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A h Ma Temple 
When I walked through the front steps of the Ah Ma temple, the smell of incense rushed over me. One of my friends told me that there were going to be firecrackers to scare away the evil. I gazed at the big Buddha in front of me as the teachers hustled us into the dry area to wait, for it was a rainy day. Bang! Pop! BOOM! There go the firecrackers! The sound was such an earsplitting sound that I could barely hear myself speak afterwards. There was a lot of smoke as the firecrackers popped. Now the firecrackers, which had originally been long, red cylinders, were nothing but little red leaves scattered all over the ground. I followed as my classmates crowded close together, and our teacher, Mr. Hoeppner, told us about chims. Chims are slivers of bamboo with numbers on them. There must be as many as 50 in a glass-shaped wooden container, all the same length, about 7-8 inches long. You shake them while they are all in the container until one of them comes out and is separated from the rest. That’s when you find out your luck by matching the number on the bamboo with the number in the booklet that has your "fortune" written it. 
Then we continued our walk to the third of the four temples of Ah Ma, and Mr. Hoeppner launched into a story about the legend of Ah Ma. The first three temples are Taoist temples, while the fourth one is a Buddhist temple. It’s kind of interesting that two different kinds of temples are part of the same worship area. However, Mr. Hoeppner said that the Asian religions are generally not competitive, so they can more or less exist next to each other without problems. Anyway, "Ah Ma," he began, "was the daughter of a prince. The prince had arranged a marriage for her, but she went against his wishes and went to a temple to become a nun instead. The prince, learning this, ordered the temple to be burnt down. Then Ah Ma was said to have put out the fire with her own blood. The prince was enraged and sent executioners to go and chop off her head. The executioners did, but when one of them swung his sword at her neck, the sword shattered to pieces and, frightened, they ran off. Determined that she must die, the prince thus sent people to hang her, and distraught that her father wanted her to die that badly, she hung herself and was sent to hell." Mr. Hoeppner paused for a minute, and we all waited, enchanted. He continued, "She continued doing good things, and the God of the Underworld, irritated that Ah Ma was doing so much good that hell was almost like heaven, begged for her to go back to earth. Ah Ma went back to earth and learned that her father was very ill. To save him, she had to be part of the medical treatment; one of her eyeballs and flesh from her arms had to be detached from her and become part of the treatment. Ah Ma agreed immediately without hesitation and her father, after he recovered, finally realized how much she loved him. He called for a sculptor and ordered him to make a statue of how Ah Ma appeared before she had gotten deformed; with two arms, legs, eyes and everything as it was. The sculptor misunderstood and made a sculpture with 1000 eyes and 1000 arms." "Now according to the legend, as a result of her wonderful deeds and service to those around her Ah Ma attained Buddha-hood. As she was about to enter heaven, she heard the cries of the suffering people on earth who were calling for her help. Her love for mankind was so great that she chose to stay on earth rather than go to heaven. May her spirit rest with us today on earth as we go on with our normal lives." |
