GROUND BREAKING CEREMONY

GROUND BREAKING CEREMONY

By MEY Sopheakdei

Ground Breaking Ceremony is an inauguration festivity of the temple of the pagoda. It is not much different from the other festivals because it is in Bon Bachai Boun.

Ground Breaking Ceremony is hardly ever done until there is a new construction of the temple or a renovation of the temple. Any newly-built pagoda must necessarily celebrate the ground breaking ceremony to have a limitation for monk to do other jobs such as the temple.

The old scholars set up subordinate festivities to make a strong and deep belief like cutting Seima-taking a rock covered with gold foil. Then setting up a boundary and carrying around the temple to offer to the monk with the machete for cutting the Seima into the dug hole in the temple.

Some pagodas, in the past, mixed with Brahmanism by carving the Seima rocks and placing them in all directions around the temple veranda with Siva linga and Oum Vagina.

People bring things like knife, hair, threat, gold, money to drop into the dug holes of Seima, but it is believed that before dropping those things, they make a wish to have what they want to be especially in the next life.

However, people are flooding to the Ground Breaking Ceremony due to a long year belief that if anyone who attend the Ground Breaking Ceremony in seven pagodas, they would be able to stay away from something bad and meet only sustainable happiness.