Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA
Vesak:
We celebrated Vesak yesterday, the Buddha's birthday. As I mentioned, I had no idea what to expect and decided to participate in all scheduled activities. Also to train myself not to just go do my own thing when something is scheduled that I don't want to do. I won't necessarily be able to do that if I become a monk. But there wasn't much to it. As one monk later commented about it, "It's a cute little ceremony".

Indeed, a cute little ceremony that involved not a negligible amount of preparation and monastics donning their formal sangati robes. After a Dharma Talk in the Meditation Barn, we walked up to the Solidity Hamlet garden that was prepared for the ceremony. The monastics chanted for a while, and then the main part of the ceremony was people walking up on a bridge constructed over the pond, and pouring flowered water over a baby doll Buddha, set up on plastic lotus-looking leaves. First, the Venerable (the resident teacher) went, followed by the abbess of the nun's hamlet. Then some children went up, and then the monks and nuns went in pairs, all the while with very nice chanting in the background. After the monastics, lay people lined up to pour water on the plastic doll baby Buddha.

Note the "cool" nun:


Nuns pouring water on the plastic doll baby Buddha (hey look, there's the "cool" nun again (I think she needs to wear the shades for medical reasons)):


I wasn't sure what to think of using a plastic doll for the baby Buddha. Apparently, baby Buddha statues are available for purchase. I believe the doll actually purchased was a potty-training doll, and came with plastic toilet and all ("all"?). However, it was with horror that I learned that the first place a brother went to get the doll was evil Walmart. Groan. Oh, but that's not the end of it. He ended up not getting the doll at Walmart. Why? Because all the baby dolls in Walmart were black!! The Western brothers I've talked to about it had basically the same reaction, "what's wrong with having a black baby Buddha?". Next year they may insist on it. Not to be politically correct or anything, but we are a pretty progressive organization, and there is nothing wrong with having a black baby Buddha. There is something wrong with avoiding having a black baby Buddha. But to lighten things up, the roommate of the Vietnamese monk who didn't buy the black baby Buddha is African American (speaks fluent Vietnamese, too), and his deadpan reaction was, "My roommate is a bigot".

But, no, we aren't being politically correct. No lectures on cultural sensitivity will be given to the Vietnamese monks. That monk was delegated the task to get a doll to be the baby Buddha, and he did what he did, and no one is going to dictate or lecture him on how he should have done it, he being a senior monk notwithstanding. But that's one of the strengths of this community.