Saturday, April 7, 2012

Buddha's Birthday

As long as the sun is shining, as it did today, with none of the chilly north winds that have blown in this past week, Buddha's Birthday is a colourful and fun affair. It's still hard to impress on the assembly that the essential part of circumambulation is the ambulating part, and it took a few of us acting as traffic cops to keep people moving up and down the stairs in the park, but the chanting was strong, and I think everyone got to pour sweet tea over the baby Buddha as we went around. This year we put the altar at the garden gate, where it had been in years gone by, and it looked great, as did the flower house. Easy pickings for a photographer, and I expect to see some shots on Facebook soon as well - Kate showed me the pictures she had taken at lunchtime, but also said she was going to the beach as it was such a nice day...



Rosalie was the doshi today.

Baby Buddha is in the shade under the flower house.

There is some circumambulation going on here.

No-one seemed to be in a hurry to go back to Zen Center

7 comments:

Shonen said...

Beautiful, just beautiful - the flower house is stunning.

Kudos to everyone who clearly worked hard on all the preparations. Looks like it was a labor of love.

Shundo said...

Hopefully it always is, Shonen

Konin said...

It all looks even more beautiful than I remember it, thanks to these gorgeous photos!

Konin said...

And yes Shogen it was a joy, at least the part I helped with.

Shundo said...

This reinforces my belief that photography is just picking and choosing...

Sandy's witterings said...

Looks like a great day and the sun certainly seems to have helped - perhaps in San Francisco you can usually expect the suns assistance.

These pictures are added to by the preparations in the previous blog - seems like the party started long before the party started. Thanks for pointing out the extra pictures on Facebook.

Shundo said...

Hi Sandy, well it's raining as I type this - we are not quite out of the wet season yet. But Saturday was a lovely day, and I think people had fun putting it all together.
I'm glad Kate got some pictures up on Facebook eventually, and I would also highly recommend Robin's pictures, which you can get to from the comments on the previous post.