Buddhism in Southeast Texas

Here's a recent article about a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in my hometown, Port Arthur. I visited this temple many years ago, and the lotus ponds were beautiful then. Next time I go home I'll have to take pictures.

I really like this.
"Buu Mon" means priceless gate and sounds similar to Beaumont, which is why it was chosen, according to the archives.

Here is their homepage. I wonder how large the Vietnamese population is in Port Arthur? There is also a large garden with statue of the Virgin Mary on the other side of Port Arthur that was sponsored by a Vietnamese association. I didn't have a camera the last time I visited, but I suspect she bore a striking resemblance to Kuan-yin. Ah, there was one picture of it via google images but the link was broken. There is this image from flickr. Not like Kuan-yin at all.

It is called Hoa Binh Park and was built by the parishioners of the Queen of Vietnamese Martyr's Catholic Church in gratitude to the city that welcomed them upon their arrival from Asia. Here is another nice photo.

That's my hometown. A smidge of cultural diversity.

The Origin of "Laissez la Roue de la Loi roulez"

My last post was my 50th, so I thought I'd celebrate that mild milestone by explaining the title of my blog.

"Laissez les bons temps roulez" is a Cajun expression, and according to the Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture, it "strongly conveys the "joie de vivre" ("joy of living") attitude that pervades south Louisiana." Amen, but I'd amend that slightly to include Southeast Texas since there is a high concentration of Cajuns there. There will be another post about that later.

In fact, you can almost declare about 10 square yards around any Cajun extraterritorial Acadiana because that joie de vivre can be infectious, particularly under the influence of good cooking and other less salubrious substances.

Now I modified this hoary but perspicacious truism by replacing the phrase "les bons temps" with "la Roue de la Loi" which in French refers to the dharmacakra, the Wheel of the Law. The term dharma is extremely multivalent in Indian religions, but here it refers to the teaching of the Buddha. The dharmacakra is the metaphorical wheel that the historical Buddha first turned at Sarnath outside of Varansi when he gave his first teaching. The dharmacakra is also a symbol of the universal emperor, and you can see the original sculpture of such a wheel that adorned the pillar of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka here. This capital of this pillar ended up on the national flag of India.

There is also an excellent sculpture of the Buddha giving the first teaching in the museum at Sarnath. You can see it here.

Obviously, my ability to pun in French is limited by my meager francophone abilities, but that's my attempt to capture two of my preoccupations when I started this blog: my Cajun heritage and Buddhism. I hope to up the Cajun content in coming days, but no promises.

Onward to 100 posts!