Buu Mon Buddhist temple, established in 1980, was the first Buddhist center in Beaumont, Texas. In fact, that’s where it gets its name. During its early stages, the temple moved to Orange, Texas for a few years and settled into its current location, in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1986. This building started out as a Baptist church, and became a Vietnamese Catholic church in 1976. Abbot Thich Huyen Viet and his small congregation moved in, and after much remodeling and renovation, had built a stupa where there was once a steeple, and installed seven foot tall guilt bronze Buddha seated on the altar in front of a fresco mural of a Bodhi tree on a river’s shore. The dedication ceremony for the current temple was held on August 15, 1987.
In 1988, Venerable Huyen Viet started a garden that would become the jewel of Buu Mon temple. What began as a few bamboos, and a small water garden, today is a major attraction that brings visitors from across the state of Texas, and the U.S. to Port Arthur for our annual Lotus Garden Tour. In 2005, the Temple’s 7th annual Lotus Garden Tour hosted more than 1000 visitors over a single weekend. Among them were twenty Venerables from temples all over the U.S., city, county and state officials, Catholic, Jewish, and Baptist clergy, amateur and professional horticulturalists, Buddhist and Non-Buddhist.