The Wall Street Journal, February 10 2009:
But last spring, some of the temple’s neighbors decided they’d had their fill. They asked the city’s zoning board to shut down what they call a “commercial enterprise” operating in a residential zone. At a public hearing, a dozen neighborhood opponents sounded off: Some said they couldn’t stand the “offensive odors” of Thai food being prepared; others objected to litter, traffic and clanging pots early in the morning. One compared the temple to a McDonald’s.
At a hearing in September, neighbor Carolyn Shoulders complained: “If anybody whose neighbor on the other side of their backyard fence had a thousand people over every weekend, they would really get tired of it.”
In a recent interview, she said she has lived on the street behind the temple for 10 years. “They don’t have to, in essence, run a restaurant in our backyard,” she said. “You want to relax on the weekend.”
Berkeley, a city where a group of protesters recently lived in trees for nearly two years, now is weighing whether zoning laws ought to be sensitive to karma.
The weekly brunch at a Buddhist monastary in Berkeley, Calif., has grown wildly popular for the bargain it offers. But not everyone is pleased with the crowds it is drawing. WSJ’s Geoffery Fowler reports.
Abbot Tahn Manas, who has lived at the temple for 22 years, says the event is critical to the Buddhist religious practice of “earning merit.” Monks are forbidden by their religion from earning money or accumulating earthly goods on their own. Providing for monks and temples is the religious duty of Buddhists of the Theravada school; it helps them build goodwill for later in life or for the next life. In Thailand, they earn merit by giving money to monks in the street. Berkeley Buddhists earn merit by volunteering at brunch, thereby serving the temple.
