HANAMATSURI

8th April 2024

Buddhist (Japanese)

This flower festival marks the Japanese celebration of the Buddha Shakyamuni’s birthday, which Mahayana Buddhists fix at 565 BCE. The flowers accentuate the tradition that the Buddha was born in a garden, so floral shrines are made and an image of the infant Buddha is set in it and bathed.

The original Japanese Flower Festival (hana, ‘flower’, matsuri, ‘festival’) was observed to encourage fruit trees to flower early; at the time, the farming community believed that the longer the blossoming, the more prosperous the harvest. Buddhism spread to Japan in the 6th century CE, and sometime around 600 CE the hanamatsuri festival became incorporated into the celebration of the Buddha’s birthday.

Nowadays a special altar—the hanamido—is erected and decorated with flowers representing the garden in Lumbini, southern Nepal, where it is said that Queen Maya went into labour. An image of the infant Buddha is placed in a pan and, in a ritual known as kanbutsu, water or sweet tea is poured over it in remembrance of the “sweet rain” that descended from heaven at the moment of the birth.

It is told that when Buddha Shakyamuni was born, birds sang and flowers bloomed in honour of his arrival. Pointing with his right hand to heaven and with his left hand to earth, the new born child took seven steps, prophesying that he would become a great sage and deliver humanity from suffering.

Hanamatsuri is predominately a Mahayana festival whereas Theravadin Buddhists observe the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and entrance into nirvana during the festival of Wesak, held in May at the time of the full moon.

While Buddhists of all traditions find meaning in these miracle stories of the events of his birth, they are also careful to point to his specific role as a wise teacher whose role was to signpost the way to enlightenment and nirvana.