My Aunt Rena came back from Thailand last week. She has not been back to Singapore for the past one and a half years. I like Aunt Rena because she is a sprightly lady with a hearty appetite for food especially snacks. She has cravings for all local food, she likes Chinese dumplings and malay kueh-kueh from Bengawan Solo etc. She also has a very big heart, very generous, very kind. Aunt Rena got married and settled in Thailand more than 30 years ago, and her family is quite affluent. She is a very pious Buddhist.
She was relating to me about how she helped to sponsor to build a huge Buddha statue many years ago. She has forgotten all about it, until her daughter brought back home a small Buddha statue. She wanted to invite Buddha to her factory. So she put the statue on the rear seat of her car very carefully. On the way there, she felt faint and could not concentrate on the road, and she kept making the wrong turns on the way to her factory, a route which she uses almost everyday. Somehow that day, she felt restless. But without warning, she suddenly saw a bright light in front of the road at a turning and she followed accordingly. Once she turned her car into that lane, she found her factory at last. She told one of her sales managers to invite Buddha to the altar inside her office. When that was done, she felt uncomfortable and uneasiness and restless and still could not work. So she finally meditated, she prayed to Buddha to pardon her if the way it was handled was not done properly and suddenly everything became clear to her, her mind alert. Her sales manager asked her afterwards where was the Buddha statue from, because he felt his whole body was burning and becoming very hot when he carried the statue, as if it was alive. Then it finally dawned upon her that the statue was from the very same temple where she had helped built. Buddhist teachings say that building holy objects reaps the merits related to the numbers of atoms the holy object consists of, which on this scale would be enormous. Hence many people will come to see it and will accumulate merit, leading them to happiness and ultimate enlightenment.
Aunt Rena told me that when she meditates, sometimes she can feel the presence of the Buddha (depending on which particular Buddha she is praying to and visualising). She can't see Buddha but she can smell his presence. It's the smell of jasmine flowers. Which leaves me with a quote from Buddha himself:
"Like a beautiful flower, full of color, but without perfume,
are the fine but fruitless words of him who does not act accordingly;
But like a beautiful flower, full of color and full of perfume,
are the fruitful words of him who acts accordingly."
