Buddhism Like Water: Vietnamese Buddhism in the United States
by Thich Minh Duc

When the South Vietnamese government fell in April 1975, almost 200,000 South Vietnamese left their country in panic. We left without much emotional or psychological preparation, and without any property. But we had something that had been with the country and in our hearts for thousands of year: Buddhism. Vietnamese Buddhism came to America, then, as the refugees’ only belonging.

Before 1975, there were very few Vietnamese Buddhists in the U.S. Those who were here had come to attend school, teach, and appeal for peace. The only Vietnamese monk in the United States was Thich Thien An, who was a visiting professor at UCLA. During his short stay in the country, he attracted a number of students who studied Zen at his center, the first Vietnamese Buddhist center in the United States. Two months after the first groups of Vietnamese refugees resettled in America, the monks who came with the refugees established three temples. Twenty five years later, 162 temples, five monasteries, and two Institutes for Buddhist Studies across the United States serve about one million Vietnamese Americans…

Many Vietnamese monastic members, myself included, came to the U.S. unprepared. We were equipped with nothing more than compassion, the practice of meditation, and a desire to bring peace — not just the absence of war. We were not fully aware that we had to struggle with the complicated matters of life in the new country, including language and cultural differences, lack of support from other monastic communities, and little financial assistance from the lay communities. We had to figure out how to support ourselves financially and at the same time to continue our path in Buddhist practice.

Excerpted from Turning Wheel, Fall 2000