Buddhist community in San Jose seeks larger temple
For Victor Thach, a 63-year-old San Jose resident who escaped the instability of post-war Vietnam and landed in the United States in 1986, a Buddhist temple on San Jose's Sunset Court represents a vital gathering place for one of the city's small communities. Established at a singlefamily home about a decade after his arrival, the temple adorned with Buddha statues serves the local Khmer Krom population, a group of ethnic Cambodians from southern Vietnam.
But its members — numbering over 100 families — have outgrown the home's roughly 1,000 square feet.
They now want to relocate east to the Evergreen neighborhood — a proposed development that would offer the first-ever large-scale Buddhist temple in the Bay Area for the Khmer Krom and create an architectural landmark in the eastern part of the city that mirrors similar holy sites in Southeast Asia.
“We want a good place to worship,” Thach said. “I don't want the next generation to look down on us and see that we haven't done anything for three decades.”
The proposed Wat Khmer Kampuchea Krom temple on 2740 Ruby Ave. would greatly expand the community's footprint with two buildings covering nearly 14,000 square feet. The cost, which could reach $25 million, will be financed through a nonprofit set up by Lyna Lam, wife of local tech billionaire Chris Larsen.
The project started in earnest in 2018 but hit roadblocks from neighbors concerned about the size of the temple and its potential traffic impacts, with many asserting it didn't fit in with the character of the neighborhood.
The structures would include a temple sanctuary and a community center incorporating traditional elements of Buddhist temple exteriors, including a 65-foot spire and a golden conical-shaped monument, known as a caetdi in the Khmer language. Behind the blueprints are the Bay Area-based Andrew Mann Architecture and Siegel & Strain Architects firms, along with a Cambodianbased design team. Land use consultant Erik Schoennauer is also involved with the project.
The buildings' interior would include a community hall, library and living space for eight monks. Overall, the site is expected to host 50 people daily and up to 300 during celebrations.
On Wednesday night, San Jose's Planning Commission approved the new temple in an 8-1 vote, with member Jorge A. Garcia voting against the project. The project will go before the City Council at the end of March. Groundbreaking is slated for this summer.
Lam, the project's main benefactor, is a Khmer Krom advocate and founder of the nonprofit A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, which would fund, own and manage the new temple. Lam herself escaped both the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime's genocide in Cambodia, coming to the United States in 1983 by way of refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. Lam and her family first settled in a Pittsburg housing project, and she initially worked at a software company and then opened her own restaurant, which she later sold.
At one time, Lam was a regular at the existing temple on Sunset Court but stopped attending because it was too crowded. The Cambodian community in the Bay Area is generally low-income, she said, and has a scattered network of small temples that are usually run out of small houses. While Stockton has a more established temple, it is difficult for the community's elderly population to make the 80-mile commute.
So for Lam, an opportunity arose.
“I want to build a temple that has proper governance and a proper space to teach kids, just like the other churches,” she said. “If you see any proper (Buddhist) temple, it's usually in a rural area. I don't want that. I want to build a temple where the community is.”