Accompany Me On My Journeys

9th May was celebrated with great vigor in Taiwan. You would think it was an auspicious religious occasion. Turns out Mothers Day for the Taiwanese is almost as good as one. People go back home to spend their day to meet their mother dear with bouquets and personalized gifts. I am not sure how long this tradition runs and I am very keen to find out if fathers day is celebrated with as much pomp. 

Besides mothers day yesterday was also God Buddha’s birthday. A Taiwan based organization Jing Si organized a Buddha bathing ceremony to celebrate the deity’s birthday. I got the opportunity to attend it and it was marvelous.

 It was held in an open green space, in Taichung. It was a very well organized event, with volunteers keeping people in rows and columns strictly and attending to the ones passing out due to the enormous crowd. Rows of people wearing the nurses uniform, or a traditional Chinese dress- signifying they were part of the “commissionary”, University students in light blue collared t-shirts with white pants, others in either grey or dark blue collared t-shirts with white pants were all assembled in a pattern with the like colours together. The ones with regular clothes were assembled behind. I wonder how awesome the scene would have been from a terrace. In the middle stood the master singing songs and prayers that were interpreted to me by a kind volunteer. She was intrigued that a foreignor was attending the ceremony and that too from Buddha’s birth land! According to her and the literature I read later Jing Si ‘s philosophy stresses on compassion, being humble, living for “the now” and cleansing your heart first in order to purify the world.  

Next to the master there were tables arranged on either side where ice Buddha statues enclosed in oval ice frames were placed on a slight pedestal with a vessels of water below and flowers places in front. At the end of the ceremony people were moving forward to take a token of a flower and touching some of the holy water and sprinkling some on themselves. Everything was so new for me and although I couldn’t understand what was being sung I felt peace wash over me. It was a surreal experience. 

What fascinated me was that the ceremony was organised in different locations at the same time taking the different time zones into consideration. It was taking place in three places in Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia among other countries. Through me the organisation is now hoping to make some inroads into India. The volunteer insisted on a TV cum print interview with some pictures. For all you know I could be on some Tai channel or magazine right now.