New Year ’s Eve welcoming Monkey Year

When December comes, everybody acknowledges that the old year has passed, and we are all welcoming a new year to come with many new things, success, and development. Final days of the old year also passed lightly, but it also made people busy in those days to prepare for first days of a new year. In spite of acknowledging that the time is just a conventional concept, people still think that a new year is an important milestone in everybody’s life.

In mind of every Vietnamese, a new year also means a sacred beginning marked by the moment of New Year’s Eve – a transition between the old and new things.

 

As usual, thousands of people from everywhere came to Hoang Phap Pagoda to attend the New Year’s Eve Ceremony to welcome the Year of the Monkey – 2016.

The old year passed, the new year has come; at the moment of sacred New Year Eve’s Ceremony, the people along with monks sat around in a warm atmosphere to review the old things and wish for best things in a new year for themselves, family and society.

 

And then, at the transitional moment and the beginning of a new year, in accordance with tradition of respecting Dharma and honoring monks, on behalf of disciples who leaving home and at home, Junior Venerable Thich Tam Dao respectfully presented to the Junior Venerable Master best wishes for long living at the beginning of spring and respectfully asked the Monk to talk about some Dharma to disciples. On occasion of the spring of the Monkey Year, the Monk sincerely prayed Three Treasures to bless all the monks having peace and impermanence in body and mind, completion in Buddha affairs, and to bless all Buddhists and their family peace and happiness. To stimulate all people in cultivating in the new year, the Monk had some pieces of advice right in the sacred moment of transiting between the old year and the new year.

 Significant points of cultivation were repeated. Cultivating is for correction; correction is for improvement. We should acknowledge that practicing Buddha’s teachings is not too difficult, but it is simple right in our life. With the guideline: “Listen to understand, review to see, recognize wrong things to correct them,” it will help us have significant improvements and firm movements in our way of cultivation. Everybody also has some mistakes in life. Regardless of being more orless, important or trivial, the essential thing is that we have to make a correction, renew ourselves to be better. It is the truly cultivation.

 

Besides, with sutras, stories in the sutra Samyutta Nikaya, the Monk also showed a very practical philosophy in cultivation through four types of people taught by the Buddha. Those are: people from the dark to the other dark, people from the dark to the light, people from the light to the dark, and people from the light to the other light. It can be inferred that every happiness or misery is decided by ourselves in our life. If we change ourselves to try our best in order to be better, we can get good achievements. In contrast, that awry things will happen is unavoidable. As we can see, with good thoughts and actions, we will have days, months, years, and whole life in peace and happiness without praying in elsewhere.

 

The next part in the New Year’s Eve, little singers Cong Quoc and Nha Thy offered to Monks and Buddhists some songs to welcome the new spring.

 

In the endless delight of first minutes of the new year, all of good men and believing women took turn to receive lucky money from the Abbot Senior Venerable and the Monks in the Pagoda.

 

Below are taken pictures: