Following the supportive response to last month’s update, we are pleased to announce that we will be relocating our 500 arhat statues from the temple retreat to 133 Canal St. Please stay tuned to find out what will be replacing the 500 Arhat Hall at the retreat reconstruction.
The current home of our arhat statues, the 500 Arhat Hall at the retreat, has welcomed hundreds of guests since it was constructed in 1988. Since our collection is by far the largest set of arhat statues in the United States, we at Mahayana Temple wanted to make these unique statues accessible to even more visitors. We are honored to be sharing Chinese Buddhist culture and strive to regularly improve the experience.
At our city temple, the new 500 Arhat Hall is set to be built on the third floor alongside a new gift shop. We’ve designed the space with a variety of rounded altars, a significant change from the rectangular shapes seen in our current 500 Arhat Hall. We hope this improved layout will enhance the experience for guests participating in the traditional Chinese Buddhist activity of counting arhats, called su luohan in Chinese. Each arhat is associated with a fortune. It is said that by counting up to your age, in any order you choose, the arhat you finish counting on has the fortune that you are meant to receive.
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