BUILDING THE GREAT TEMPLE had been a long, challenging project, but in the summer of 2002, it was nearing completion, and the temple’s striking East Asian xieshan roof became visible to motorists on the nearby freeway. Commuters sometimes stopped to inquire if the restaurant was open.
Pao Fa Buddhist Temple was Orange County, California’s first mega-temple, with a prayer hall, classrooms, a library, a dining hall, and rooms for resident monastics housed in its 41,000 square feet. Building the temple had been the work of Master Jen Yi and the American Lotus Buddhist Association of Irvine, and it became a spiritual home and community center for the area’s Taiwanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese American Buddhists.
Memory and news stories tell us 2002 was a hopeful and idealistic time for Buddhism in the West, with the tradition becoming more visible and more accepted within the wider culture.
The same year Pao Fa Temple opened, the New York Times ran a couple of breezy travel articles about the “Buddhist weekend,” which had become trendy among overworked urbanites. City folks were encouraged to put away their cell phones and de-stress at one of the inexpensive weekend retreats offered at Vipassana, Zen, Tibetan, and other Buddhist centers around the US.
Writing for Lion’s Roar (“Surveying the Buddhist Landscape”) in March 2002, author and professor of religion Charles Prebish described driving by his old high school in Chicago. He was surprised to see a new Korean Zen center across the street. “Not far away were the Chicago Zen Center, the Kubose Dharma Legacy, the Lakeside Buddhist Sangha, the Dhammaka Meditation Center of Chicago, the Chicago Shambhala Center, and the Buddhist Council of the Midwest,” he wrote. He compared this survey of Chicago Buddhism against the 1970s. “Then I was always very careful to telephone groups before I visited to make sure they were still there. As often as not, I got the ‘Sorry, this number has been disconnected’ message,” he wrote. “The challenge now is not to count how few centers and teachers there are, but how many.”
In fall 2002, the first issue of appeared on newsstands, describing itself as “an in-depth, practice-oriented journal for Buddhists of all traditions.” Articles included “The Practice of Jodo-Shinshu” by Taitetsu Unno (1929–2014) and a forum on “The Law of Karma” featuring Bhikkhu Bodhi, Jeffrey Hopkins, and Jan Chozen Bays (in both cases, topics that remain, twenty years later, not only relevant but still widely misunderstood in Western Buddhist circles). Buddhism in the West had entered a new phase—people were discovering it for the first
