Bliss, Bush, and Bullshit

[This article was originally posted Thursday, January 08, 2004, on the long-gone "Barefoot Fool" blog, which you can read a little more about here. As with so many of my old projects, there are broken promises in this piece: "Campbell's words and work will be a constant theme in this blog..." Hard to imagine when the blog itself is moribund!

[Anyway, in today's political climate, I--like others--find myself yearning for the relatively benign antics of Bush the Younger. Hell, Nixon's starting to look not-so-bad! Anyway, think of the comments at the end as a sort of time capsule, and take away whatever you can use.]

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Last Sunday [Jan. 4, 2004] I attended a very L.A. event. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had sponsored an exhibition of Buddhist art called "The Circle of Bliss." In association with that exhibition, they sponsored a group of Tibetan monks to create an 8-foot-across sand mandala. In weeks to come, I hope to present a detailed interpretation of its symbolism, on a subsidiary page. {Never did--broken promise!] In the meantime, I will briefly tell you of its importance.

My "Ancestral Shrine"

A Tribute to My Family, My Japanese Sojourn, and My Ancestors

[This article was originally posted in the "American Temples" section of the old Temple Guy site, probably in late 2004 or early 2005. At that time, I was publishing the "Laughing Buddha" blog; see here for more information on that and other defunct projects. Notes in square brackets were added in 2019, when the article was relocated to this site. I have also added far more photos than were in the original.]

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Back in the early 50's, before this disreputable Laughing Buddha was born, my family moved to the house they still live in, in Rosemead, a suburb of Los Angeles. [Alas, no longer: when Mom passed in 2023, we sold the house.]

In L.A.'s highly mobile society, fifty years [in the end, around 70] is a long time for anyone to stay in one place, but the Buckets have done just that. All of us--my two older brothers, my younger sister, and I--went to the same elementary, junior high, and high schools. We had many of the same teachers, and friends of mine were often siblings of my sibling's friends.

Me and the Abbot: Venerable Hui Chuan of Hsi Lai Temple

The YUGE Main Hall at Hsi Lai Temple, Hacienda Heights, CA

For a half a year (roughly November 2002 to April 2003) I had the privilege of working at Hsi Lai Temple (Wiki) in southeastern L.A. County, which used to bill itself as "the largest Buddhist temple in North America." I'm not sure how that's measured, as there are certainly temples with more land, and possibly more floor space. It may be the largest Main Hall, as I can't recall seeing any bigger. (Now it's advertised as "one of the largest Buddhist temples in the Western Hemisphere.")

The Golden Spike c. 1995

Meeting of the cowcatchers (1995)

Milestones are always happening, and when we look back, we sometimes can't see what the big deal was.

But this one was a big deal.

Thirty years after planning began, and roughly six years after the work started, two locomotives rolled up and touched cowcatchers in an otherwise-deserted place in north central Utah in 1869, symbolically tying the country back together just four years after the end of the Civil War.