by BISHOP KOSHIN OGUI
Buddhist Churches of America

My fresh start began at a town called Oxnard in California. It was April 1, 1965 and I was 25 years old.

Oxnard was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Los Angeles and a bit over an hour from Santa Barbara. It was a town surrounded by farms, right in the middle of flower plantations on Highway 101 along the West Coast. If you drove six blocks from the heart of town, you would end up right in the middle of farmland. It was like that in all directions.

The Oxnard Buddhist Church was in a place about four blocks east from the center of town. It was built at the dead end of a street lined on both sides with Mexican bars, shops, and restaurants. It was a simple barracks-like structure with a gymnasium acting as the main hall. It had a 60-car parking lot that wasn’t paved. When you drove through it, dust and sand kicked up.

The living quarters of the minister were linked to the main hall. There were two worn sofas in the living room. Outside the windows of the two bedrooms, you could see train tracks, and the house shook when the trains rushed past.

When I arrived at the main hall, I found a statue of the Amitabha, who greeted me silently with a smile. A large group of ladies from the Fujinkai were also there, and they greeted me with smiles too. They handed me fresh towels and sheets and told me that there would be a welcome party three days from now. Then they left.

It was a somewhat shabby building but I felt everyone’s warmth with the flowers in the living room and the clean sheets. I was content enough.

I thought about the history of the place, which, at the time, had been around for 36 years. It had stood through all the hard times before, during, and after World War II. It had endured through times of racial discrimination.

I was humbled when I thought about it. The Japanese people who built it had been living in poverty but they worked as a group and scraped the money together to buy the land and build the the buildings. I was humbled by the passion and the guts of the Issei who had built the place.

It was a fitting place for the fresh start of a 25-year-old. The kindheartedness of those people and the strength of those Issei stayed in my heart. To this day, these are still an integral part of my life.

Gassho

Translated by Lefteris Kafatos