Buddha

It was not too long after the death of his eldest son that a grief-stricken Chester Chang sought respite in the quiet courtyard of one of his favorite places, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The strangest thing happened," begins Chang, an avid art collector, speaking at his Santa Monica home, filled to bursting with sculptures, paintings, tapestries, furniture, books, ceramics, swords and daggers from his far Eastern travels.

Pankaj MISHRA would seem the last person in the world to be interested in Buddhism. As this book begins, he is a young man heading for an isolated cottage to write, his head full of ambition, dreaming of literary fame to come. The difference between Mishra and other such young people on the literary make -- though he is too tasteful to say so -- is that by now he has made it. His novel "The Romantics" won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction.

Archeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi can barely bring himself to look at the ravaged cliff face where two ancient Buddhas towered until the Taliban infamously blasted them to bits. "For me, everything there is over," Tarzi says, pointing toward the heap of peach-colored dust and chunks of rock that used to be one of the massive statues. "It hurts my heart to go there and see what has been lost."

The owners of the Bombay Palace in Beverly Hills have been itching to get hold of the bar-lounge across the street and turn it into something more exciting than their sedate Indian restaurant. Recently they did just that. Buddha is the key. The pan-Asian restaurant-club White Lotus in Hollywood and Koi, a fashionable sushi restaurant in West Hollywood, among others, have drafted Buddha as their good luck charm. Nirvana carries the theme even further.

Edward Said's 1978 book, "Orientalism," accusing Western scholars of filtering their "discoveries" through a grid of prejudice in order to bolster an imperialist worldview, whipped the academic discipline known as post-colonial studies into a lather. Since then, the term "Orientalism" has been uttered almost solely in contempt and Orientalists as a class have been reductively vilified as little else but tools of imperial oppression.

Choreographer Terry Beeman understands the body: Whether he's assigning it sculptural balancing poses, making use of deliberate slow-motion runners' stances or busting loose with glorious, in-your-face primal lunges, this dancemaker -- and 20 breathtaking dancers -- stole the show from Rei Aoo's Dance Planet at Glendale Community College Auditorium on Saturday.

Robed monks and hundreds of thousands of worshippers made a procession through the countryside Thursday to transfer the fabled remains of Buddha from a noisy neighborhood in the capital, Phnom Penh, to a new, $4.5-million shrine. A golden urn containing ashes, bones and teeth was carried in a float decorated as a giant legendary golden bird to the dome-shaped shrine, or stupa, on a hilltop in Oudong, 30 miles north of the capital.

Cambodian workmen have unearthed 27 solid-gold Buddha statuettes, buried for hundreds of years beneath the foundations of a ruined pagoda hidden deep in the jungle, officials said. The statues, about 4 inches high and each weighing about 1 pound, came to light over the weekend when builders started restoration work on the 200-year-old pagoda destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Four statues made of silver and bronze were also found.

Brian T. Maeda's "Buddha Heads" is at once a powerful family saga, and a gangster movie that is way too talky but balanced by its unusual background. A tale about two generations of gangbangers in the Japanese American community is certainly not your typical fare. "Buddha Heads" starts with a collage of newsreel images showing Little Tokyo's Japanese Americans being evacuated to internment camps not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

CHINA * A team of engineers has begun a $30-million, 60-day cleaning and restoration project of the world's largest Buddha image, the official New China News Agency reported. The 233-foot Leshan Buddha, carved into a cliff in Sichuan province, had been eroding rapidly because of wind and acid rain. Its face is discolored and parts of the statue have broken off. The experts are cleaning the 1,280-year-old statue's body and filling in cracks. They will also install a system to drain rainwater.