Temples Los Angeles County

The Buddhist community that built the nation's largest Thai temple in North Hollywood in 1979 is mounting emergency relief efforts for the Thai temple in Phoenix, where six monks and three others were mysteriously killed last weekend. "We had very close links and visited with them all the time," said the Venerable Sumana Tissa, one of 16 monks stationed at the Wat Thai Temple in the San Fernando Valley.

The Buddhist community that built the nation's largest Thai temple in North Hollywood in 1979 is mounting emergency relief efforts for the Thai temple in Phoenix, where six monks and three others were mysteriously killed last weekend. "We had very close links and visited with them all the time," said the Venerable Sumana Tissa, one of 16 monks stationed at the Wat Thai Temple in the San Fernando Valley.

Three masked men, two armed with guns, forced their way into a Sikh temple in North Hollywood early Monday morning and held two church members at gunpoint as they destroyed a $14,000 security system and vandalized the temple's telephones, church members and police said. "This is the first time this has happened in a temple by a Sikh group," said Gursharan Singh Nat, treasurer of the Sikh Gurdwara of Los Angeles, on Lankershim Boulevard. "The whole community is shocked."

Just a few feet from Southern California's newest Buddhist temple, a six-lane boulevard carries harried business commuters in Irvine past a blur of low-rise industrial buildings. The temple's Far East architecture is intriguing enough to motorists that they stop in and ask: When does this Japanese restaurant open? The confusion is understandable. No one in these parts has ever seen anything like the $5-million Pao Fa Buddhist Temple, Orange County's first mega-temple.