Buddhist Culture & Arts Festival ( 6-10 June 2007)

We went to the Buddhist Culture & Arts Festival ( 6-10 June 2007) which was held at the Mines. It was pretty crowded on a Saturday.

It was a really interesting exhibition.

There was a pictoral trail that replicated the travels, in the 7th Century, of the monk, Xuanzang. His journey from China, through Central Asia, Pakistan and India were recorded in his book, "Western Pilgrimage". The popular fairy tale version is, of course, the "Journey to the West" featuring SunWuKung, the Great Monkey King. Walking along the pictoral trail, it showed presently destroyed states, cities and communities that, in the 7th century AD, were powerful countries, rich cities and vibrant communites. It was particlularly sad to see the photograph of the now empty grottoes of the Bamiyam Buddhas that Xuanzang had visited nearly 1300 years ago. The photographs seen in this pictoral trail were from an expediton that retraced Master Xuanzang's Western Pilgrimage. This photographic records of this modern journey were published in the book "Dust in the Wind". I could not resist it despite the hefty price tag of RM288!!

Walking around, the Tibetan section was of particular interest to me. Just take a look at this sand Mandala done by the Tibetan monks!

It was a very intricate and detailed work of devotional art .. one of the monk actually destroyed it at the end of the exhibition with a swipe of his hand to demonstrate how all the things in the universe were temporal; that all things were just fleeting illusions.

I loved the butter figurines made from what looked like pasticine but actually was a mix of butter and flour(?).

The close up image showed how the monks who made them paid close attention to the fine details ...

There were lots more things to see ...

However, I skipped all the Buddhist relics since I was not particularly keen on viewing pieces of bones :-)

There were dozen of vegetarian food stalls and we had a great time trying out all the goodies - all home-made by the members of the various Buddhist Associations or Fellowhips and sold to raise money for various charities.

We had to rush through the rest of the exhibition ....got too tired by then :-) but had a great time though.