02 August 2012

Lammas Day / Dharma Day

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I love calendars, and I know I repeat myself often here. Yet calendars are so fascinating. The northern hemisphere’s First-Harvest festivals used to be celebrated around August 1 or 2. The Anglo-Saxons called it Lammas Day, and the Celts called it something like Lughnasadh. Summer has ripened up in the temperate zones, and I do miss those radical changes of season.
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Lammas Day/Lughnasadh is directly opposite Imbolc (or Groundhog’s Day) in the yearly calendar, both of them being points hinting to major seasonal changes ahead. Lammas Day is halfway between the greening of Beltane/ May Day and the fall of greenery at Halloween – just as Groundhog Day is halfway between Halloween and May Day. Northern calendars are loaded with tradition.
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Here we are enjoying a relative cooling because of the cloud cover and monsoon rains, but it is still too hot to wear a shirt. Today is Dharma Day, a full moon celebration (usually in July but depending on the moon’s cycles) of the Buddha’s First Discourse and the start of his teaching. Tomorrow starts the annual Rains Retreat for monks and lasts until October full moon. This tradition of monks staying put in a home monastery during the monsoon rains goes back all the way to Buddha and to the earlier Hindu traditions before him. It only applies to southern, Theravada/ Hinayana, lands in the monsoon pathways.
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Although the moon is full, we won’t see much of it tonight because of the thick clouds.
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-Zenwind.
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