{"id":6715,"date":"2008-03-26T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2008\/03\/26\/praying-dog-boosts-attendance-at-japanese-temple\/"},"modified":"2008-03-26T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-26T12:00:00","slug":"praying-dog-boosts-attendance-at-japanese-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2008\/03\/26\/praying-dog-boosts-attendance-at-japanese-temple\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Praying&#8221; Dog Boosts Attendance at Japanese temple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"source\"><a HREF=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/asia-pacific\/7310993.stm\">news.bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"summary\">OKINAWA, JAPAN, March 23, 2008: Attendance at a Buddhist temple in Japan has increased since the temple&#8217;s pet, a two-year-old dog, has joined in the daily prayers. Conan, a Chihuahua, sits on his hind legs, raises his paws and puts them together at the tip of his nose. &#8220;He may be showing his thanks for treats and walks,&#8221; says a priest at Jigenin temple on Okinawa island. Priest Joei Yoshikuni would like Conan to meditate, but &#8220;it&#8217;s not like we can make him cross his legs&#8221;, he says. &#8220;Basically, I am just trying to get him to sit still while I meditate,&#8221; he told Associated Press news agency. Mr Yoshikuni said it only took Conan a few days to imitate the motions of praying. &#8220;I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it too,&#8221; he said. Jigenin temple now gets 30% more visitors than it did before Conan joined in the prayers, Mr Yoshikuni said.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>news.bbc.co.uk OKINAWA, JAPAN, March 23, 2008: Attendance at a Buddhist temple in Japan has increased since the temple&#8217;s pet, a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}