A Buddhist Ritual Gets an Ecologically Correct Update
BY RACHEL NUWER
Published: January-February 2014
On a bright November day in Central Park, nine Buddhist nuns and monks with their poofy winter coats over their gray and beige robes joined representatives from New York City's Wild Bird Fund for a little karmic cleansing. Gathered around boxes labeled "thrush," "sapsucker," and "flicker," the group read and sang from prayer books in Mandarin and Sanskrit, wishing the birds well and praying that they find enlightenment in future lives. "Okay, let's hope it works," chuckled the Venerable Benkong Shi after performing one final bow to the boxes. Then it was time to set the birds free. Like Noah releasing the dove of peace, another monk gently removed the birds one by one while his colleagues snapped photos on their smartphones. The northern flicker darted into the brush. "Bye-bye!" the Abbess Jingyi Shi, 51, called after the birds. "Be careful!"
From a nearby bench, a grizzled New Yorker--coozy-clad Pabst in hand--surveyed the scene. "I come here to get away from people," he grumbled. "And here I am surrounded by some sort of religious ceremony."
The group didn't seem to hear.
This unusual ritual--which drew puzzled looks from several passersby--all began with a turtle in a plastic box. In 2007 a nun at the Grace Gratitude Buddhist Temple in Manhattan's Chinatown opened the temple's bronze door to find a tiny red-eared slider at her feet. The turtle was meant not for her but for Benkong, an elder monk there. This was no abandoned baby in need of care, they suspected--it had likely been left in protest.
A month earlier Benkong had inadvertently offended New York City's entire Chinese Buddhist community. Conservationists in the city had noticed an increase of nonnative turtles in Central Park's Turtle Pond and along the banks of the East River. The problem traced back to the thousand-plus-year-old practice of fangsheng, "release life," in which Buddhists free caged animals into the environment as a way of generating positive karma through acts of kindness. "Children with their grandmas were kissing turtles--never mind the salmonella--and releasing them into ponds in New York, where they'll probably freeze to death," Benkong says.
In fact, releasing animals into the wild without a permit in New York is outright illegal. A journalist covering the issue interviewed Benkong and quoted him as dubbing the practice, a bit indelicately, as fangsi: "release of death." Benkong also blamed the misguided releases on "ignorance" on the part of his fellow Buddhists, a statement that did not go over well with readers. "That's when the shit hit the fan," he says. "Ignorance is one of our cardinal sins."
Now, after weeks of threats and racist comments ("Being a white man dressed like this didn't help"), his offhand remark had again come crawling back to haunt him in the form of the little slider. "Now I have this turtle, what can I do?" he remembers thinking. "I can't sell it, release it, or kill it."
Instead, he and a nun raised it, naming it Pyewacket after the cat in the Jimmy Stewart- Kim Novak comedy Bell, Book, and Candle. He also resolved to find a solution to the problem that had created the whole mess in the first place. . . .
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