Singapore

We spent a week in Singapore after our India adventure.

Chinatown market

I really enjoy crowded marketplaces–the more crowded, the better. There’s always so much new to see and smell and taste. Plus, being 6’3″, I generally have a birds-eye view and can still breathe and locate other people I’m with.

Preperations for Chinese new year were well under-way (actual New Years is in a week), which contributed heavily to the crowdedness and expanse of the marketplace.

Sri Mariamman Temple

We visted a Singaporean Hindu temple. The unique thing about this specific temple is that it was populated by Hindu “village gods”–gods that are generally maintained and prayed to by the local farmers/merchants of a small village community as opposed to an official brahmin priest. The village gods have slightly different names and portrayals as the more well-known Temple gods starring in the same mythology and stories.

There’s a similarity to the Christian protestant versus catholic divide in village god worship (being available to the peasants, very personal and accessible) versus temple god worship (controlled by the priestly class, living solely in temples). Protestantism is the idea that the bible should be read by and accessible to everyone, rather than just the priest/father giving the sermon, as decreed by old-school Catholicism.

Because everyone in Singapore is an immigrant at some level, when the Hindus came to the country they were granted space (as all religious singapores) to practice their religion. This space ended up being a temple, naturally, as there’s no room for small, sparse villages on the Singaporean island. So this temple is the only place (within my knowledge) that these village gods are worshipped in a temple setting.

Broken Tooth Relic Temple

The interesting thing about this temple is contained within its name. It contains a relic, a tooth, which supposedly belonged to the original Buddha Gautama. People come and pray to it.

The main philosophical divide (or at least, one of the main philosophical distinctions) in Buddhism is between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism is more in line with what’s commonly thought of as Buddhism: Ascetiscism, long hours of sitting meditiation, orange-red robes, and so on. It’s in some ways the more classic and traditional form.

Mahayana buddhism acknowledges that everyone can’t (or won’t or don’t) really take the time to retreat for years and meditate in the woods, or on top of a mountain somewhere. It tries to make the Buddhist philosophy more accessible to the average individual. As such, it tends more towards temple prayer, holy relics, and primarily the idea that enlightened individuals called Boddhisatvas have postponed their unificiation in Nirvana in order to help you, the average individual, come closer to enlightenment. They’re the Buddhist equivalent of the Christian Saints, as far as I can tell.

The Broken Tooth Relic Temple is an example of a Mahayana Buddhist place of worship.