Deep sounds, deep thoughts
The most important of Dharma Drum Mountain’s Lunar New Year activities has to be considered the New Year’s Eve bell ringing ceremony at the organization’s World Center for Buddhist Education; the event is now entering its eighth year.
The Center’s ghanta (temple bell) is called the “Lotus Bell,” because the Lotus Sutra, one of the most important of Buddhist texts, is cast in relief on the bronze bell, as is the Great Compassion Mantra (more than 70,000 Chinese characters in all!). This impressive ghanta has a weight of 25 metric tons and height of 4.5 meters, and it requires four to six people to swing the striker. Each strike produces a deep, rich tone that reverberates for one and three quarter minutes, extending through space and time like an echo across a valley, symbolizing Dharma Drum Mountain’s mission to spread Buddhist philosophy and doctrine.
Master Sheng Yen said, “To hear one ring of the Lotus Bell is equivalent to one reading of the Lotus Sutra.” On New Year’s Eve the ghanta is struck 108 times, each stroke representing one of the 108 worldly desires (sometimes called “defilements” or “impure thoughts”) that cause people to suffer spiritual confusion. Each sounding of the bell—whose tone is solemn, reassuring, and calming—symbolizes the uprooting of one of these inner vexations, and the displacement of the old to pave the way for the new. What a joyous way to ring in the New Year!
For this year’s event, the organization has also specially made wooden hanging ornaments in the shape of the Lotus Bell Tower, inscribed with auspicious four-character idioms for the New Year, so visitors can depart with a physical reminder of their shared spiritual experience.
For the whole period of the Lunar New Year, beginning right from the first day of the first month on the lunar calendar, Dharma Drum Mountain will hold lectures on Buddhist philosophy, lantern lighting events, or offerings to the Buddha, at their various temples, monasteries, and Buddhist studies venues all around Taiwan. At overseas locations, such as the Chan Meditation Center in New York, they will likewise organize lectures by Buddhist masters and other Lunar New Year activities of a spiritual nature.
Regardless of whether you observe January 1 or the first day of the lunar year as the start of another trip around the sun for our planet, what matters is that the old is passing to make way for the new.
The extended Lunar New Year holiday in Taiwan is a transitional period between old and new. After another busy year, you get a little breathing space and the chance to get yourself reorganized and refocused. Even more importantly, you get the chance to do an accounting of the past year, and to reflect on what has gone right and what has gone wrong for you, in life and in work, over that time.
It seems like in the past few years more and more people have been choosing to attend tranquil, reflective New Year’s activities like those organized by Dharma Drum Mountain. Even if you plan to “party hardy” during the holiday, there would be no harm in taking a few hours to visit a temple or monastery. There is every likelihood that you will come away with a special feeling that not only are you laying the spiritual foundations for a new year, you are also laying the spiritual foundations for a new you.
Seventeen hundred people attended the 2014 Buddhist assembly at the Dharma Drum Mountain Nung Chan Monastery, passing New Year’s Eve in an atmosphere of gratitude and tranquility. The assembly included chanting, paying respects to the Buddha, and a ritualistic “circuit” by a statue representing the Buddha.