Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America by Stephen L. Klineberg

Author:Stephen L. Klineberg [Klineberg, Stephen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501177910
Google: HYThDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1501177915
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2020-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

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As you travel away from Central Houston on Westpark Tollway, heading toward Missouri City in Fort Bend County, you will encounter along the Beltway 8 service road a variety of small warehouses and areas filled with industrial and construction equipment. But turn down South Garden Street, and near the end on the left, you will find one of Houston’s very few landmarked Victorian homes, a structure that, even in this minimal government/lax regulation environment, is prohibited from being altered or torn down. “The property was on the market for years,” says the young Tibetan spiritual master, Gala Rinpoche. “Nobody wanted the house. But we did.”

Rinpoche, a title that means “precious one,” was born in central Tibet in 1975. “I was left, when I was ten years old, to be educated in a school started in India by the Dalai Lama.” He was sixteen when he was recognized as a tulku, the seventh reincarnation of a particular spiritual master who returns again and again to help people transform their suffering. When the monastery opened a branch in Atlanta, Gala Rinpoche became a resident teacher there and assistant program director. Now the founder of the Drepung Loseling Institute of Texas, the forty-four-year-old Rinpoche tends to an almost entirely Vietnamese flock. “There was a big Buddhist community here in Houston. I wanted to bring more study and practice into it,” says Rinpoche over a home-cooked Vietnamese feast, prepared by one of his students, who owns a local restaurant.

With the help of his benefactors, Rinpoche has been buying up the land surrounding his Buddhist temple. “The older generation is being separated from the younger. The elders are more traditional, but their kids are becoming Americanized. The families aren’t living together and caring for each other as they used to. I want to build a retirement home next door,” he says, gesturing to the empty lot he had acquired for that purpose. How did it all happen so fast? “I just showed up and people started contributing,” he says of all the various organizers—Vietnamese architects, NASA engineers, business owners—who helped make this happen.

A few miles away, closer to Bellaire Boulevard, where the street signs are in both Vietnamese and English, we come to another large Buddhist compound. A statue of Kwan Yin, the female Buddha of compassion, floats above a large, artificial pond just behind the entry gate, in front of the main temple with its pagoda roof. Inside the Jade Buddha Temple, an exquisite wood-carved shrine stands at the front of the main hall. The space resounds with a plaintive chant calling for blessings from the Buddha and Kwan Yin before their resident teacher begins his lessons in Chinese.

Around the back of the hall is a smaller temple, host on Sundays to their English-speaking Dharma Group. Members from both Asian and Western communities gather to hear a guest speaker, who usually follows their morning meditation. They trade stories of their involvement in Buddhism, of how they came to Jade Buddha, and gently correct each other’s pronunciation in their respective languages.

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