Me and the 10,000 Buddhas

That’s who I spent the day with, along my friends aniDa and Zoe, and it was so rejuvenating to be with images of sentient beings devoted to wisdom and compassion. No fire or brimstone, no need for spectacular miracles of loaves and fishes, oil burning beyond its shelf-life, no Big Daddy demanding obedience and compliance and recommending smiting and stoning or jihad revenge. Just the good sense to sit calmly and follow one’s breath and slowly dissolve the illusion of separateness and come into the unity of the 10,000 things. 

 

This Temple of the 10,000 Buddhas (really more) in Hong Kong features ascending stairs (525, to be exact) with Golden Buddha statues on each side. No two alike, different faces, different postures, different expressions. 500 of them and then another 12,000 smaller ones in the temple at the top. Bird song abounding throughout it all and that blessed sense of returning to so many sacred places I’ve had the good fortune to visit. Not only the Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside L.A. and European cathedrals and Indian/ Balinese Hindu temples and Thai/ Japanese Buddhist temples, but the Asian and African cultures where you can feel the sacred and secular, spiritual and profane, inextricably intertwined together in daily life. Cultures that take time each day (not just Sunday) to make offerings to the gods, play music and dance designed to invite the Ancestors, live lives without the toxic need to accumulate unnecessary things, dominate others, bury their heart in mediated sensation, busy themselves at hyper-speeds—just living the whole life in company with the living natural world and the human community. How I miss their reminder to live more simply. How I need it.

 

And so it was a day well spent with birds and Buddhas. You can meet some in the next post.