After an early meal we raced down to London this morning to attend the Annual Buddha’s Birthday Celebration in London’s Leicester Square. Like last year we were delayed by the crowds converging on Wembley for the Cup Final and so we arrived too late for the procession through China Town. Actually we didn’t mind that as it was raining and we got wet enough nipping through the pedestrianised bit from where we had jumped out of the car in St Martin’s Lane. I had been asked to give a short address and I focussed mostly on the hope that the Buddha’s message brings us for a better and happier life. This, of course, is a big weekend for Buddhists throughout the world. Theravadans like us celebrate the Birth, Enlightenment and Passing of the Buddha, while for some other schools it’s the Enlightenment only and for our Chinese friends of the London Fo Guang Temple it’s the Birth that they celebrate at this time. And their way of doing it is to ceremonially bathe the images of the child who later grew up to leave his princely estate and eventually win full Enlightenment to become the Buddha. We were each of us invited to go forward and bathe an image. The images of the child prince show him pointing to the earth and to the heavens as he declared that this would be his last birth.