That passage may sound strange to those who have never left the US, but when I lived in Nepal, it was an everyday thing. We saw statues of those gods all over, and we even knew the names of some of them. One god we saw was huge! He was twenty feet or more long and covered with colorful powders. He must have been powerful! You could buy those powders near the reclining statue and dump them on him out of reverence. When we visited China and Japan, we saw huge statues of fat Buddhas in many places and believers were putting coins in a basin in front of them. Some were spinning prayer wheels.
