Another way to look at it is that the kind of person who does this sort of thing is incredibly confused and probably in a deep state of suffering or delusion.
Still a terrible thing to do but might change one’s view of the perpetrator.
Reminds me of a story about Buddha that I grew up, listening to in Nepal.
“An angry villager, upset that many people from his village had begun following the Buddha, went to confront him while he was meditating and hurled insults at him, trying to provoke a reaction. The Buddha listened silently and calmly until the man was finished, then asked him whether a gift still belonged to the giver if it was not accepted. When the villager said yes, the Buddha explained that in the same way, he did not accept the villager’s anger, so it remained with him. Realizing this, the villager understood that anger only harms the one who carries it, and he left humbled and changed.”
There is another version where he slapped Buddha and Buddha offered another side of his cheek for the villager to slap, or something like that. But I think the above version of the story is better.
You don’t even have to be religious to have compassion for someone who is mentally ill. Which I would argue you have to be to do something this anti-social…
I have compassion, but at some point, otherwise sound-minded individuals need to be held accountable for their actions. As an adult, continuing to have delusional religious beliefs is a choice.
Originally Karma is more along the lines of "by taking bad energy around with you, you get bad results", so it would suck for them (Assuming this was done by someone and not a tree), but more because they go around being shitty than because the Buddha statue put a hex on them.
More than one idiot, for sure. I remember not too long ago there was a menorah being desecrated near the lake and the Japanese tea garden also being vandalized/looted.
I went to Angkor Wat in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge had destroyed large parts of the temple complex and its statuary, including a long line of decapitated stone Buddhas. The Indian government was paying large reconstruction costs for the Hindu portions of the temple but the Buddhist portions were allowed to remain as they were. Made a fitting statement I think.
Whoever damaged this is suffering emotionally and acted out. It's unacceptable behavior but this moment should also be met with feeling compassion for this person.
May (I/you/all beings) be safe and
protected, free from inner and
outer harm.
May (I/you/all) be happy.
May (my/your/everyone’s) body support the practice of loving awareness.
May (I/you/all) be free from ill-will, affliction, and anxiety.
May (I/you/everyone) love (myself/yourself/themselves) as (I am/you are/they are).
May (I/you/all) be happy and free
from suffering.
May (I/you/all) find peace in an
uncertain world.
May (I/you/all) find ease on the
middle
Or despise any being in any state.
I used to live in community with a mix of people that included some very religious Jewish people and also some people more of the Hindu persuasion. Needless to say, the Hindu people had idols all over the place and one of the Jewish guys would surreptitiously cover or remove the idols. So maybe it’s something like that. Someone hates idols. Or maybe that Buddha was just asking for it?
Edit: it’s a testament to the stupidity of the average person that this comment is being downvoted.
Or maybe this is just oakland and we have an oversupply of cynical people that destroy public spaces for selfish and antisocial reasons despite the best effort of our neighbors and community to maintain this city
Really? If you can’t see relevance and overlap between my comment and this story, where the comment functions as a related anecdote, you need to go hit 6th grade English again and learn some reading comprehension.
it’s a testament to the stupidity of the average person that this comment is being downvoted.
It's being downvoted because your comment looks like anti-semitism.
You could have told the same story without including any of the religion names, and definitely without appearing to blame a particular religion (or its adherent) for bad behavior
The final comment was a joke. I don’t like seeing shrines attacked by community members. I just shared an anecdote from my life. The lesson for me here is that people suck. (Both the idol attacker AND this Reddit community has a bunch of people who see words and just react without applying critical thinking).
In a lot of Buddhist traditions, while there are shrines, viewing them as "idols" or looking at Buddha or a bodhisattva like they are god are considered not great as well. Most traditions center more on living life with the "heart of a Buddha" or walking the "path" that he did to reduce suffering or our attachments to suffering
Edited-- to add that Hinduism does have a creator figure. Buddhism and Hinduism are not mutually exclusive and can be quite similar of course, they are still different.
I think it is a distinction between practices-- a lot of southeast Asian tradition is centered around Theravada, then you have Mahayana in other parts of the east. There is also zen which is absolutely its own thing too. I've attended tibetan monasteries where there were much stricter rules around precincts and was more similar to a larger organized religion. While there are shrines and worship toward central figures, I have been taught in Mahayana tradition that one should not worship these people like revered gods, to be feared or prayed to out of begging, but rather acknowledged as those we should aspire to live like/ carry some of their being with us. I do think it is very very dependent on the specific practice or tradition being followed.
Not sure why I'm being down voted. I've been attending retreats, sangha and eastern practice for over 20 years. The places I attended have people from all traditions, including the dalai lama himself attending-- I don't know everything but what I've provided here isn't untrue to my own experience.
I think my use of words was a perpetuator of misunderstanding, I should have said "idolatry" instead of "idol" which usually means a physical idol or item depicting the person. I wanted to clarify to the person describing the disdain for idols, as Buddhism in its whole does not rever these people as gods or creators that we are indebted to but as people we should aspire to live like.
My point was not that shrines are seen as problematic, or Buddha statues, but that in most tradition, these people are not revered the way a Christian God would be. The goal was to walk the path of life similarly or learn from the way they lived or were in being. It is not as much worship, as it is a thank you and an invocation (if this makes sense)
Trust redditors to go outside once and assume the worst of everyone.
It was hella windy yesterday and that was the top head exposed to the elements, could have been a branch, if someone was intent on desecrating statues, seems it would have been easy to smash up the whole shrine.
Why? If they wanted to trash the shrine, they decided to stop at 1 head? That makes no sense.
It might not have been a tree, but there are a million more likely explanations than a dude punched the head clean off for no reason and didn't touch anything else.
Well, why do you think they'd start and stop with just one of the statuettes there?
Maybe the OP you responded to and I are just really bad at putting ourselves into the headset of someone who'd vandalize a shrine like this but doesn't it seem a little weird to you? It's not like a few kicks or a baseball bat couldn't have done a ton of damage to the whole lot.
If a tree branch fell and broke the head off a statue, then there’d be a tree branch and a broken head there. There are myriad reasons why they’d start and stop with a single head - I’d say it’s more likely the demolishing the entire structure. If you see a broken window, do you think “Well it’s probably just a stone that fell off an airplane, because a person would’ve broken all the windows!”
A myriad of reasons but you're not even going to bother to list a few?
then there’d be a tree branch and a broken head there
The broken head is right be behind the statue in the first picture. With as windy as it was, I could see that being enough to break a weak spot on an "inexpensive" plaster statue. Or cause that oddly leafless shrub right behind it to be repeatedly smacking into it.
Re: your broken window question, well... there are a myriad of reasons why someone might break a window and what I would think would clearly depend on how it's broken and which window it is. When I lived in the Mission, I was out of town to a week and came back to a bullet hole in a second story window of our place. It didn't really occur to me someone was specifically vandalizing our window, cause it was kind of fine save a small bullet hole. If I saw a bigger hole in a window on the upper floor of a house, that might have been some kid playing baseball or something. If I saw it next to a door or on a car, I'd think someone was breaking in, not just trying to vandalize something because of hate. If wouldn't really jump to thinking "oh, vandals!" over a single broken window. If they were vandalizing the place, they're doing a pretty poor job of it just breaking a window.
Shame you're getting downvoted. At the very least, I think it's reasonable to wonder why someone would do such a poor job at vandalizing a shrine if they're keen on vandalizing a shrine. Maybe the answer is just 'drugs' or 'who knows what's going on in the mind of someone who would do this in the first place?' but it's still peculiar.
There's someone further up in this thread's comments insightfully retelling a story of the Buddha refusing to accept someone's insults, I only first heard that parable a few months ago, from an internet human who goes by pissedmagistus talking about how if we go around assuming that people are thinking mean things about us, we're creating a mean version of them in our head that may or may not be true, and that opting to presume that people are thinking mean things about us is us creating judgmental versions of others, which is of itself, judgmental and now he opts to assume people are cool. I think it applies fairly well here. Maybe somebody did vandalize the statue. But... just one of the multiple Buddhas there? It's strange. Given everything, the explanation that weather knocked out weather for tens of thousands also knocked off a plaster Buddha's head seems at least as plausible as everything else and doesn't require imagining other humans to judge for it occurring.
This is sad! Hopefully it can be repaired
I mean, it’s an inexpensive statue and can be replaced. In the Zen sense, “It was already broken”.
Just a shitty thing to do.
Another way to look at it is that the kind of person who does this sort of thing is incredibly confused and probably in a deep state of suffering or delusion.
Still a terrible thing to do but might change one’s view of the perpetrator.
Reminds me of a story about Buddha that I grew up, listening to in Nepal.
“An angry villager, upset that many people from his village had begun following the Buddha, went to confront him while he was meditating and hurled insults at him, trying to provoke a reaction. The Buddha listened silently and calmly until the man was finished, then asked him whether a gift still belonged to the giver if it was not accepted. When the villager said yes, the Buddha explained that in the same way, he did not accept the villager’s anger, so it remained with him. Realizing this, the villager understood that anger only harms the one who carries it, and he left humbled and changed.”
There is another version where he slapped Buddha and Buddha offered another side of his cheek for the villager to slap, or something like that. But I think the above version of the story is better.
The ancient playground wisdom of "I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you."
Good wisdom is timeless. 😁
Oh great . Keep making excuses for these losers.
Nope. We should not be extending grace and kindness to blatant antisocial behavior
From a Buddhist perspective this is a lesson on the impermanence of all things.
Isn’t that a pretty standard tenet in most religions?
You don’t even have to be religious to have compassion for someone who is mentally ill. Which I would argue you have to be to do something this anti-social…
Hear hear!! Fully agree. May everyone’s compassion for others grow in 2026 and beyond
It could just as easily have been done by a believer of some other religion who considers Buddhists to be heathens/pagans/apostates/infidels, etc.
Also… someone who is confused and/or deluded. They’re living in a state of confusion and deserve you compassion, not your judgement.
I have compassion, but at some point, otherwise sound-minded individuals need to be held accountable for their actions. As an adult, continuing to have delusional religious beliefs is a choice.
I didn’t say to do either of those things. I’m talking about compassion — which it’s possible to have for the worst criminal imaginable.
They’re gonna send him to the back of the line in Samsara
There are millions of people suffering everyday and they don't do shit like this. That's not an excuse.
I didn’t say it was an excuse. I said it was a reason for compassion. Two very different things.
Everyone who is suffering deserves compassion. Not only the ones who act in the ways you want them to.
And I didn't say they didn't deserve compassion. 🙄
Not the first time. The shrine was initially placed there to deter illegal dumping.
It faced a lot of opposition from neighbors, although crime went down significantly in the area at the time.
Quan Am is the bodhisattva of compassion, by the way
Why were neighbors so opposed to the shrine? That's my old neighborhood, and I loved seeing it whenever I went running.
too many people going to pray, leave offerings. it’s probably not like that anymore
Seriously imagine getting mad at having a cool statue on your block
Someone is going to have forever bad karma. Sucks for them.
That's "My name is Earl"/Americanized Karma.
Originally Karma is more along the lines of "by taking bad energy around with you, you get bad results", so it would suck for them (Assuming this was done by someone and not a tree), but more because they go around being shitty than because the Buddha statue put a hex on them.
I pray that Oakland and its residents can see better days ahead, sorry for the community :/
It only takes one idiot, to ruin it. With a population over 400k there's always one
More than one idiot, for sure. I remember not too long ago there was a menorah being desecrated near the lake and the Japanese tea garden also being vandalized/looted.
Remember the Christmas tree in JLS that was burned by an arsonist a few years back? The Anti-Social behavior is in the house!
this.
I don’t think they meant literally one person.
Dude, Oakland is rad. Yeah it sucks that the statue got broken but this isn't an exclusive problem
Some people are such dicks.
I went to Angkor Wat in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge had destroyed large parts of the temple complex and its statuary, including a long line of decapitated stone Buddhas. The Indian government was paying large reconstruction costs for the Hindu portions of the temple but the Buddhist portions were allowed to remain as they were. Made a fitting statement I think.
Anyway, fuck this guy.
Bro that’s my old neighborhood, that is so uncool. I love the 2 intersections with shrines and it’s a damn shame someone is messing with them.
Those shrines add great culture to the neighborhood and the city.
What would Buddha say
We don’t know, his head’s gone 😮💨
"ow"
"There can be only one....."
Karma is real
Where there are idiots, those idiots will always think it’s fun or cool to do idiotic things like this. Sucks
Damn, hopefully this wasn't malicious.
Doesn’t look like an accident. 😕
How can you tell?
It was hella windy yesterday and that was the top head exposed to the elements, could have been a branch.
Whoever damaged this is suffering emotionally and acted out. It's unacceptable behavior but this moment should also be met with feeling compassion for this person.
May (I/you/all beings) be safe and protected, free from inner and outer harm. May (I/you/all) be happy. May (my/your/everyone’s) body support the practice of loving awareness. May (I/you/all) be free from ill-will, affliction, and anxiety. May (I/you/everyone) love (myself/yourself/themselves) as (I am/you are/they are). May (I/you/all) be happy and free from suffering. May (I/you/all) find peace in an uncertain world. May (I/you/all) find ease on the middle Or despise any being in any state.
Again?
Omg I used to live in that apartment building in the background!
Bro’s gonna reincarnate as a toilet seat
I'm so sorry. To whomever did it, karma is a bitch!
Bamiyan.
That’s hella weird bc I’m in Japan right now and saw on the news someone did the exact same thing to one in a public spot.
I used to live in community with a mix of people that included some very religious Jewish people and also some people more of the Hindu persuasion. Needless to say, the Hindu people had idols all over the place and one of the Jewish guys would surreptitiously cover or remove the idols. So maybe it’s something like that. Someone hates idols. Or maybe that Buddha was just asking for it?
Edit: it’s a testament to the stupidity of the average person that this comment is being downvoted.
You’re downvoted as you decided to randomly blame this on Jews. Way too much antisemitism on reddit.
Or maybe this is just oakland and we have an oversupply of cynical people that destroy public spaces for selfish and antisocial reasons despite the best effort of our neighbors and community to maintain this city
Great. That has nothing to do with my anecdotal comment.
What does your comment have to do with anything?
Really? If you can’t see relevance and overlap between my comment and this story, where the comment functions as a related anecdote, you need to go hit 6th grade English again and learn some reading comprehension.
It's being downvoted because your comment looks like anti-semitism.
You could have told the same story without including any of the religion names, and definitely without appearing to blame a particular religion (or its adherent) for bad behavior
Most of the neighbors loved it.
And I have no idea what you mean by "maybe that Buddha was just asking for it" but it's a weird thing to say.
I would like to clarify that the Buddha that was mentioned in that article you linked isn't the same one that OP posted.
The one that OP posted about is two blocks away on a hill that also has a one way turn. It's less popular than the one referred to in that article.
The final comment was a joke. I don’t like seeing shrines attacked by community members. I just shared an anecdote from my life. The lesson for me here is that people suck. (Both the idol attacker AND this Reddit community has a bunch of people who see words and just react without applying critical thinking).
What a delicate little flower you are.
Nothing wrong with that. Is there something wrong with that?
In a lot of Buddhist traditions, while there are shrines, viewing them as "idols" or looking at Buddha or a bodhisattva like they are god are considered not great as well. Most traditions center more on living life with the "heart of a Buddha" or walking the "path" that he did to reduce suffering or our attachments to suffering
Edited-- to add that Hinduism does have a creator figure. Buddhism and Hinduism are not mutually exclusive and can be quite similar of course, they are still different.
As someone with Buddhist fam abroad I’ve never been to a Buddhist nation with skepticism about idols and statues like you describe
I think it is a distinction between practices-- a lot of southeast Asian tradition is centered around Theravada, then you have Mahayana in other parts of the east. There is also zen which is absolutely its own thing too. I've attended tibetan monasteries where there were much stricter rules around precincts and was more similar to a larger organized religion. While there are shrines and worship toward central figures, I have been taught in Mahayana tradition that one should not worship these people like revered gods, to be feared or prayed to out of begging, but rather acknowledged as those we should aspire to live like/ carry some of their being with us. I do think it is very very dependent on the specific practice or tradition being followed.
Not sure why I'm being down voted. I've been attending retreats, sangha and eastern practice for over 20 years. The places I attended have people from all traditions, including the dalai lama himself attending-- I don't know everything but what I've provided here isn't untrue to my own experience.
Which one of those traditions thinks it’s ok to desecrate a buddha statue?
Gotcha, thx for explaining more
Why then are there so many big opulent Buddhist temples all over the world?
I think my use of words was a perpetuator of misunderstanding, I should have said "idolatry" instead of "idol" which usually means a physical idol or item depicting the person. I wanted to clarify to the person describing the disdain for idols, as Buddhism in its whole does not rever these people as gods or creators that we are indebted to but as people we should aspire to live like.
My point was not that shrines are seen as problematic, or Buddha statues, but that in most tradition, these people are not revered the way a Christian God would be. The goal was to walk the path of life similarly or learn from the way they lived or were in being. It is not as much worship, as it is a thank you and an invocation (if this makes sense)
Trust redditors to go outside once and assume the worst of everyone.
It was hella windy yesterday and that was the top head exposed to the elements, could have been a branch, if someone was intent on desecrating statues, seems it would have been easy to smash up the whole shrine.
Bruh, I live in the neighborhood.
No.
EDIT: Ain’t no branches big inning in the area to have fallen off. If a vehicle did it, there would be more damage.
Someone took a swing at the head.
Sure that doesn't mean you go outside much.
Why? If they wanted to trash the shrine, they decided to stop at 1 head? That makes no sense.
It might not have been a tree, but there are a million more likely explanations than a dude punched the head clean off for no reason and didn't touch anything else.
this is such a weird response
You’re really reaching with this.
Well, why do you think they'd start and stop with just one of the statuettes there?
Maybe the OP you responded to and I are just really bad at putting ourselves into the headset of someone who'd vandalize a shrine like this but doesn't it seem a little weird to you? It's not like a few kicks or a baseball bat couldn't have done a ton of damage to the whole lot.
If a tree branch fell and broke the head off a statue, then there’d be a tree branch and a broken head there. There are myriad reasons why they’d start and stop with a single head - I’d say it’s more likely the demolishing the entire structure. If you see a broken window, do you think “Well it’s probably just a stone that fell off an airplane, because a person would’ve broken all the windows!”
A myriad of reasons but you're not even going to bother to list a few?
The broken head is right be behind the statue in the first picture. With as windy as it was, I could see that being enough to break a weak spot on an "inexpensive" plaster statue. Or cause that oddly leafless shrub right behind it to be repeatedly smacking into it.
Re: your broken window question, well... there are a myriad of reasons why someone might break a window and what I would think would clearly depend on how it's broken and which window it is. When I lived in the Mission, I was out of town to a week and came back to a bullet hole in a second story window of our place. It didn't really occur to me someone was specifically vandalizing our window, cause it was kind of fine save a small bullet hole. If I saw a bigger hole in a window on the upper floor of a house, that might have been some kid playing baseball or something. If I saw it next to a door or on a car, I'd think someone was breaking in, not just trying to vandalize something because of hate. If wouldn't really jump to thinking "oh, vandals!" over a single broken window. If they were vandalizing the place, they're doing a pretty poor job of it just breaking a window.
Maybe it was actually a tree branch that killed the United Healthcare CEO.
Shame you're getting downvoted. At the very least, I think it's reasonable to wonder why someone would do such a poor job at vandalizing a shrine if they're keen on vandalizing a shrine. Maybe the answer is just 'drugs' or 'who knows what's going on in the mind of someone who would do this in the first place?' but it's still peculiar.
There's someone further up in this thread's comments insightfully retelling a story of the Buddha refusing to accept someone's insults, I only first heard that parable a few months ago, from an internet human who goes by pissedmagistus talking about how if we go around assuming that people are thinking mean things about us, we're creating a mean version of them in our head that may or may not be true, and that opting to presume that people are thinking mean things about us is us creating judgmental versions of others, which is of itself, judgmental and now he opts to assume people are cool. I think it applies fairly well here. Maybe somebody did vandalize the statue. But... just one of the multiple Buddhas there? It's strange. Given everything, the explanation that weather knocked out weather for tens of thousands also knocked off a plaster Buddha's head seems at least as plausible as everything else and doesn't require imagining other humans to judge for it occurring.
I mean, Buddha was just a nepo baby who abandoned his wife and child “to go find himself”. lol