Green Tara appears for Vesak!

KMP had a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Vesak Day twice this year – once in Malaysia and again today in Singapore! In the morning, as it was a public holiday, there were more visitors to our booth than over the past few days.

To celebrate Vesak, KMP super writer Jamie “Paris” Khoo decided attract more attention to KMP’s booth as well as fulfil a long time fantasy of hers to dress up as her favourite Buddha, Green Tara – and wow, look at how fabulous she looks!

Not only did she look great, she also drew quite a crowd to our booth. People actually came to ask for bookmarks and postcards. She walked around outside the Book Fair hall too, going up and down the escalators, from the ground floor to the top floor, accompanied by her wannabe dakinis - Shin, Susan and I. We imagined ourselves going up to the heavens and down to the three lower realms (as we were on the 4th floor)!

Some youngsters asked for postcards and then threw them in the dustbin, which they found very amusing and we didn’t. We simply thought that maybe even holding the postcards may give them an affinity for Dharma in the future.

We even met a Tibetan thangka seller who marvelled at our own Tara and asked to take a photo with her! Here on the left is a picture of our Tara and a Tara Thangka!

While sales weren’t that many, there were lots of visitors and we even closed late today because there were still browsers in the booth at 10pm! Our book sales were a bit better than the previous couple of days, and total sales came to SGD650.

Yek Yee and JJ shared that a lot of visitors were intrigued by the ‘Greedy’ title of the Chinese book. Some were actually challenged why we used the title, saying that we shouldn’t use ‘greed’ with Dharma. However, once, Yek Yee had explained to a mother about the rationale behind the Be Greedy title, and the mother understood and explained it to her child. It is fantastic that KMP has the opportunity to share with people about changing mindsets.

The KMP volunteers and staff received a wonderful sms message from Rinpoche which was very touching : “I am excited and happy for all of you. All of you are like in a retreat during this period like a 10-day retreat. Your body moving, packing, unpacking, showing, sleeping, eating, travelling for dharma. Your speech, nearly all words direct and indirect is increasing dharma. And your mind single-pointedly focused on talented, skilful ways to bring dharma to others! I am truly happy from my heart. Beautiful.”

To end the day, HE Tsem Tulku Rinpoche’s Chinese book, Be Greedy was found by Shin and Joseph to be displayed in the New Book section in Kinokuniya. Let’s hope it’s a best seller!