Comments by "K `" (@user-jt3dw6vv4x) on "Vesak: The Most Important Buddhist Holiday?" video.

  1. Yah if it became Christianised, its pre-colonial heritage may have been wiped out to such an extreme extent like we see in the Philippines today, where a lot of Filipino people are unaware of how much cultural similarities they shared with the rest of Southeast Asia and South Asia.
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  2. Vesak is actually a really old holiday, it was celebrated in China as early as 300 CE and in various other Asian countries but with different names. It's just the various celebrations that occurred across Asia during the fourth lunar month (East Asia) and second lunar month (South and Southeast Asia) were sort of unified in this recognisable pan-Buddhist holiday as a result of what happened in colonial Sri Lanka.
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  3. 🙏🙏🙏🙏
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  4. No, Vesak has always existed. The festival was always celebrated since the ancient days. People in China were celebrating the Buddha's birthday since at least 300 CE during the fourth lunar month and there are Japanese woodblock paintings of women celebrating Vesak in Japan by bathing the Buddha statue. The festival as practiced across Asia was simply rebranded and unified in a way during the colonial era. You can still see despite the unification that the cultural differences between each celebration across Asia can differ. East Asians (exclude Tibetans and Mongols) still only celebrate the Buddha's birthday, whereas South and Southeast Asians + Tibetans and Mongols celebrate the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha.
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  5.  @lshulman58  Yeah it's just a coincidence. The Vesak festival has been celebrated across Asia for thousands of years, it's a very old festival but it was known by different names depending on the culture. In China it was celebrated as early as 300 CE and is still known as Fodan and in Japan, it's still known as Hanamatsuri (Flower Festival). In India, the festival is still known as Buddha Jayanti. It's only in some South and Southeast Asian countries that it's known as Vesak or Wesak or Visakha or Vixakha as it's named after the second lunar month on the Buddhist calendar which is also known as Vaisakha.
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  6. Who asked?
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  7. If you don't mind me asking, what country do you live in? Are you from Italy?
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  8. That's what happens in Australia. Federation Square in the Melbourne CBD becomes host for the Buddha's Birthday and Multicultural Festival. It's basically a huge Buddhist and pan-Asian festival that attracts Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Your Zen Centre seems to have been more of just a centre rather than anything else. You should visit a Buddhist temple or a monastery, doesn't matter if East Asian or South/Southeast Asian as you will see all types of people there celebrating Vesak.
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  9. That's nice to hear, yeah those are very large floating lanterns. People also float small lotus lanterns on the water.
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  10. Vaisakhi has nothing to do with Vesak actually. It's completely unrelated and they're not celebrated on the same day. They just both have similar names because they're both named after the Indian lunar month of Vaisakha. Vesak as practiced in India is not called Vesak, it's called Buddha Jayanti, while the festival in various other parts of South and Southeast Asia like Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia are named after the second lunar month of Vaisakha on the Buddhist calendar.
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  11. No. Vesak is completely unrelated to Vaisakhi. They just have similar names because their names both derive from the Indian lunar month of Vaisakha. Buddhism itself emerged long before Sikhism did and the calendrical system of the Buddhist lunar calendar is based on the Hindu one. So the name "Vesak" was coined as a result of the month of Vaisakha, which is the month the holiday is celebrated. Also, Vesak and Vaisakhi are not celebrated on the same day. Per the Gregorian calendar, Vesak is celebrated somewhere in mid-May whilst Vaisakhi is celebrated on April 14 and lines up with the other South and Southeast Asian New Year festivals which are not correlated to religion.
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  12.  @sahilsingh6048  The Buddhist calendar is not the Vikram Smvat calendar, that's what they're saying.
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