Buddhism – Kuala Clare

Gong xi fa cai! Happy New Year, little piggies*!

*May not be an exact translation.

This was my first time celebrating Chinese New Year (CNY) anywhere, so I’ll cover the basics for any other first timers. Firstly, it is based on the lunar calendar so the dates change every year. This year it started on Tuesday 5th February and ended on 19th February. So, definitely not in December which is when we decorated our Christmas tree in CNY dragons and piggies. Hehehe..

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Secondly, each year is based on the Chinese zodiac, and this time it’s the year of the pig! This leads me onto an interesting fact about CNY in Malaysia.

Malaysia is a very multi-cultural society, but is still predominantly Muslim. One of the things that I’ve learned about Muslim culture is that pigs, or at least pork, is haram i.e. forbidden by Islamic law. This means that while the large Chinese population here bloody love pork and all things pig-related, the larger Malay Muslim population hate it. So in Malaysia, the year of the pig is not celebrated with images of the pig everywhere as it would be elsewhere, as this would be offensive to the Malay people. You can buy adorable little piggie accessories and you’ll see them in the Chinese shops and temples, but not in public places, which are decorated with lots of more generic (and lovely) CNY red decorations, flowers and displays of other important figures, like the god of prosperity. He looks quite fat and happy so I like him a lot.

Thean Hou CNY5

This is Thean Hou temple, one of my favourite places in KL. It has six tiers and is apparently one of the oldest and largest temples in Southeast Asia (sidenote: I feel like a lot of temples claim this fact, but it still may be true). Like most Chinese temples, it celebrates a mixture of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. I love the fact that it’s ok to mix these ideologies in one place, and I’ve heard people who describe themselves as Buddhists here say that it is not necessarily a religion but a way of life that anyone can choose to live by, alongside anything else you might believe in. The Chinese temples in Malaysia are such beautiful, welcoming places and this one perched on a hill over the city has to be one of the best.

The first time we visited Thean Hou was when we first arrived in KL, and it was decorated with yellow lanterns at that time. Just for some daytime pics and a comparison to CNY, here it is in September:

This time, for CNY, it was decorated with red lanterns, the colour of luck and happiness. Isn’t it just gorgeous?

One lovely tradition here over CNY is the “open house”. I actually can’t work out if this is common everywhere that celebrates it, or if it’s specific to the Malaysian Chinese. But what happens is that some Chinese families open their doors for family, friends and strangers to come in and share in their food, drink and revelry to celebrate the new year. We were lucky enough to be invited by someone we know to celebrate with his family.

The traditional gifts to give at CNY are angpao, little red envelopes with cash inside, and mandarin oranges. We also thought it would be cute to bring something from “home” to our hosts, but that’s hard to arrange last minute in KL, so I hope they enjoyed their unbranded Scottish shortbread with their tea (neither of us are Scottish, but close enough).

Apparently Malaysia has the best dragon and lion dance teams in the world, so I’m sorry that we only got to see one performance, but it was amazing! Overall, Chinese New Year has been a gorgeous, happy celebration in KL and it reminded me that it’s such a treat to live in this multicultural place.

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February 27, 2019February 27, 2019 by kualaclare Categories: Buddhism, Buddhist temple, Chinese, Chinese New Year, Kuala Lumpur, Language, Malaysia, Mandarin language, Thean Hou Temple, Year of the Pig Leave a comment

The Borobudur temple is one of the main reasons people go to Yogyakarta. It’s a Buddhist temple about an hour outside the city. Actually it’s the biggest Buddhist temple in the world, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Having an accolade like that, it surprised me that I hadn’t really been aware of it before, and we often mispronounced the name (we misprounounce a lot of things, recently telling a taxi driver in Lombok, an island about 500 miles away, that our address on the hill was Borobudur). This was the outsider’s unenlightened ignorance, and we all know the best place to become enlightened about anything is a Buddhist temple.

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But I now realise that the temple’s image is often used to promote Indonesia and Java in particular. It’s on the front cover of our Indonesia guidebook, for example, and once in Jogja, it’s clear that going to Borobodur is the thing to do. The most commonly promoted way to see it is with a one day tour along with Prambanan (the Hindu temple where we saw the traditional ballet), which doesn’t make a lot of sense because they aren’t connected in any way and are in different directions once you leave the city. It seemed like it would be a long day, we haven’t had good experiences with organised tours before, and I didn’t want to risk cultural fatigue. Nobody wants to be that idiot who turns up to the world’s largest Buddhist temple and thinks, “yeah, fine, it’s another temple, I’ve seen like 10 of these today”. I don’t really think that is possible now, having been there, but I still prefer to spread things out.

Whether you do it on its own or with Prambanan and other temples, the recurring theme with Borobodur is SUNRISE. Sunrise tours are highly reviewed online, tour companies and locals encourage people to get up early and see the sunrise there. I have no doubt that it’s beautiful at that time, but for various reasons, I decided we’d go for sunset instead.

The practical reason was that Joe is working on this trip, and needs to be doing [insert whatever it is that Joe does] by 7am in this particular timezone. So getting to Borobudur for sunrise and back in time wasn’t really an option, unless we waited until the weekend, and as you’ll know from my last post, we had loads of other stuff to do at the weekend. Like launching my pottery career. I also like to be asleep very early in the morning, and love the golden hour of sunset almost anywhere in the world.

Based on its popularity, I was pretty sure the temple would be swarming with tourists and photographers early in the morning, which is fine, but not conducive to an enlightened, peaceful experience (or the best photographs). I can also tell you something else that isn’t conducive to an enlightened, peaceful experience: being stuck in traffic on your way to Borobudur with the sun quickly setting, thinking you’ve ruined the whole trip by not just doing what EVERYONE told you to do, and going for sunrise.

But guess what? I didn’t ruin it! We made it before sunset and it was absolutely bloody beautiful.

It’s massive, impressive, imposing, peaceful and eerie all at once. There were a few people there with us, no more than 8, and they seemed to be professional photographers. Borobudur has 9 levels and is quite steep to climb, but there are about 500 Buddhas around to encourage you to keep going. Mostly they are inside the bell-shaped domes, although some of them have been opened up or broken, and you can see their calm sweet faces. I read that it was built around the 8th or 9th century, but spent hundreds of years hidden under volcanic ash and jungle after it was abandoned (presumably due to the volcanic eruption) and I kept imaging how it must have felt to be one of the people who rediscovered it all those years later. It’s an amazing thing to see, even when you know it’s there.

I think my photographs of the temple could be on the cover of a guidebook. I’m obsessed with them. This might sound arrogant, and I just took them on my phone, but I can imagine many people having a similar experience, looking back at their own pictures of Borobudur and thinking THAT LOOKS AMAZING. It’s not that I think I’m an excellent photographer, it’s just that this is one hell of a photogenic temple.