On Friday, a 3rd annual Vesak celebration was held on the White Home honoring the start, enlightenment, and loss of life of the Buddha.

Second Gentleman Mr. Douglas Emhoff on the third annual Vesak celebration on the White Home. Photograph through the Padmasambhava Buddhist Middle New York on Fb.

The White Home held its third annual celebration in recognition of Vesak on Friday, Could 5 and shared a assertion from US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on the Buddhist vacation that celebrates the start, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha. The assertion from Blinken reads:

Blissful Buddha Purnima. We ship our greatest needs to Buddhists all over the world as they commemorate Vesak.

Vesak marks the start, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha. The event offers the possibility for us all to mirror on his teachings and renew our dedication to common values equivalent to compassion, tolerance, and human dignity.

On this event, we rejoice the wealthy contributions of various Buddhist communities in each nook of the globe and recommit to working collectively throughout perception traditions to construct a greater world for everybody.

This 12 months’s ceremony on the White Home marks its third annual Vesak celebration. In keeping with a press launch from the Worldwide Buddhist Affiliation of America (IBAA), the occasion was hosted by Second Gentleman Mr. Douglas Emhoff and attended by ambassadors from Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, and Sri Lanka alongside delegations from India, Indonesia, Mongolia, and representatives of the IBAA. The occasion was held within the White Home Indian Treaty Room and included the lighting of butter lamps, as shared by the Padmasambhava Buddhist Middle, whose co-founder and director Ven. Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche attended the celebration.  

Attendees of the third annual celebration on the White Home in Washington, D.C. Photograph courtesy of IBAA.

“With between 700 million and a billion followers, Buddhism is the third of the good missionary religions, together with Christianity and Islam, and brings a message of maybe distinctive significance to the cultural circumstances we discover right now,” Wangmo Dixey, President of IBAA, commented within the affiliation’s press launch. “The Worldwide Buddhist Affiliation of America was based to rise to this problem, the problem of bringing collectively all the assorted Buddhist voices present in America, and selling the civilized and reasoned discourse that’s such a characteristic of our nice custom.”