Buddhaland Brooklyn, Richard C. Morais's second novel (after The Hundred-Foot Journey), plays on the age-old story of faith lost and found, painting a poignant portrait of a Buddhist monk's search for religious enlightenment while leading an American flock. We first meet Seido Oda as a child in a remote mountainside village in Northern Japan, when his family commits him to priesthood at the Buddhist monastery.
After his father's suicide by fire kills the rest of his family, Oda turns inward, developing an unshakable devotion to Buddhism through prayer, poetry and art, ever hopeful that "one day, the Buddha will reunite you with your family in the Buddhaland." After 16 years, Oda's near-hermetical existence at the temple comes to an end as his superiors dispatch him to a Brooklyn neighborhood in order to establish the sect's first American temple.
In New York, Morais lays bare the flaws inherent in Oda's dogmatic and stubborn approach to faith--his social ineptitude, his inability to adapt to and connect with parishioners and his failure to confront tragedy and emotional conflict. Through Oda's story, Morais shows the modernist influences on traditional Buddhism, contrasting the austere, natural serenity of temple life to with the pent-up frustrations of a boxy, concrete metropolis. It is a dilemma familiar to believers of all faiths seeking to reconcile their own viewpoints against those of their religion. Readers who follow Morais's lyrical narrative will find spiritual redemption of their own in his search for the paradisiacal Buddhaland. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer