Word: buddha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...smile. "How much for a palm reading?" I ask. "We will talk about money later, darling," she says, grabbing my hand with delight. Behind her is a shop full of Indian paraphernalia - a Ganesha idol, incense sticks and OM signs, along with Tibetan scrolls of the Buddha. It strikes me that an American psychic in New York City must regard it as a coup to be seen in public with an Indian customer like me - the same rush that a white basketball trainer would get if LeBron James stopped by for a lesson...
...With them, the story of Buddhism in India comes back to its beginnings. In his book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, author Pankaj Mishra describes the troubled times in which the Buddha appeared. Dissatisfied with lives regimented around work, he writes, people gathered to listen to a new breed of freethinking philosopher, "India's first cosmopolitan thinkers." Those disaffected seekers came together in groves and parks built near the cities of the sixth-century B.C. Gangetic Plain. But any 21st century Delhi-ite would surely recognize the tensions driving their search for spiritual clarity...
SHANGHAI — The laughing Buddha towers over us, a bulging golden figure sparkling in the firelight and beaming through ashy smoke. Small, weathered women with crinkled skin and wispy gray hair kneel on the silky red cushions before the statue, making eye contact with only the floor as they hold their incense high and pray. Lining the ceiling are red lanterns, hangings, and tiny golden statues...
...Traveling in my family has always been a paradox. We are Hindus who wait hours in line at the Vatican. We go to the Bahamas and spend the whole day indoors reading. And here, at The Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai, my parents harangue our guide with loud questions and snap pictures as people pray and my brother and I lurk behind...
...Buddha is laughing...