The Buddhists and the Catholics

In Broussard, Louisiana, at the intersection of Champa Avenue and Vientiane Street, a glimmer of brightly colored mosaic tiles curve around golden buddhas, peaking in a dramatically vaulted ceiling, where, at Lanexang Village, a Buddhist community gathers.

Louisiana, ranked as the fourth most religious state in the country by the Pew Research Center, is eighty four percent Christian—almost equal parts Catholic and Protestant. Thus, this building, the most recent addition to the Theravada Buddhist monastery Wat Thammarattanaram, is an anomaly here—particularly in Acadiana. The “sim,” or ordination hall, closely resembles the ornate temples of Laos, every inch of it masked in color, and is currently home to four monks.

“Lao culture and Lao Buddhism, they’re very different from Tibetan Buddhism or Zen Buddhism, which are more reserved and low key,” said Phanant Xanamane, Wat Thammarattanaram’s steward of community engagement. “Lao people like their gold. They like their color.”

The founding members of Lanexang Village hail from the long, lush country of Laos, wedged between Vietnam and Thailand. Many community members speak Laotian to each other and cook their families traditional Laotian meals. Champa, the village’s main street, is named for the national flower of Laos; Vientiane is named for the Laotian capital. And here in Acadiana, the residents of Lanexang Village continue to engage in the spirituality of their homeland, where the majority of the population practices Theravada Buddhism, the oldest extant school of Buddhism.

Louisiana, ranked as the fourth most religious state in the country by the Pew Research Center, is eighty four percent Christian—almost equal parts Catholic and Protestant. Thus, the most recent addition to the Theravada Buddhist monastery Wat Thammarattanaram, is an anomaly here—particularly in Acadiana.

In recent years, the small community—all four streets of it—has gained attention for throwing one of the biggest celebrations of Songkran, the Laotian New Year, in the country. Laotians from all over the country gather with Louisianans, non-Laotian and Laotian alike, for a weekend of parades and libations.

While these festivities have overwhelmed most of the community’s presentation in the media,  there is something deeper to Lanexang’s celebration of Songkran than cultural celebration. It is a public display of a process that has been happening for decades: two communities, the Laotians and the Cajuns, slowly, steadily, inviting each other in.

In a trajectory similar to that of the Vietnamese in America, the founding members of Lanexang Village came to the United States with sponsorship from the Catholic Diocese in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Xanamane, they were refugees who had fled from Laos to Thailand, escaping the Vietnam War and its fallout as communist leaders took over their country. Xanamane himself was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. He arrived in Louisiana in 1981 at  four years old. 

The new arrivals were funneled into available unskilled labor jobs: peeling shrimp, shucking oysters, picking peppers at the Tabasco factory, and working in food processing factories. 

For Laotians, the environment of Louisiana bore a resemblance to their homeland. Laos was—and largely still is—a rural society, and the “sportsman’s paradise” of Louisiana made sense to them. Louisiana was familiarly agricultural, its land full of lakes for fishing and woods for foraging mushrooms and palmetto shoots—all common ingredients in Laotian cuisine. The climate, too, agreed with them. Laos is a hot country with mild winters, just like Louisiana.

In 1985, after years of coalescing in the area, the Laotian-Louisianan residents pooled their money together to purchase land from the parish. Here, they formalized their community, building the three residential streets of Lanexang, the main avenue, and, most importantly, the temple.

“They wanted to revive that sense of community and continue their Buddhist practices,” Xanamane said.

The temple, or wat, sets the pace of a Laotian village. It serves as a space for social gatherings and allows people to accumulate good karma, a lifelong goal for those who practice Buddhism.

Buddhists believe that all actions have consequences. Good actions beget good consequences—ones that bring peace—and bad actions beget painful ones. One accumulates good consequences, or good karma, through a monastic life, meditating, living simply, and—for those who do not take the vows of a monk—building and supporting a temple and monastery.

Buddhism is not technically a religion, though many may practice it in a similar way. Rather, Buddhism is a philosophy that posits a way to end suffering through simplicity, kindness, and meditation. As such, it is non-theistic. Buddha is not a god, but a revered teacher who lived during the Mahajanapada era of ancient India, and anyone can follow his path, regardless of what they believe about higher powers.

Building the monastery, then, was an act of continuity, with Lanexang residents lifting aspects of the life they had in Laos and bringing them to Louisiana. When the temple was first established, Xanamane’s cousin, Amonelath, told me it was no more than a shack.

Inside Lanexang, the sense of familiarity, of common practice, slowly revived itself, but outside of its streets still remained a relatively new place. As described by members of both communities, there are similarities between Lao and Cajun culture. Both place an emphasis on welcoming and tight family bonds. Both are celebratory and value prayer. However, Xanamane described an initial sense of separateness from Americans in those early days, a sense of “us” and “them.”

Despite shared values of hospitality and strong community ties, Laotians and Cajuns operate differently. Where Americans might operate in what Xanamane called a “liability culture” and are quicker to litigate and regulate, Laotians, Xanamane said, are more nonchalant, preferring to resolve conflict quietly or to let things go. Sometimes, Xanamane said, this could lead to misunderstanding.

Xanamane remembered this feeling of distinction at school. Laotians and Americans did not intermingle much. In class, some of the basics of Cajun-Catholic culture went right over his head. He didn’t understand what catechism was or why some of his classmates were allowed to leave school to attend it. American kids once teased him for the Laotian food his mother packed him for lunch. Xanamane refused to bring Laotian food to school after that.

“Looking back at it, I felt back then that I was living two different identities—that I went to school and was very American and did well, and then went home and was very Laotian and spoke a different language and ate different food, interacted with my Laotian cousins, and really had no American friends that ever came over,” said Xanamane.

Xanamane called this behavior “code switching,” a term used to describe how members of minority communities must “switch” back and forth from the distinct customs practiced by their own community to that of the dominant culture.

Though this experience was often difficult for Xanamane, he said he “did not feel a sense of lack” at not being included in American culture. He was curious about this different, American way of life—how they gathered, the food they ate.

For some Americans, the curiosity was mutual. Heddy Nunez, a seventy-year-old woman from Abbeville, started attending Wat Thammarattanaram in the mid-1990s after years of getting to know her son’s Laotian friend Pon.

Over the years, Pon and Nunez shared many conversations explaining to each other the philosophy of their respective homes—Cajun Catholic and Buddhist. They discussed philosophy and righteousness, kindness and morality.

Nunez started visiting Wat Thammarattanaram during Songkran, making it an annual tradition. She would sit, observe, and have conversations with people at the sermon hall like those she had with Pon.

“Back then there was a very big language difference, but it seemed that every time I went, eventually someone would come and sit by me and share with me some information about what was going on,” Nunez said. “There was kindness there that was very big.”

The sermon hall, where people gather for prayer and meditation, is the first point of contact for newcomers. It is decidedly sparser than the ordination hall. The chairs are few and most people sit on the floor. One wall, however, is decadent, lined with shrines to Buddha that have been filled with food and other goods. These goods are offerings, another way one might accumulate good karma.

Newcomers who enter the sermon hall looking “totally lost,” as Nunez put it, are all given the same treatment: first, a greeting, then an offer of water and food, and the opportunity to walk around.

“I come from a beautiful Cajun Catholic background which really created an opening for me to understand goodness, and to find that the Buddhist community, the Lanexang Village, is a beautiful place,” Nunez said. “It provides great lessons on morality, on wisdom, on compassion.”

Now, Nunez goes to Wat Thammarattanaram once a week.

While Nunez engaged in the ways this new spirituality complemented her South Louisiana heritage, Xanamane—unbeknownst to him—was taking part in a longstanding Louisiana tradition by way of his own Laotian culture. He left Louisiana—and then, he felt called to come back.

Xanamane spent time living as a monk, a traditional Laotian right of passage for men. He spent a week at a monastery in Georgia. He then visited Laos, gaining a deeper connection to his own lineage and clarity on the way he wanted to lead his life.

Then, after five years spent in New York City working as an architect, Xanamane made the decision to return to Louisiana. His purpose: to act as a cultural ambassador for Lanexang, translating a love and understanding of Laos and Theravada Buddhism for both the people of Louisiana and the next generation of Laotian-Americans.

Today, Xanamane gives tours at Wat Thammarattanaram, runs a community garden, and—among other things—educates anyone who inquires about Laos, Lanexang Village, or Buddhism.

He admitted that this work is not always easy. His own Laotian language skills are not strong, and he cannot readily understand elders who try and explain Lao tradition and rituals to him. Moreover, the younger generation has been slow to develop an interest in Laotian culture. They resist speaking Lao at home and want to eat fish sticks instead of sticky rice and bamboo salad.

“Each household, I think, is this special threshold between the cultures, where there are different generations living in each household,” he said. “I think that is where we’re seeing a lot of this blurring and blending and gray area happening between our two cultures.”

In this way, Lanexang’s most elaborate displays of Laotian culture have acted as some of the largest of these thresholds, demonstrating this blurring and blending. Xanamane calls the new ordination hall “a sensory bridge” to the homeland, its unfamiliarity and uniqueness serving as its draw for Laotians and non-Laotians alike.

Likewise, Songkran shows off not only Laotian ways of life, but how Laotian-Americans have adapted those ways to the land in which they live. The residents of Lanexang celebrate Songkran according to an American calendar, not a lunar one, and serve crawfish with Laotian food. Just don’t call it “Lao Mardi Gras.” It’s true that there are parades, and even something that is akin to Lao krewes, but Xanamane emphasized that this is a misnomer.

As for Nunez, she attends both mass and Wat Thammarattanaram weekly, continuing what she considers to be her study of goodness in the world. In sitting and studying with Wat Thammarattanaram, she said she has found “such peace,” that she’s less reactive and her relationships have improved.

According to Nunez, Buddhism has started to catch on among her Catholic friends, some of whom attend one of the Lafayette area’s six Buddhist temples. The Cajuns, she said, are good at integrating.

“Everything goes in Cajun country,” Nunez said.

Today, Nunez is one of the people who welcomes newcomers at the temple, helping to ease the language barrier and treating them with the same kindness that Lanexang residents treated her with decades ago.

Xanamane hopes this kind of exchange will help introduce more people to the peaceful tenants of Buddhism, the loving culture of Laos, and that it will inspire younger members to investigate their own lineage and  generations of traditions and customs, some cultivated halfway around the world and some around the corner.

“It’s very nice to see that people are finding ways to tap into their nature, their goodness, their inner divinity,” Xanamane said of witnessing all types of people coming to learn and commune at Lanexang. “And if it leads to less suffering, then we are all doing our job as Buddhists.”

To inquire about tours of the Wat Thammarattanaram, call the temple at (337) 364-3403.