[Buddha-l] MARYSVILLE: American Buddhism facing generational shift

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 18, 2011, at 16:08 , <djessop at nas.net> <djessop at nas.net> wrote:

> Is any particular day of the week especially significant 
> to Buddhists?

It is mighty tempting to be a smart Aleck and say that the only significant day of the week is today, but I'll withstand the hardships associated with restraint. Now that you raise the question, Deborah, I realize I have no idea how ancient Indians thought about days of the week or whether they even named them. I'm not even sure there was such a concept as a week. There was the concept of the fortnight, the period between the new moon and the full moon, and in Indian Buddhism (as in Indian culture in general), the full moon day and new moon day were days for doing something that passed as sacred. 

This display of astonishing ignorance on my part is calculated to bring all manner of knowledgeable people out of their lurking mode to inform us of what we could both easily learn by consulting Doctor Google. But let them do the heavy lifting, I say.

While they are doing the hard work, I'll mention a quaint habit that Quakers have (aside from the quaint habit of butchering English grammar by saying things like "What does thee want?") Quakers hated the idea of days named after pagan gods and months named after Roman emperors and Latin numbers, so they refused to use those names and referred to the days of the week as First Day, Second Day and so on, and referred to the months as First Month (which originally meant March but eventually became January, to everyone's great inconvenience). 

Written this Second Day, the eighteenth of Seventh Month (this being the third First Day of Seventh Month by latter day reckoning or the Fifth Month by the old reckoning),
Friend Richard