Sunday, April 17, 2022

Passover, Easter, the Buddha's birthday

Christian Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover, and because the Buddha's birthday is reckoned, like Passover (Nisan 15, a full-moon day, with celebrations through Nisan 22), according to a lunar calendar (the Jewish calendar is both solar and lunar, but Passover is reckoned according to the calendar's lunar aspect), it's never far behind Passover and Easter. In 2011, I wrote a post titled "from Pesach to Vesak" to celebrate this weird fact. The Buddha's birthday is always on April 8 of the lunar calendar. For those of us who use the solar calendar, that means the Buddha's birthday falls on Sunday, May 8, this year—only three weeks after Easter Sunday. The government has thus made Monday, May 9, a public holiday so that people won't feel cheated out of their expected day off.



No comments:

Post a Comment

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.