Buddhists

As a Catholic who grew up in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, I witnessed and experienced a lot of sectarian bigotry and religious persecution. I have been living in the United States for more than 10 years, six of them in Yorba Linda. I believed that I could live and raise children here without the influence of bigots affecting our daily lives. Now I am not so sure. The thinly disguised exhibition of sectarianism which took place at the Yorba Linda City Council meeting on March 4 makes me ashamed that I am a resident of that city.

The Angry Buddhist A Novel Seth Greenland Europa Editions: 400 pp., $16 paper Seth Greenland's "The Angry Buddhist" begins with two sexy American women getting matching tattoos in Puerto Vallarta - and then it swiftly jumps forward into the madcap final week of a congressional race out in the desert around Palm Springs. The incumbent, a wily and infinitely pragmatic political sleazebag named Randall Duke, finds himself facing a new kind of problem, namely, an opponent who might actually defeat him. Her name is Mary Swain, and here she is, observed at a rally by the angry Buddhist of the title, one of Randall's brothers, the busted cop called Jimmy Ray Duke: "She glides to the microphone and Jimmy notes the burnished skin, the blinding smile, the five hundred dollars' worth of blond highlights, fitted red blouse set off against the matching white linen skin and jacket that wraps her like cellophane.

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.

The rain poured steadily and the sky was gray. But that didn't stop thousands of visitors from hiking up the steps of the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights to welcome the lunar new year. "Prosperity flows with water," said Liang Zhu of El Monte, quoting a Chinese proverb. "It's so rare that it rains on the first of the new year. It's lucky. " Zhu, along with his wife, brother and sister-in-law, pushed up against a stone railing in a sculpture garden where people cheerfully threw coins over the edge, trying to hit a small bell.

Deep in a remote desert valley, where rattlesnakes lurk in the scrub, Stéphane Dreyfus and several dozen other Buddhists are preparing to undergo a mind-altering journey: Three years, three months, three weeks and three days of silence. There will be no word from the outside world in the Great Retreat, only the deafening quiet of rock and cactus, with seemingly endless time to ponder the emptiness of life. Dreyfus and his fellow adherents hope to find enlightenment in the silence, a gift they plan to share when they emerge from their long seclusion.

Lofty dialogues between scholars of various world religions might make greater progress if the premise of liberation theology were adopted, according to a notion gaining favor among academicians probing the interfaith frontiers. The idea is that rather than searching for a common religious core, which some think is nonexistent, the discussions should begin with the plight of the poor and examine how each religion addresses those problems.

Re "A Publishing Flood of Biblical Proportions" (Oct. 16): In this article on books about the Bible, Mary Rourke writes that the first book of the Bible is "long since established as humanity's position paper." I'm sure this will surprise the majority of people on the Earth, consisting of Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists and others who are not believers in Genesis. DONALD MICHAEL KRAIG Los Angeles

The Vietnam Buddhist Temple in Garden Grove will hold a commemoration rite honoring Bodhisatta Quang Duc and other Vietnamese Buddhist devotees who have dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom. Duc burned himself to death in 1963 to escape the oppression of Buddhists by then-South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, temple officials say. The ceremony will be at 11 a.m. Sunday at the temple, 12292 Magnolia St. Information: (714) 534-7263.

Thousands of devout Buddhists poured into a remote mountain town in India's northeast, arriving in packed trucks or on foot after trekking for miles along narrow paths for a rare chance to get a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual leader's weeklong visit to Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh state near the Chinese border, has been mired in a diplomatic squabble, highlighting the growing friction between Beijing and New Delhi as the two nuclear-armed giants vie for economic and political power.

Your Oct. 11 article, "Through Monastery and Village in Sikkim," contains material that is offensive to Buddhists. The author describes his visit to Rumtek Monastery and his encounter with someone he calls "Jangen Rinpoche." It is clear that he is actually referring to His Eminence Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, who was one of the highest and most world-renowned spiritual authorities of the Kagyu Tradition of Buddhism. His Eminence was tragically killed in an automobile accident shortly after your correspondent's encounter with him, and Buddhists are observing mourning for him. Certainly there is no reason the author would have known this.

For most of his 76 years, the 14th Dalai Lama has been the spiritual light for followers of Tibetan Buddhism, his every word parsed for guidance to living a better, more fulfilling life. Awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama has been an outspoken advocate for compassion, meditation and religious tolerance. Now, as he steps down as leader of Tibet, the perpetually smiling monk in saffron and burgundy robes makes in "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World" what some may regard as a heretical pronouncement: You don't need religion to lead a happy and ethical life.

The Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche spent his life in the West confounding expectations and behaving in ways no one could anticipate or even understand. After 17 years of marriage, his wife found him "completely unfathomable" and his devoted students often felt the same. How, then, to make a film about a man who categorically resists summarization? Director Johanna Demetrakas has decided to simply present the man in all his demanding complexities and let him and his encounters with associates speak for themselves.

Shopkeepers peer out from storefronts festooned with traditional Tibetan prayer flags at platoons of armed police, some carrying an unusual addition to their riot regalia: fire extinguishers. A string of self-immolations by young Buddhist monks in Sichuan province is unnerving the Chinese government and giving a new, more radical momentum to the Tibetan protest movement. On Monday, the ninth young Tibetan — and the first woman — killed herself in the small town of Aba by self-immolation in a protest against Chinese rule.

The Novice A Story of True Love Thich Nhat Hanh HarperOne: 147 pp., $23.99 The novel, as a storytelling device, begins with that white parchment of possibility, turns many tricks, reveals many truths and, in the best of hands, can exploit the very worst in humankind. Novels are fairly seditious undertakings. And that's why the very idea of a Zen novel sounds like either a comedy sketch or simply an improbable stretch. And yet that's what Vietnamese Buddhist Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has done with his first novel, "The Novice: A Story of True Love.

Vincent Horn opened his eyes after a moment of meditation, scanned the room and smiled. About 150 other people were emerging from their own states of dead-silent, self-induced tranquillity. They shuffled a bit in their seats. "Hello, Buddhist geeks!" Horn said from his perch onstage. "This is the most geeks I've seen in one place, I think, ever. " His statement brought to mind a moment in the documentary "Woodstock," when folk singer Arlo Guthrie takes in the crowd of several hundred thousand young people and cackles, "Lotta freaks!"

The century-old Buddhist temple is for sale. The asking price for its gilded columns and marble stairs is $1.1 million. But the cost to a blighted corner of this city and to the area's Japanese American community is not as easily estimated. Indeed, during this Obon season — when Buddhists remember the dead — the decision to abandon the landmark Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple balances two basic tenets of the faith: honoring ancestors and accepting the impermanence of all things.

The comment by Cynthia Duffy in the March 6 article about Yorba Linda's refusal to allow a Buddhist group to build a monastery in the city was unfortunate for two reasons. First, she appears to know little about Buddhism. Buddhists--especially of the more traditional Theravada variety, which is followed by the Myanmar Society of America which requested the building permit--are atheistic. They worship none of the "pagan gods" to whom Duffy referred. Instead, Buddhists venerate the historical Gautama Buddha, who founded the religion, as well as other Buddhas who have helped humans on their quest for enlightenment and Nirvana.

This cold and barren land of rocky slopes and glaciers, of cliff-side Buddhist monasteries and of the wild yak, is the most remote and unpopulated corner of India. Until a road was cut through in 1964, an overland journey from the cities on the Vale of Kashmir took weeks. A sloping airstrip was built in 1974. But even now, in winter, this city and the surrounding district of Ladakh, twice the size of Switzerland, are cut off from the outside world for months at a time.

The ruins poke out of a monotonous stretch of scrub and beckon the world to visit Afghanistan as it was more than 1,400 years ago, when Buddhist monasteries dotted the landscape. An ancient citadel juts from a tall crag, standing sentinel over what once was a flourishing settlement. The monastery sits largely preserved, as does a series of reliquaries adorned with schist arches and shelves. But few people today will have a chance to see these ruins, which French and Afghan archaeologists are unearthing.

For the third time, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a Thai teenager's confession to the 1991 slayings of nine worshipers at a Buddhist temple near Phoenix was coerced and invalid. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held its ground in overturning the conviction of then-17-year-old Johnathan Doody despite a directive from the U.S. Supreme Court to reevaluate its decisions last year and in 2008. The appeals court ruled that Maricopa County sheriff's deputies distorted their reading of Doody's Miranda rights, telling him he was entitled to an attorney only if he had committed a crime.