[Buddha-l] Dana

[curt]

Just this Sunday I went to the local Kali Temple to celebrate Durga 
Puja. My knowledge of Hinduism/Vedanta/whatever is almost completely 
theoretical - and I wanted to see what it looked like "in action". I 
knew that "Durga Puja" was a major event - but I wasn't quite ready for 
what I encountered - hundreds of people crammed into a big room all 
sitting on the floor with a Priest chanting into a microphone and people 
blowing conch shells and beating on drums and banging on gongs - and at 
regular intervals the Priest would start ringing a bell and chanting 
even louder. At one point a person started walking through the crowd 
with a hand scrawled sign - when he got close enough for me to make it 
out it said "Red Nissan - Georgia Plates" - the crowd was so large that 
many people had double parked - blocking other people in! All during the 
two-hour puja people were coming in and going out - and there were at 
least 100 people milling around outside the Temple room proper - waiting 
for the food (bhog) that would follow the Puja proper. Oh - and the 
whole time there were half a dozen or so people up on the main altar 
moving around, lighting candles and incense and lamps and placing and 
arranging and rearranging flowers and fruit and other offerings. I found 
it very moving that in midst of all this, here and there there were 
ordinary people bowing reverently to Durga and Kali and Shiva - not most 
people - not even a fifth of them - but enough so that you could see a 
kind of heartfelt, spontaneous "religiosity" that was totally immediate 
and voluntary. People were completely free to choose "how religious" 
they wanted to be - and most people seemed to opt for a kind of minimum 
(many people were talking through the whole ceremony - some on cells 
phones), but that only emphasized the genuineness of those who chose to 
go a little (or a lot) further in their overt expression.

I will probably be adding the "Kali DC" Temple to my list of good causes 
to support in the near future (of course I made a little donation for 
the Puja while I was there - and I also got my car blocked in!)

- Curt

Richard P. Hayes wrote:

>In the past the bulk of my daana was given to Buddhist organizations,
>but nowadays we prefer the Vedanta Society and the Unitarian-
>Universalist Association, because both of them seem to us (my wife and
>I) to be promoting our values better than anyone else is doing these
>days.
>  
>