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Vesak is the festival, which is celebrated with high enthusiasm and elaborate preparations and "Vesak" is a word in Singhalese, the language of the majority Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Also, Vesak, the most important day in the Buddhist calendar around the world, celebrates the birth, enlightenment and passing away of Gautam Buddha. This festival is celebrated in all the countries where Buddhists live in considerable number. These include Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Tibet, Laos and Myanmar.

Vesak is celebrated on the day of the full moon in May, Sri Lanka will turn into an array of colour and light. Each village home lights up with lanterns, oil lamps and decorations to signify the most colourful festival of Sri Lanka. Huge lanterns with considerable artistic appeal attract many people to the places where they are displayed.

In the cities, apart from the home decorations, glittering lights creating tapestries of designs adorn ‘Pandols’, erected at vantage points. Pandols are large structures that combine traditional painting and glittering lights to unfold stories of The Buddha’s past births, the ‘Jathaka Stories’. Another feature of the festival decoration is large decorative structures, "known as vesak pandal", placed at important locations such as road junctions. They normally depict events from Buddha's life and elaborately decorated with coloured electric bulbs forming dynamic patterns. These highly creative works never fail to attract thousands of people to these locations.

Vesak devotional songs (Bakthi Gee), sil campaigns, Bodhi Poojas, Dansalas, greeting cards and stamps are some of the things that we see every year at the time of this Buddhist festival. As it is mainly a religious event, for devout Buddhists, religious observances form the main activities of the festival. They generally wear white dress and go to the temple and participate in the traditional ceremonies there. Many of them spend the whole day in the temple and reaffirm their determination to follow the teachings of Buddha.In temples Buddhists worship, offer flowers, light lamps and burn incense. These traditional observances, in essence, have their value in satisfying the religious and emotional needs of the people. On this holy day the Dana plays an important role.

Other than the exclusive religious aspects of the festival, the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, decorate their houses and public places and arrange for various cultural events to bring happiness to everyone on that day. Devotees are also called upon to avoid any kind of killing and eat vegetarian food on the day. In quiet a few countries, particularly in Sri Lanka, two days are marked out for the celebration of Vesak and all liquor shops and slaughter houses are closed by government orders.

Source: HubPages: By Rmnathan & Virtual Library