Being Buddhist For A Day
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Today is Poya. A full moon day. Poya is a public holiday in Sri Lanka and you can do nothing, but you’re supposed to do a very specific sort of nothing. For a day at least, Buddhists are supposed to try and be Buddhist. So I’ve been trying.
Going To Temple
The Buddha’s path is clearly a monastic path, going from home to homelessness. Most people are putting that off for another life, including myself. On Poya, however, lay people live like a monk for a day at least, keeping the ten (or eight) precepts, which we’ll discuss later. The first thing is to get to where the precepts are kept, the ‘village’ temple.
Thus first thing is to get my recalcitrant children out of the house. They actually like going to temple, but they don’t like going to temple. They whinge the whole way, even though we’re only going like 500 meters. Everyone’s supposed to wear white but I’m happy to just get them out of the house without anyone seeing red. Before we go, we gather flowers to give the Buddha, to remind ourselves of impermanence. We gather the pink araliya flowers that fall next door, and some blue flowers that grow over the well, and the white flowers that aren’t jasmine…
