Turning brokenness into beauty: Buddhists respond to anti-Asian violence

LOS ANGELES -- One by one, the Buddhist priests bowed before the altar at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, wearing robes of yellow, orange and black.

Accompanied by the chanting of the Heart Sutra in Korean, they dipped a paintbrush into a bowl of golden lacquer to gently fill in the cracks of a white ceramic lotus that had been handmade for the occasion.

The ritual, which took place last May, was drenched in meaning. The lotus flower represented the purity and potential of the Buddha's awakening. The repairing of the cracked ceramic lotus, a Japanese art known as kintsugi, was a symbol of the collective effort to heal the wounds of religious bigotry.

Here, just 49 days after including six women of Asian descent, was a symbolic