Our Almsgiving Day

Unlike other days, I had to get up early because today was the day I offered alms at my temple. Every month on the 28th, I accept my temple's morning alms. There were approximately 13 monks. Because it was a weekday, most of the monks leaving Pirivena for their studies, thus we needed to bring alms before 6 a.m.

When the alarm rang at 4 a.m., I got out of bed. First, I made bed tea for my husband and myself. While my husband scraped the coconut, I put chickpeas in a pressure cooker, followed by rice in the rice cooker. I cooked fish yesterday, so I simply had to make dhal curry and coconut sambal. I put red rice in the other of my two rice cookers. After finishing the coconut scraping, my husband prepared cattasambal using the blender. After the chickpeas boiled, I tempered them with other ingredients.

As everything was ready, we proceeded to get dressed. While we dressing, our pet Beenu realized that we were going somewhere, so he was excited and started to jump and bark. He dislikes seeing us leave, which is why he was in such a rush.

By 5.45 a.m., we had left for the temple leaving our Beenu alone. On the way, we stopped at a shop to get some bananas for dessert. At the time we visited the temple, all of the monks were doing their regular chores; some were cleaning the temple garden, while others were sweeping the Bo tree. Some monks were cleaning the Buddha Shrine Room, while others were collecting the swept garbage and putting it in the waste dug.

One monk accepted our alms and prepared Buddha Puja for us to offer at the Buddha Shrine. Another monk performed a Buddha puja, blessing us and sharing the merit.

After that, we had a brief conversation with the temple's chief monks and returned home with a sense of accomplishment.

Thank you for reading my post.