Roanoke’s Vietnamese Buddhists have long wished for a place where they could meet, worship, and share their beliefs with a larger community.
For three hours on Sunday, some 200 people, most of Vietnamese heritage, gathered under a huge white tent and faced an altar covered in flowers and fruit, tea and incense, a statue of Buddha at its center.
They watched as children processed in, a choir of women dressed in emerald and sapphire-colored tunics sang, and monks — visiting from India, Houston, Massachusetts, Manassas — prayed, taught, and appealed for future funds.
The ground-breaking ceremony in Roanoke County ended with supporters walking over to a nine-foot jagged stone, with the name “Buddha Mountain Center” painted in red in English, Vietnamese and Chinese. Four shovels adorned with red bows were passed between monks and members as they symbolically scattered dirt from the construction site to the chrysanthemums at the foot of a Buddha statue. In the final act of the event, sand collected from a mandala created by visiting Tibetan monks was sprinkled amid the soil as a blessing for the new temple…