Lao Buddhist Associates to add another colorful building along South Greenwich

As you exit Kellogg and head south on Greenwich Road, you’ll see a nondescript stretch of road with the usual businesses, homes and rows of trees, fences and telephone poles that could be anyplace in America.

Then, a shock of brilliant gold and red will make even the most unobservant person turn to see something one doesn’t often happen upon in Wichita or even on this continent: a glittering meditation center of the Lao Buddhist Associates of Kansas where two ferocious dragons almost dare visitors to climb the stairs and enter.

The monks are much more welcoming.

“The doors are always open,” said Somphien Amphone-Suh, who volunteers at the association and helps translate for Venerable Khamphou Milayome, the monk who leads the group.

Milayome, his fellow monks and the association’s board are now embarking on their third building project at the compound at 2550 S. Greenwich.

After coming to Wichita in 1988 and living in houses downtown and on Pawnee, the monks bought the 5-acre Greenwich property at a city auction around 1991. They first built a community center there in 2004, and the meditation center followed in 2017.

Through this time, they’ve been living in a small, old farmhouse that remained on the property. There are enough rooms for the current five resident monks, but there’s no space for visiting monks.

“It serves its purpose, but they really would like to expand because they are getting a lot more monks coming in, and they’re outgrowing it,” Amphone-Suh said.

Wichita’s Icon Structures is building the 4,000-square-foot residence, and it will be similar in style to the meditation center. However, Icon is not going to add the colorful adornments that make the meditation center so distinctive.

“Most of what’s going to make it cool is the stuff they’re going to put on it,” said Denny Marlin, who handles Icon’s marketing and business development. “All of the really aesthetic pieces they’ll do themselves.”

Marlin said the monks create individual pieces of art, many just a few inches around, and “cast them in concrete, and then they paint them and just apply them to the structure.”

“They’re the artists. We’re kind of giving them a really nice blank palette.”

Even at existing structures at the property, Marlin said, “They’re constantly adding.”

That includes reflective glass to make everything pop.

Marlin said volunteers take care of maintenance and landscaping at the property while the monks focus on adornments.

“That’s part of their process.”

A work in progress

The Lao Buddhist property is a continual work in progress as the association attempts to raise enough money for each of its projects. Landscaping and parking will follow the new monk’s quarters.

At each step, architecture and design follow century-old traditions and styles.

Amphone-Suh pointed to steep roof pitches as an example.

“That is culture, that is generations past.”

It’s the same with colors and designs “that carry forward from generations back in Laos.”

Gold and red are prominent because they contrast and enhance one another, but Amphone-Suh said all colors are important.

“They try to encourage all the colors because they try to encourage everybody of every culture of every race,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what color you are.”

She said the idea is “then for it to come together as a unity.”

Amphone-Suh said the monks invite anyone to come “just to meditate, to ask questions, to learn the language.”

Milayome said he wants to create more of a schedule of events — for festivals, meditation times and for classes on beginning and intermediate meditation or ones on learning to speak Laotian — and share it with Wichita through the association’s Facebook page.

He said he wants to teach meditation to “promote the happiness for the people.”

That’s a huge focus for Milayome. He recently graduated with a finance degree from Wichita State University and now is pursuing a master’s at Friends University. It’s not because he needs the knowledge to run the association.

Milayome said he’s trying to compare finance with Buddhist teachings to help guide people who are struggling with business and their personal happiness.

“Meditation can help them to start (to find) the inside happiness.”

He said it’s developing the ability to concentrate and, most importantly, be in the moment. Milayome said that concentration applies to anything, such as listening to a lecture or driving a car.

“We call that meditation.”

Even at a funeral, he said the chanting that Buddhist monks are known for is about “teaching for the people who live right now. Not chanting for the people who passed away.”

Colorful additions to Wichita

The association is breaking ground for its newest building on Oct. 25. Marlin said he hopes it will be ready in five months, but it could take more like seven.

“We’re going to be working through the winter, so it gets a little unpredictable with how the weather is.”

There are a few other colorful meditation centers around Wichita, each of which attracts attention wherever it stands.

Amphone-Suh said there are a lot of similarities among the centers.

“Everybody is pretty much chanting the same thing.”

Sometimes, it’s in the monks’ native languages, such as Vietnamese, and sometimes it’s with more traditional Buddhist chants.

Amphone-Suh said they are welcoming places, and she said the Lao Buddhist Associates of Kansas wants people to know it.

“The Buddhist temple isn’t just limited to you having to believe in Buddhism. If you need that meditation . . . how to gain your inner peace, the meditation center is open.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 4:47 AM.