It all started with the Oakland Buddha.

So the story goes, Oakland resident Dan Stevenson was pretty fed up with the crime, drug-use, vandalism and other seedy behavior happening on his corner. So in 1999, after many attempts to contact the public works department went unheeded, he and his wife hoped to raise the energy of the area another way: they bought a 20-inch Buddha garden statue from the hardware store and epoxied it to a rock on the median at the corner of their block.

Pretty quickly the atmosphere of the place changed, almost like magic. People stopped shooting up on the corner, and members of the vietnamese community built a shrine around the buddha to protect it, keeping the space clean and offering fresh flowers. People would stop an bow, stop and pray, and talk to the Buddha on their way to and from work or to walk their dogs.

So, I thought, why couldn’t that happen everywhere?

Therein lies the inspiration for this project. I would like to do something similar. In Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I live, there are periodic waves of gang violence, drug-related mental health crises, and shootings. Members of the community die, makeshift shrines pop up in their honor, but then fade away. Politicians make speeches, bloviate about solutions, but nothing seems to ever get done. So I thought, why not place a Jizo or a Buddha statue on the sites where shrines used to be, or near corners that could use a little boost of energy?

Since this isn’t limited to Flatbush, and there are many areas around Brooklyn, around New York, and around the country that could use a little love, I’m calling this the One Thousand and Eighty Buddhas Project. Shifting the collective consciousness, one statue at a time.

If you’d like to contribute your own statues to this project, us

If you would like to help, please donate to unitedstatesofdharma@gmail.com on Paypal. Include “One Thousand Eighty Buddhas” in the note.

$34 buys a Jizo statue.
$89 buys a Buddha statue.

May all beings find peace and happiness through this endeavor.