon, south of Madison, looking down at a white house that was built — I'm guessing — in the 1920s. The windows were busted out long ago, and I notice that the house has progressed from ramshackle through dilapidated to true hoveldom. Then I return to the task at hand: struggling to place a handmade casting on an enormous ornamental gateway.

I am helping two Cambodian Buddhist monks — Soy Seng and Sakoeurn Korn, as they are known on their American citizenship papers — and I am frustrated. We are working overhead, the blood is draining from our arms, and to me falls the sorry job of eyeballing the level that will establish the correct position.

That means I must announce, over and over, that the current try is good, but not perfect.

Calmly, persistently and cheerfully, Soy, the chief monk, has us relocate the casting, striving for an accuracy far beyond what I think the situation demands. His assistant, Sakoeurn, unflinchingly repositions the casting.

I join in, and eventually we get it right.

Accuracy within a 16th of an inch would be close enough for the average person building a giant gateway that reaches a peak of 35 feet tall, but not here. After all, this gateway will announce the presence of a Cambodian Buddhist temple on County Highway MM, just north of U.S. Highway 14. (The temple is now several years old; the gateway and fence will be done in a year, then further building will occur.)

Mention "Buddhist temple" in Madison, and most people assume you mean Deer Park, the well-known temple for Tibetan Buddhists, which the Dalai Lama visited this summer. Few people know about the Cambodians. Although only about a mile separates the two temples, the forms of Buddhism they practice are worlds apart in theology and culture, and the groups have little contact.

As we wait for the blood to return to our arms, I remind Soy what happened 12 years ago in the ruins beneath us. It was the place where we began our friendship.

In 1996 I was asked by a friend, Roger Garms, if I'd like to teach English to a monk for whom the local Cambodians had, amazingly, managed to garner immigration papers. Roger, a psychologist, said the temple and its new monk were supposed to help hundreds of impoverished Cambodians integrate into Dane County by sustaining their native culture.
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