This story is pretty amazing. The area was literally a dumping ground for people littering and tossing their trash on the sidewalks. One resident, who had done is best to clean up the area only to have it trashed again and again, got so tired of this that he came up with the clever idea of putting up a small Buddha statue and turning it into a shrine.
Some of his neighbors and the area’s visitors, being predominantly Asian (south, southeast & east), had mostly grown up in cultures where shrines to Buddha were kept clean and presentable…so they stopped littering their trash all over, and actually started picking up other’s trash for some distance all around the little Buddha statue…and eventually turned it into the charming, well-tended edifice in the image above.
…That being said, this is another example of how you talk about a thing–and its corollary, how you treat a thing–changing how other people view a thing.
Oh, and the guy who initially decided to do this thing? Not a Buddhist, but he believed a statue of Buddha was fairly neutral politically, but was still an image of veneration for a wide swath of the community. Since the original statue was affixed to the traffic median, a statue of Guanyin (Buddhist goddess of compassion) has been added, as well as the shrine itself being built.
Some neighbors did complain to the city about early morning noise from worshippers gathering and praying at the shrine, but there was so much opposition to the idea of removing the statue that the Oakland city council has permanently tabled the idea of its removal as “undergoing further consideration”…since 2014.
Also, the worshippers call it Dharma Temple…which is a great way to remember that dharma and kharma are all about following the rules that better the world so as to avoid getting into trouble…such as the rules about no littering.
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