The story of how a man named Johnny Rhondo, the self-titled grand master of the Church of the Revelation, came to hold the charter to Long Beach's oldest Cambodian Buddhist temple is a curious one.
The Buddhist wat on East 20th Street is the beloved, if dilapidated, nucleus for the nation's largest Cambodian community, co-founded by the late actor Haing S. Ngor and served by monks known to hew closely to ancient tradition.
The Church of the Revelation's address is listed as a post office box in Orange.
The sudden transfer of assets to an offshoot of Rhondo's church has split the Cambodian community, infuriated a Los Angeles Superior Court judge and even stirred anger among the monks, who devote their lives to avoiding such emotion.
"We're all human," conceded head monk Khoeun Pang, 70, sitting in the lotus position on the floor of his living quarters last month.
For months, two groups have warred over which was the rightful administrator of the temple, each side depicting the other as an interloper, partly along fault lines that have increasingly divided the community in Long Beach for years. Six of the temple's seven monks have taken one side; the nine members of the board of directors, now locked out of the temple, are on the other.
The board members say the monks have been manipulated by a group of activists to rise up against them in a bid to get the temple's money. The so-called insurgents, including two of the temple's founders, depict the board as politically connected, opportunistic big shots who wrested control of the wat from the laypeople.
The temple at the center of the dispute, Wat Khmer Vipassanaram, was founded in 1985 by Khmer Rouge survivors in a depressed part of Long Beach across from a Cambodian refugee assistance center.
Run by the nonprofit Khmer Buddhist Assn., the complex is a series of old Spanish bungalows and converted apartments next to an auto body shop. The founders hoped to save enough money to ultimately build a true temple.
"We wanted a place where we could have peace of mind, meditate and contemplate, so we could forget the trauma and nightmare of the Killing Fields," said Larry Sar, a co-founder who survived the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge genocide.
The association was preparing to break ground on the new temple when the dispute broke out in December.
The monks' faction demanded an annual election of the board of directors as required by the temple's bylaws, which had been ignored for more than a decade.
