Tet - Lunar New Year
Quang Minh Tet Festival is a unique annual event held on the site of the Quang Buddhist Temple. Each year, thousands of people from Maribyrnong and surrounding suburbs attended the Quang Minh Tet Festival to watch performances, see displays chants, and eat vegetarian food to welcome the Lunar New Year.
The Lunar New Year is one of most significant cultural and spiritual event for the Vietnamese and Chinese community throughout the world. As a spiritual centre, the Quang Minh Temple provides an important space for community members to come together to pay respect to their ancestors and is a centre that seeks to provide hope and inspiration for all.
The broad aims of the Quang Minh Tet Festival are to provide opportunities for the local community and the Vietnamese, Chinese Buddhist & non Buddhist to come together and explore and experience the beauty and richness of the Lunar and Buddhist traditional celebration.
Trung Thu - Mid Autumn Festival
Trung-Thu Festival, also known as the Mid-Autumn or Children’s Moon Festival, is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar and is considered the second most important Vietnamese festival after Tet.
Trung-Thu Festival started at the dawn of agricultural civilization, which dates back to some fifteen to twenty thousand years in Southeast Asia. Over many centuries, the Trung-Thu Festival has been a special time for everyone to rejoice in the spirit of autumn.
The purpose of Trung-Thu Festival is to promote education, innovative ideas, music, sports, arts and crafts and poetry to young people. The festival hosts a panorama with the children's lantern procession, colourful shows, songs and dances. Trung-Thu Festival offers the unique flavours of mid-autumn with such delicacies such as moon cake, lotus seed paste cake, mung bean cake, and fragrant teas. The festival provides pleasant sounds of children’s laughter, upbeat music from the Dragon dance drum, and distinctive children's songs, which will bring smiles to everyone’s faces.
Vu Lan - Ullambana Festival
Vu Lan can be considered the Vietnamese Mother's and Father's Day. The festivals origins can be traced back to the Ullambana Sutra which consists of a discourse by Gautama Buddha to Maudgalyayana, one of his two chief disciples, on the practice of filial piety and how to save his deceased mother from suffering. The sutra says that Maudgalyayana had a vision of his mother rebecoming a hungry ghost in the lower realms due to her karma. The Buddha advised Maudgalyayana to organize an assembly of monks to make offerings for the benefit of his deceased mother.
Vu Lan is celebrated on the 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar and the festival acts as a reminder to honour one's parents as well as remembering ancestors and the deceased. Visitors to the temple make offerings to the sangha and to chant for the liberation of the deceased who have been reborn into undesirable states. One of the more prominent activities during the festival is the rose ceremony in which visitors are given a red rose if their parents are alive or a white rose if their parents have passed away. This custom is fairly new in terms of Vietnamese Buddhist traditions and has become a unique event for Vu Lan.
In addition to visiting temples people are encouraged to perform compassionate acts such as releasing livestock back into the wild, and eating vegetarian.
Vesak - Phật Đản
Phật Đản or Vesak commemorates the birth, enlightenment (Buddhahood), and passing (Parinirvāna) of Gautama Buddha. It is an annual holiday observed in many Asian countries practicing Buddhism including the Vietnamese Buddhist community.
Of great importance is the understanding and remembrance that the Buddha was not born a Buddha but became one through his own efforts to obtain full realisation and enlightenment. This enlighten state is also known as Nirvana (Sanskrit)or Nibbana (Pali) and occurs when a person sees and understands the true nature of all things. This liberation means all their delusion/ignorance, attachment/greed and aversion/hatred is extinguished and ultimately means that there will be no more rebecoming.
On Phật Đản, visitors and Buddhist visit the temple and pay respects to the Triple Gem: the Buddha, the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) and the Sangha (Buddhist disciples) by celebrating in festivities as well as practicing giving, virtue and cultivation. Giving generally involves simple symbolic offerings to the temple such as flowers or burning incense which promote the idea of impermanence since beautiful flowers will wither and incense will burn out and dissipate. Virtue is observed by refaffirming commitment to the moral precepts taken as a Buddhist and cultivation includes chanting, meditation and listening to sermons.