Ceremony Notice

New Year Blessing Ceremony

Lunar

1st month, 1st day

Gregorian

Saturday, 6 February 2027

The first day of the first lunar month is Maitreya's Birthday, and on this day Han-tradition monasteries hold the New Year universal service — prostrations and vows, the merit dedicated to the year ahead. The temple holds its New Year Blessing Ceremony accordingly, receiving blessing tablets for living family; the resident community recites and dedicates the merit during the ceremony, that every household be at peace and grow in merit and wisdom. This ceremony is for the living; no memorial tablets are taken.

The New Year universal service: prostrations and vows, merit dedicated to the year ahead

Please send registrations by 3 February so the tablets can be written. The offering has no set amount; give as you are able.

A Perennial Service

The Merit Lamp

One lamp before the Buddha breaks the darkness of a thousand years. The day the office receives your offering, a physical lamp is lit before the altar in your name.

The Seven-Day Merit Lamp — four prayers (averting calamity · benefactors · Medicine Buddha · blessings), $70 a seven-day period, several periods may follow on. The Birthday Candle — lit on the birthday itself, $10 a name. The Perennial Lamp — any offering, and welcome with none: simply email the office.

Ceremony Notice

The 49-Day Medicine Buddha Blessing

Begins

begins Monday, 21 September 2026

Completes

completes Sunday, 8 November 2026, the Medicine Buddha's Birthday

As the Medicine Buddha Sutra prescribes, for the forty-nine days before the birthday the temple's venerable master chants the sutra daily and keeps the lamps burning, completing on the birthday itself; an offering of $490 for each name. A name registered mid-course joins the daily dedication from the day its offering is received.

01

The Daily Order

Morning bell, morning liturgy, the formal meal, communal work, evening liturgy, evening drum — the order of the day is the order of practice. The monastic rule of the Han tradition begins with the Tang master Baizhang Huaihai; the Yuan recension, the Imperially Revised Baizhang Rules in eight fascicles, sets out the daily pattern that later monasteries follow in their morning and evening liturgy. The resident community keeps to this common pattern, morning and evening, day after day without break.

02

What a Ceremony Is

A dharma ceremony is an assembly practicing together according to a liturgy. Common in Han-tradition monasteries are sutra recitation, repentance rites, the release of life, the universal Buddha service, the Ullambana offering, and the Water-Land rite — reciting a sutra, bowing through a repentance text, or offering a meal to the assembly. What matters is not scale but accordance with the dharma: following the liturgy, gathering the mind in one place. Every ceremony of this temple's year stands on this.

03

Daily Liturgy and Communal Practice

The daily liturgy is the fixed morning and evening practice, unbroken day by day, as indispensable as food; its merit lies in constancy, not in quantity. Communal practice is many people cultivating one method at one time and place — reciting, bowing, or sitting; its merit lies in concord, the strength of the assembly gathering a scattered mind. The two depend on each other: without daily liturgy, communal practice is a passing guest; without communal practice, daily liturgy easily becomes a solitary road. A student at home may set a daily order on the monastery's lines — one stick of incense and one sutra, morning and evening; kept constant, any place becomes a place of practice.

04

The Pattern of Repentance Rites

The Sixth Patriarch says: "To confess is to confess one's former faults — all the evil, delusion, arrogance, deceit, and envy of the past, confessed entirely and never to rise again: this is called confession. To repent is to repent one's later faults" (Platform Sutra, chapter on repentance, T48n2008). The repentance rites of the Han tradition mostly follow liturgies drawn from sutra and treatise — the Emperor Liang Repentance, the Water Repentance of Compassionate Samadhi, the Great Compassion Repentance — each with its order of inviting the holy ones, bowing to the Buddhas, disclosing faults, and dedicating merit. Repentance is not purchase, and merit is not counted in prostrations; its effect lies in seeing one's fault and giving rise to shame, so that the three actions of body, speech, and mind turn about.

05

The Meaning of Homage

The bow with joined palms and the full prostration are the body's expression of reverence and the mind's gathering of attention; the courtesy of the hall lies not in elaboration but in respect. The Chapter on Samantabhadra's Vows explains homage to all buddhas thus: "raising deep faith and understanding, as if each stood before me, with purified body, speech, and mind I constantly practice homage" (T10n0293). What makes a bow a practice is that one phrase — as if before one's eyes: with the Buddha present, bearing composes itself and needs no rulebook. Before the Buddha at home, one bow and one prostration carry the same meaning.

06

Practicing Together from Home

The temple is not at present open to visitors; the resident community holds each ceremony as the liturgy prescribes, and students of the ten directions join it by registering tablets online. No account is needed: on submission you receive a registration number, a confirmation reaches your mailbox, and once the office has read it the tablets are placed and the recitation dedicated during the ceremony. At home, on the day, keep the fast, recite, and hold the Buddha's name — at the same hour, with the same mind, as the assembly. The merit of communal practice lies in concord, not in being in one place.