Ritual

Today I visited the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple where Buddhist devotees offer up their prayers. In addition to lighting incense, bowing in many directions and offering up prayer to the Goddess Kuan Yin, the Buddhists also partake in reading their own fortunes. This ritual involves shaking a containing with bamboo sticks till one falls out and cham si is released, spelling the message of their fate.

I spent some time watching the Buddhists shake their cham si trying to understand exactly what was going on. Should you pray first and shake second? Did it matter how many times you shook the container? What if more then one stick fell out? Could you shake repeatedly and receive many fortunes? And what exactly are the red wooden petals for that they throw after a fortune is released? But at some point I stopped being so concerned with the hows and the whys of it all and I just watched.

I watched the woman who seemed to shake the container far many more times then she prayed. I watched the man who swirled the sticks before each round of shaking. I watched the woman who never read a single fortune that fell from her container - not a single one. What I realized through all this watching was that ritual had nothing at all to do with what you did or even how you went about it, the only thing that all these people held in common was that they believed so whole-heartedly in what they were doing that their actions became them. They were the offering. All those flowers, incense sticks and cham si were just ways to express what was already within.

If you'd like to see photos from my day, check out the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=92699&id=1068837131&l=ecb9d00440