Doing dana through vegetarian diet

This is the second day of Kew Leong Ya Festival and devotees are still taking strictly pure vegetarian food. As a matter of fact, vegetation food is good for health as proven by those who are sick. By swifting from meat food to vegetarian ones, the digestive system can function better.

As a Buddhist, I am made to understand that taking vegetarian food is doing dana, that is refraining from killing. If more people swift to vegetarian diet, more killing of edible birds and animals can be prevented. Those who practise taking vegetarian food will have a longer life.
Hence we know that taking vegetarian not only enables one to do dana but also prolong one's life.

It really rained all right

In my last post, I mentioned that it would rain during the Kew Leong Ya Festival. As today was the first day of the festival, the morning looked gloomy but my wife and I managed to walk for 45 minutes without rain at 7 a.m. and the sun came out bright.

Hence we went to market without bringing an umbrella, thinking it wouldn't rain.
We were wrong because on our way to where I parked my car, it started to drizzle. We hurried along but the rain got heavier and we were wet by the time we reached our car.
The rain stopped a while but continued do pour in the evening.

Kew Leong Ya Festival

For nine days, from tomorrow, the devotees of Kew Leong Ya, the nine sons of the Dragon Emperor will be taking pure vegetarian diet to purify themselves in honour of the nine dewas. Devotees will go the temple to pray and ask for favour from the nine dewas.
Most Chinese in Penang are the devotees of the nine dewas.

If you have been following this blog, in one of the posts, I mentioned how my trigger-finger (inability to flex the ring-finger) was miraculously cured by Kew Leong Ya when I went to the temple to pray to them. When I knelt down to pray with jossticks, a painful sensation engulfed my head. Later I learnt from my spiritual friend that the dewas actually acknowledged my being there by doing so. When I placed my jossticks in the urn, one of glowing part of the joss ticks fell onto my trigger-finger and it got cured after that. You have to experience it to believe it.

In Penang, roadside stalls will be put up to sell vegetarian food to devotees. You can always see a yellow cloth banner bearing Chinese words "Jiu Long Ye Zai" which means 'vegetarian food for Jiu Long Ye'. The caterers are doing good business during these nine days.

On the last day of the festival, the nine dewas will be sent back to the sea - the dwelling place of their father, the Dragon Emperor.

As the said dewas control the rain, it will definitely rain during this period, believe it or not.

Running 30 rounds in the college field

When I was undergoing training in Malayan Teachers’ College, Penang, I used to run with my buddy, Yong Cheng Suan in the college field in the evening after lecture hours. We started to run one round on the first day. This was increased to two rounds the following day. Without realizing it, we had reached the day when we could complete 30 rounds in the field. Since then running 30 rounds or 12 kilometres was no problem for both of us. It shows stamina can be trained with the passage of time and with perseverance.

If I were to run the same number of rounds, I don’t think I can do it.

The experience of staying in a wooden house

When I went to SM Jerantut, Pahang to start working as a qualified teacher, I stayed in a wooden house owned by an ex-teacher, Mr Kok. I paid RM40 per month for the rent. Actually, I was occupying the room of another teacher, Mr Tan Chap who had gone for a three-month Bahasa course. When he returned, I had to vacate the room and stayed somewhere else.

I was staying on the first floor. The room had very good ventilation, an electric ceiling fan and windows around. As it was January, the cool air at night and in the morning made me feel that I was staying in an air-conditioned room.

The only disadvantage of staying in Mr Kok's house was that I would know who had come back. There were 8 rooms on first floor. The footsteps on the wooden floor told me that someone had come back or he had come out of his room because needed to ease himself in the washroom.

Mr Kok ran a grocery downstairs so we had no problem getting our personal effects there. Snacks and instant noodles were available too.
After some time I got used to the sound of footsteps outside my room and continue to read my books or doing preparation for teaching for the following day.
My school was five minutes' walk from where I lived.

Old vegetable seller who could speak Mandarin

I still could remember an old woman who sold vegetables in the market in Jerantut, a small town in Pahang. My wife and I would buy fish, meat and vegetables in the market at weekends for cooking. I did not take my wife there every day because I was teaching in the morning session then.

What surprised me was an old lady selling vegetables being able to speak Mandarin - the language we used to talk to her as my wife could not speak Cantonese. Although I could speak some Cantonese, I was more at home with Mandarin.

This incident shows that when there is a need to learn a language to communicate with others to do business, anyone is motivated to do so. If an old lady could do it, young people should have no problem doing so at all.

A test of patience

Whenever I go for my yearly eye check-up, I always remind myself to be patient. Why do I say so? It is because there will be so many patients seeking treatment from Dr Lai, a renown ophthalmologist or eye specialist in Penang that I have to wait for a very long time before I am able to see him. Usually I have to wait for three to four hours before the procedure is over. You see, when you arrive at his clinic, you have to wait a while before the nurse attends to you. She will check your eyesight and eye pressure after which two types of drops will be applied to the my eyes to dilate them for examination by the doctor.

From then on, you will have to wait for a long time before the doctor sees you.

Waiting to see an eye specialist like Dr Lai is really a test of patience.

Redundancy in English

Certain words which begin with the prefix ‘re’ which means ‘again’ will be redundant in meaning if ‘again’ is used after them. The following examples will clarify what I have said:
1 He will redo the whole process again. (again is redundant)
He will redo the whole process. (correct)
2 She repeated what she had said again. (again is redundant)
She repeated what she had said. (correct)

Chinese surnames

The first name in a Chinese name is the surname. For example, if a Chinese man is named ‘Tan Huat Chye’, then his surname is ‘Tan’. In China, surnames are spelt according to pinyin. Hence the above name will be called ‘Chen Fa Cai’.
In Malaysia, surnames are spelt according to Chinese dialects. If the above man is a Hokkien, his name will be spelt as ‘Tan Huat Chye’ as in the example. However, if he is a Cantonese, then ‘Chan Fa Choy’ is his name.

There are about one hundred Chinese surnames. These are some examples of them: Lim, Sim, Koay, Lee, Lian, Saw, Cheang, Ong, Khor, Teh, Lau, Teoh, Chuah, and See (all in Hokkien dialects).
Some Chinese who adopt Christian names will have their surnames at the back of the Christian names. For instance, Robert Lim’s surname is Lim.

Running software incompatible with OS

Have you ever experienced running programs incompatible with you operating system? Well, I have.
Yesterday, I installed MpcStar, a video preview program. When it was executed, my Winxp returned an error message and closed the program. Not satisfied, I restarted Windows and tried it twice but the same error still occurred.
Sometimes, Word seems to hang when run under Winxp. Luckily the recovery component of Word recovered part of what I have keyed in.
I think these are some of the things we have to bear when using the computer.