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Vesak is just over! It was just two weeks ago when Chong Lim asked me to go over to the Sri Lankan Buddhist temple in Assam Kumbang, Taiping to help put up some Buddhist flags. The Buddhist flag was originally designed in 1885 by the Colombo Committee, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The original flag was long and streaming and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, an American journalist and founder and first president of the Theosophical Society, felt that inconvenient and had it modified.It was this modified flag that Anagarika Dharmapala and Olcott presented to the Japanese Emperor in1889. Like most flags in the world, the colours in the flag have their meanings: Blue (Nila) stands for loving kindness, peace and universal compassion, yellow (Pita) stands for the Middle Path - avoiding extremes, emptiness, red (Lohita) means the blessings of practice - achievement, wisdom, virtue, fortune and dignity, white (Odata), the purity of Dharma - leading to liberation, outside of time or space and orange (Manjesta) refers to the Buddha's teachings - wisdom. The five colours of the flag are some of the colours that were said to have emanated from the body of the Buddha when he attained Enlightenment. Now, what would you probably do or think if you, in your sane mind, were to see a man meditating under a tree emanating coloured lights from his body?
Vesak is just over! It was just two weeks ago when Chong Lim asked me to go over to the Sri Lankan Buddhist temple in Assam Kumbang, Taiping to help put up some Buddhist flags. The Buddhist flag was originally designed in 1885 by the Colombo Committee, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The original flag was long and streaming and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, an American journalist and founder and first president of the Theosophical Society, felt that inconvenient and had it modified.It was this modified flag that Anagarika Dharmapala and Olcott presented to the Japanese Emperor in1889. Like most flags in the world, the colours in the flag have their meanings: Blue (Nila) stands for loving kindness, peace and universal compassion, yellow (Pita) stands for the Middle Path - avoiding extremes, emptiness, red (Lohita) means the blessings of practice - achievement, wisdom, virtue, fortune and dignity, white (Odata), the purity of Dharma - leading to liberation, outside of time or space and orange (Manjesta) refers to the Buddha's teachings - wisdom. The five colours of the flag are some of the colours that were said to have emanated from the body of the Buddha when he attained Enlightenment. Now, what would you probably do or think if you, in your sane mind, were to see a man meditating under a tree emanating coloured lights from his body?
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