'Electric Buddha Boxes' from Shanghai

A few days ago, we linked to a BoingBoing post entitled "Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio." Well, Shanghai blogger Swiss James, who is, naturally, "an Englishman born in the year of the Horse," recently bought six of these plastic chanting contraptions and videotaped them for us all to see and hear (he used his close proximity to Jing'An Temple as an excuse).

He writes:

I think there’s something really appealing about these little gadgets and ended up buying six of them on Saturday afternoon- all of with look different and have different sounds. There seems to be a huge range of these little gadgets, every new shop I went into had a stack of them, all with their own sounds and designs. Some of them are small enough to hang around your neck- as modelled by the handsome chap below:

The most expensive one was I think 30 RMB (2 quid) and the cheapest was half of that- in the end I bought six of them, which might seem a little excessive but like the Buddhists say, you only live once!

He has taken to calling whichever one he's listening to at the time his "Third-eye Pod." He also points out that, "This is a very clever and amusing Buddhist pun."

Check out the video. We like the one that opens up and changes stripes, almost as much as we love our Buddhist Christmas Turn Lamp, which also chants.