The chief priest (41) of a Buddhist temple resolved in an act of Buddhist compassion to burn out a nest of wasps, and in doing so duly had his temple smitten and reduced to ashes, destroying the entire temple complex.
Read the rest of this entry »
Italians (or at least a few senile old priests and media hacks) seem positively delighted by the level of bowing and scraping their complaints of vandalism against some irreverent Japanese students have elicited; so delighted in fact that when the girls visited (out of their own pockets, or least those of their parents) the historic cathedral they scrawled graffiti on to grovel and shed tears of repentance, they were greeted with open arms and praise for their courtesy and manners, and subsequently made into peace ambassadors.
Read the rest of this entry »
A man who stole more than forty stone Buddhas, worth some $20,000, apparently hoping for an interesting curse to befall him, has been arrested for theft. The statues in question were 地蔵 / Jizou (Ksitigarbha), stone guardian idols, commonly revered by the heathen Japanese, and his motivation was “I saw on TV that the statues could cause a curse like this and I wanted it”, an explanation which perhaps poses more questions than it answers.
On further investigation he was found to have used a truck to move the heavy idols back to his home, where he was found to have stashed even more stolen monuments, for which charges are pending. The idols were apparently unharmed by their ordeal. Via ZakZak.
A group of six heathen Japanese junior college students visiting Florence took it upon themselves to desecrate the holiest site in the city, Brunelleschi’s crowning glory Florence Cathedal, a six hundred year old structure noted for its great dome, defacing the marble walls therein by scrawling irreverent graffiti on them in an act of brazen sacrilege.
Read the rest of this entry »
According to a Yomiuri survey, 72% of Japanese profess no belief in religion of any sort. Of course, as you might expect from these kinds of statistics, things are a little more nuanced than at first they seem, though the general ambivalence of the Japanese to religion does not appear to be in doubt.
Read the rest of this entry »
