Brilliant Bry *：歡樂吧！生命

One day when I was walking in Amsterdam, I saw a home interior shop with an army of Buddha heads on display, ranging from small to big in both size and price. All of a sudden, I had such a weird feeling.

I’ve seen such statue of Buddha head in the homes of various friends – none of whom is actually a Buddhist. Maybe some of them have Zen practise in disguise, but I wouldn’t know anything about it. Most of the time when I enquire about their motive, they say it just looks nice.

And I have no idea.

“Why don’t you have a statue of the whole Buddha?” I’ve asked. They thought that I was being way too serious to even ask such a question.

To me, the statue looks more like a chopped-off head on a stick on display. A murdered Buddha, maybe?

I know, to many people in the West, the oriental world lies in a mist of mystery. Even though I am not practising Buddhist, Buddhism is embedded in my culture one way or another. Seeing a Buddha head as a decoration next to modern or fancy furniture in a Western-designed house freaks me out. I thought for a second how it would be to see it in an oriental house.

No. I shake my head. No, we simply do not do that. Zen is a life style, not a designer decoration. It’s more an attitude which cannot simply be achieved by placing a Buddha head in the house.

The funny thing is that it probably looks exotic to Westerners: the image is certainly Eastern enough. However, it also looks exotic to us, the Orientals, the Asians, because the Western idea of it being exotic is exotic enough itself.

And maybe, on another level, the whole idea is indeed Zen after all. We have to accept what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. Nothing is exotic, when Zen is in daily practise. But the question would still remain: why would one even put a statue of Buddha head in the house? In truth, there’s nothing exotic about it at all.

Let me take a wild guess. Maybe Buddha himself is somehow smiling when listening to me nagging about this. “Bryan, Bryan, why would you mind such little thing? You know that it doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters.”