I found this character several years ago on the street. To repair his very chipped paint, I recall taking the afternoon off work and walking into an art supply store, lugging the statue.

"I need bronze-color acrylic touch-up paint, kind of shiny," I said to the person behind the counter. "It's not for me, it's for my friend here," I said, indicating the Buddha.

The touch-up paint operation was a smashing success, and Buddha looks good as new, to this day. Heh, you'd hardly know his looks weren't "natural."

As Buddha replicas go, I'm afraid this one was mass-produced and looks almost cartoonish--he's a piece of "kitsch," an Andy Warhol Buddha.

Why do I keep him around, given that his esthetic charms are few, and that his symbolic importance, to me, is low?

On a bleak, rainy day early in 2004, I had to make a court appearance downtown for a traffic violation.

At the courthouse, a representative of a bail bonds firm was distributing promotional fabric keychains, black and lettered in fluorescent green. I got one and took it home and it's rested around Buddha's neck ever since: "Bad Boys Bail Bonds."

One reason I suppose I adorned the Buddha is that I was making a light-hearted gesture of thanks, involving a religious icon, because my own legal problems that day turned out not to be worse than they were. Mercifully, I was nobody who had to think about a bail bond.

I believe another reason the keychain landed on Buddha's neck was a bit deeper, and it had to do with my relationship to religious veneration, generally.

In the sense that he hypocritically forsook his wife and young child, in a bid to "end suffering," I believe the storied Buddha was flawed, a "bad boy"--not to say he was worse than any of us. He was also no better. By the same token, there isn't much in Gospel accounts to document Jesus' human shortcomings, though he certainly had them. A martyr complex, maybe?

Holding up others as "teachers," as examples of super-human morality or wisdom, is misguided. I keep Buddha around, out of habit, out of a kind of respect, and as acknowledgement of what I see as the misguidedness of veneration.

Alongside the Buddha is a wooden crucifix I think the man at the garage sale told me was from Romania. I keep it, because I like the drama of the crumpled figure of Christ, nailed to the cross four times, with a javelin in his side.

I suspect people keep crosses around for these and other reasons in Latin countries. Those societies have become secular, as ours, but the artifact has a cultural resonance. This is what grand-mama hung over her bed.

I have no cultural ties to crosses, or to Buddhas. All iconography in my home is borrowed. Mine is an American altar.
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