Wat Buddharatanaram Buddhist Temple

I just finished a huge homework assignment... I'm rewarding myself by writing a blog entry.

Tuesday we traveled about 45 minutes south to Keller, Texas, to visit the Wat Buddharatanaram Buddhist Temple. I had never visited a Buddhist temple before, and it was an amazing place. It's a gated compound, so the monks who live there are very separated from the rest of the community in Keller. In fact, many of the older monks do not speak English. (They speak Laotian.)

The compound has numerous buildings including the temple, the building where they eat lunch, and the living quarters. Here's an image of our group in front of the temple.
Both the exterior and the interior of the temple are incredibly ornate. This serpent serves as the "railing" for the last set of stairs to the temple entrance.
No shoes are allowed inside the temple.
This is the view when you walk in the front door. That's a huge statue of Buddha with smaller Buddha statues in front of it. The large statue is the largest (or one of the largest) Buddha statues in the United States. They actually built it first and then built the building around it! People travel great distances to come to this particular temple to see it. Take note of the old man kneeling on the table to the left...
Here's a closer view. I smiled at this "man" when I walked in the temple, and it took me several minutes to realize that it was a statue! It must be like one of those wax museum statues; even when I was able to get closer to it, I still couldn't believe it wasn't alive! That freaked me out a little bit.
Here is one of the novice monks. (This is a real person, not a statue!) He's a sophomore in high school and only lives in the compound over the summer. He plans to go to college after graduation (to make his mom proud) and then he is seriously considering becoming a monk.
There are carpets on the floor, and we had to kneel down immediately upon entering. We knelt (or sat cross-legged) for over an hour during our initial presentation and then another 45 minutes during the lunch. Everyone kept shifting around because our legs/feet were falling asleep! It was tricky, though, because we weren't allowed to have our feet pointed toward any of the monks. That is an insult to them because feet are considered unclean.

The entire interior of the temple was covered with intricate, hand-painted murals.
The framed ones, like the one below, were painted in Thailand and then shipped to the temple.
Here's a close-up. The shimmery parts are gold leaf.
The wall-length murals were painted in person. They flew artists from Thailand to Texas just to paint these murals.
Being an artist myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the artwork. All of the pieces depicted scenes from Buddha's life (or from one of his past lives). There was usually more than one thing going on in each painting, so you could stare at one for five minutes and still miss part of the story.

This is another temple that the monks are working on. They complete nearly all of the construction work themselves. The only time they call someone else to help is when they are forced to in order to pass U.S. building code regulations.
After learning about the temple, we were invited to join the monks for lunch. The monks only eat one meal per day, and after 12pm they are not allowed to chew (they can only drink water and juice). In addition, they do not ever purchase groceries. Instead, they eat what people bring to them. And, since they do not believe in saving extra food for the next day, they only eat what people bring them THAT day. So, the Buddhist community members have to be very generous or the monks would starve!

Weirdest thing that happened while we were there... while we were gawking at the artistry inside the temple, one of the monks was taking photos of us. It felt so strange to be photographed... but then I realized that we were doing the same thing to them. When you're in a new cultural place, it's easy to recognize that the people there seem weird to you, but we tend to forget that we seem strange to them too.

There's lots more I could tell you, but I have another huge homework assignment to start working on...