Buddha's Day and Multicultural Festival incorporates the traditions of Buddhist ceremonies and celebrations including the "Bathing of the Buddha", daily Dharma ceremonies, the Wishing Bell and traditional incense offerings, a vegetarian culinary tour of Asia alongside the Yarra on the River Terrace, cultural demonstrations and insights, music, art and craft and community service groups.
Extract from http://www.buddhaday.org.au/
While taking a break from my duties, I decided to walk around taking some shots via my mobile phone's camera (forgot to bring my camera). Here I saw lines of queues of people wanting to bath the Buddha. I decided to take some shots and also close ups.
Close up on Buddha statue. Unfortunately we didn't take part in the queue.
Got caught up by the look of the vibrant colours, and managed to capture some rays of sunlight shinning down onto the Buddha statue. There's plenty of vegetarian cuisine food stalls down at side of Yarra river but we didn't take any snaps of it. Did try out some of the food ... Not too bad.
We have various activities and talks in the BMW auditorium hall as well. But I only managed to sit in for this CH'AN tea ceremony. We were taught on meditation and teacher also shared some Buddhism teachings on living life. One teaching I find it really useful is telling people not to spend too much time and energy worrying on things that didn't happen and start living and enjoying the present. At the end of the ceremony we tasted some tea (although I am more of coffee drinker). The tea leaves actually comes from Taiwan Alishan mountain.
Lastly we have Lion dance performed by our temple volunteers as well. Overall it was really an enjoyable day. Sometimes we think to ourselves, we are blessed to be able to volunteer ourselves for such meaningful event and to enjoy every moment of it.
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