Birthdays and Back to School for the Buddha

It's been a busy time over here at the West Wight Sangha. On Sunday we celebrated Wesak, the commemoration of the Buddha’s birth, awakening and final passing into Parinirvana, all of which are considered to have occurred on first full moons of May. This interpretation is specific to Theravada Buddhism but has been adopted as the date for the official U.N. holiday of Wesak worldwide.

On Tuesday Dave Downer from the Newport Soto Zen group and I went to one of our local primary schools, St Saviour’s, to do a presentation on Buddhism as part of their World Faith Week at the invitation of year 4/5 teacher Kate Bakewell.

 
We spent some time on practising some basic meditation which the children seemed to thoroughly enjoy, half of them adopting a full lotus position without any prompting!

 I had also learnt from my visit to Gurnard Primary school back in February how popular ringing the various gongs and bells that we had taken was, so we made more time for this activity on this visit.

Tayler: “I liked the sound of the singing bells and I thought that I wanted to listen to it forever.”