Like the waning moon

Day 1 - start of my vegetarian diet. It was a breeze. Had porridge for lunch and dinner, with stir-fry cabbage, fried beancurd, salted peanuts and szechuan veg. Someone told me to go vegetarian for a month. Pray that I can persist till the entire month. I didn't mind going vegetarian because:

1. It is more healthy and my body can do with some cleansing.

2. By cleansing my body, I am also clearing up some negativities and bad chi and bad luck.

3. It's the start of Vesak (in Tibetan calendar, it is called Saka Dawa, the month of great merits), hence it is good to be vegetarian for this month. Saka Dawa marks Buddha's enlightenment, death, and entry into Nirvana. The merits of virtuous acts, such as donating food and money to monasteries or the poor, prostrations, and not eating meat are multiplied 100,000 times.

Tonight I went for Vajrasattva 金刚萨垛 puja in DPL. It has been many weeks since I attended pujas and I felt I desperately needed to. When I just reached the centre, there was a little white Maltese which was very cute, he kept licking and licking me all over. What a nice welcome. I offered butter lamp and flowers to Shakyamuni Buddha on behalf of Grandma and Mom. I pray that their obstacles relating to health be removed as soon as possible. I managed to complete about 10,000 recitations of Vajrasattva's short mantra within the 2.5 hours, as well as recited many times the 100-syllable mantra with the lamas. I dedicated the merits of this puja and the mantras I recited to my Grandma and Mom.

Vajrasattva practice cleanses away all our negative energies, delusions and defilements. Of all the different practices for cleansing, the purification through the visualization of Vajrasattva and recitation of the 100-syllable mantra is the most potent. It is said in the scriptures that our delusions cannot be washed away by the Buddhas. Buddhas cannot shower us with divine waters and cleanse us. Nor can the Buddhas through all their divine knowledge cleanse us of all our delusions. These delusions have been committed and heaped upon by our ownselves and therefore, because we created them, we must dissolve them.

If possible we should recite the Vajrasattva mantra at least 21 times everyday. May our negative karma decrease like the waning moon through this practice. I found this video from Youtube, the Vajrasattva 100-syllable mantra, sang as a song which is a nice way to memorise the mantra.