One yoke or two?

This was the question Margaret pondered recently as she prepared to celebrate the 2010 Mid-Autumn Festival (a.k.a. Harvest Moon Festival, Lantern Festival, Mooncake Festival), which culminates tonight. Tradition calls for white lotus seed paste, and you can get them with one salted duck egg yoke or two. Sure, you can have chocolate and orange, but why when you can have jujube paste or chicken floss? Margaret played it down the middle with red bean paste and purple sweet potato, no egg yoke. Actually, not bad. 

And, yes, there are lanterns: 



Clarke Quay













Clarke Quay







Chinatown









Chinatown

 

Mooncake photo courtesy of visualdensity.

We're finally moved into our new digs. We live next door to the Singapore Buddhist Lodge. This is the view from what the building's developer calls "the yard," but which is actually a tiny porch outside the kitchen door that houses our "washer cum dryer." This picture doesn't do justice to the size of the lodge's health, welfare and educational operation, in addition to spiritual guidance. The monks chant, clang and drum every few of hours day and night, though they tone it down considerably between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Some of the chants are pretty catchy. Here's a link to their website, though something seems to get lost in the auto-translation from Chinese to English. Here's a snippet from the section titled Broad Types of Fukada:

Seeds of blessings as we limited seed, seed to the fields, but get more and more benefits, so people do not want to kind of blessing Fu Peifu, Blessed Jane blessing to cherish, to make Ford more and more and finally reached a satisfactory level of Fukuchi, is the Buddha. Hope you can use this wisdom to develop their own blessings, and with good fortune to develop their own wisdom.

Below is a picture of a paper-burning ceremony we witnessed from our bedroom window one night. From my cursory Google search of all things Buddha, it may have been a ritual to honor dead relatives.

Look for more random blessings of wisdom from Singapore and yonder lands in the coming weeks and months.