About
Chùa Hương Lâm — Huong Lam Buddhist Temple
A Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Pearland, Texas, founded in 2007 and guided entirely by a community of nuns.
Our story
2007 — Chùa Hương Lâm is founded in Pearland, south of Houston, by Vietnamese Buddhist nuns.
2012 — The temple is inaugurated (Lễ Lạc Thành) during the Quan Âm festival.
2017 — At Phật Đản 2641 the community opens the nuns’ residence, Ni Xá, and celebrates ten years of the temple.
2023 — Forbes profiles the nuns as Changemakers: female monks challenging cultural norms in a quiet corner of Texas.
Today Sư cô Ni Su Tinh Hao and eight fellow nuns guide a congregation of more than a hundred families. All of the sư cô received their monastic training in Vietnam from a young age; Sư cô Tinh Hao recalls meeting senior nuns at a temple in Vietnam at fifteen and “immediately feeling a sense of belonging and inner peace.”
In pictures
The temple today
What we practise
We follow the Mahayana Buddhist tradition as it has been lived in Vietnam for centuries — chanting, meditation, the precepts, and devotion to Quan Âm, the Bodhisattva of Compassion — and we offer it in a way that speaks to life in Texas today. The temple is open to people of all faiths for prayer, service and meditation, and the nuns go out across the greater Houston area to offer prayer in times of suffering.
In stone
Teachings carved in stone
Around the courtyard, carved stone panels tell the life of the Buddha, from his birth to his awakening. The pedestal of the Quan Âm statue carries the twelve great vows of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, inscribed in Vietnamese and English.
The life of the Buddha and the vows of Quan Âm
Seamlessly merging old traditional concepts with the modern world to make Buddhism more relatable for all.
Forbes, October 2023