Essay On Buddhist Ceremony

785 Words2 Pages

Buddhist Ceremony

As I pulled into the parking lot of the Buddhist temple here in Sioux Falls, SD, I didn’t know what to expect. I sat in my car pulling up the courage to go inside because I had no idea what to expect. As I walked in to the Buddhist temple it was nothing to what I was used to. As being a Catholic as I walk in there’s not much to see other than a few paintings on the wall. Everything is put away nicely and there’s a ton of space. When I walked into the Buddhist temple there were Buddhists, cloths, and a whole bunch of flowers. There were so many flowers in such a small place that it looked like a flower shop and smelled like a flower shop. After I had walked around a little bit, I tried to find a place to sit. They
The first thing I noticed was when the Buddha came in everyone stood. Than he set a candle up in the middle of this thing that had a bunch of lights shinning on it. In the background there was a big Buddha. After the Buddha had put the candle in the holder he bowed to it three times and started to chant something in a different language. After the chat he read a passage and went back to chanting. Every so often a bell was hit. When the Buddha is chanting he is continuously bowing to the candle. The Buddha is continuously reading from different passages and than chanting after every passage. He did this continuously for the first half hour of the service. After that he proceeded to go into a talk. Kind of like a homily if your Catholic. Today he talked about Chinese characters because they are so interesting. The characters mean different things depending on how they are written and how they are placed. When he wrote the characters down he explained each character in depth and talked about each one and how it relates to our life. The way he taught
As I said before I didn’t know what to expect when I went into the temple. One thing I had never seen was the outfits that the Buddhists wore. I found them to be very interesting and simple. If I could have stayed I would have loved to know if they were different ones for different types of ceremonies or how often they do get to change them. There were many followers present when I went. Although I did go during a ceremony. At the beginning of the ceremony when the Buddhist was kneeling they also did too. There were also times where they were standing and had bowed at certain times. There was one thing I enjoyed more here than my own religion was when the Buddha had come to talk about the readings. He interacted with the followers instead of just lectured. It was nice to see some interaction. It was just different to not be able to understand the chants that they were saying. I could tell that they were in a different language, so if I was able to stay longer I would have asked what the chants had meant. I’m glad that I was given this assignment to be able to learn about another religion. Even though we had a chapter on Buddhism I don’t believe that you can learn everything from a book. There is more learning to be done when going to an actual ceremony or even asking someone about their religion and the values that are done

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