Why Religious Elements Are Indicative Of Cultural Beliefs And Values?

Observe a religious practice or visit a place of religious worship or spiritual significance that is unfamiliar to you. For instance, you may visit a Buddhist or Hindu temple, a local shrine, or a Christian church. Some of the larger institutions (such as Singapore’s Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum) offer free tours, which would make for an easy point of entry. How is the space organized, what kinds of artifacts or images are displayed, and what kinds of routine practices do you observe? How do these elements reflect underlying beliefs and values?

Why Religious Elements are Indicative of Cultural Beliefs and Values In this short paper, I eloborate on a prior visit (without a tour guide) to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple (BTRT) and my
Chan cites Kumar with regards to the concept 'transfer of merit' in Mahayana Buddhism in which the infinite merit of Bodhisattvas can be drawn upon to help one's own karma (Chan, 2014, p.43). Charity and consequently the self-sacrifice that follows can earn the devotee karmic merit (Kumar, 2001, p.72), with the amount of merit earned being proportional to the sacrifice made by the donor and the use derived by the donee (Kumar, 2001, p.74). Kumar then hypothesizes that this principal was what led to cases of self-mortification in Tangki rituals (Kumar, 2001, p.74). In this vein, one can then infer that if materialism is rooted deep enough within a society, it would then be logical for devotees to make sizeable donations and have them qualified as 'significant sacrifices'. The donee, being the temple, would then have benefitted significantly as well from this exchange since material gain, regardless of for what end, would be weighed heavily in a society with materiastic values. One can then see that how this practice of large scale donations for ornamental work highlights materialistic values within the Singaporean
Often, I caught myself forming opinions or passing value judgements and had to remind myself to detach myself and truly take on the perspective of the devotee or the person I was interacting with. Although I only had short superficial conversations with most of the people I conversed with, I was able to often piece together opinions of different interviewees to better understand what was being put across. Most importantly, this anthropological study made me understand how empathy can be properly