Around the 1920s, a small Sangha with a handful of members began meeting under the sponsorship of the Los Angeles Betsuin. One hundred years later, the Orange County Buddhist Church — my home temple — is the BCA’s largest, with 783 members. It started with gatherings in living rooms, grew to a modest wooden schoolhouse in 1935, and now has become an inspirational symbol of the Jodo Shinshu community and Nembutsu teaching in Southern California. It is, as I dare to dream, what Albany and...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … in short, it was so far like the present period.” That opening line from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” came to mind on my flight home from Minneapolis, where I had attended the BCA Eastern District Council Meeting and the 80th anniversary of the Twin Cities Sangha, on the weekend of May 2-3. Dickens wrote about the past, but the duality he described — extreme swings between hope and despair, between the best and worst — has a...

In our kitchen, much like others, is a shelf of cookbooks and there is one in particular with well-worn pages and Post-it notes in the margins. The glossy bronze cover captures its title — “Generation to Generation, a Family Cookbook.” Appropriately named, this cookbook is the culmination of the contributions and collective knowledge of generations of families passed down from generation to generation and family to family symbolizing their countless delicious meals and experiences. Each...