In Brief
In Brief
Saturday, March 18, 2006; Page B09
Teen 'Little Buddha' Is Missing in Nepal
A teenage "Little Buddha" who had been meditating and fasting for 10 months in a forested area of Nepal is missing, with no clear clues pointing to his whereabouts.
Police and residents of the southern district of Bara have been searching for the 15-year-old boy, Ram Bahadur Banjan, who was last seen March 11.
  Ram Bahadur Banjan had been meditating and fasting for 10 months in Nepal. (By Gopal Chitrakar -- Reuters) |
Since May, thousands of people had gone to see the boy in his forest abode because they thought he was the reincarnation of Nepal's Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha.
Makeshift shops had been set up to cater to the visitors, who had come from Nepal and neighboring India.
Visitors were permitted to view Banjan between dawn and dusk from a cordoned area about 80 feet away.
The area is known to have substantial numbers of communist rebels, who have been fighting government troops for a decade, and some people fear that he may have been kidnapped.
But police officials have discounted the possibility of an abduction by the rebels or by local criminals. They said that Banjan might have just wandered off.
-- Religion News Service
'Pray-as-You-Go' Web Site Gets Off to a Fast Start
A Roman Catholic order in Britain has launched a "pray-as-you-go" Web site aimed at putting stressed-out commuters and other travelers in touch with God via their iPods and cell phones.
Since Ash Wednesday, British Jesuits have been offering daily prayer services, spiritual music and Bible readings that can be downloaded from their Web site ( http:/
On Ash Wednesday alone, some 3,300 prayer sessions -- each lasting about 10 to 12 minutes -- were downloaded in countries as far away as the United States and Australia. By mid-March, the total stood at more than 33,000 sessions and was climbing.
