Yeondeunghoe: Lighting up a lantern

To celebrate the 50th year of diplomatic relations between India and Korea, the Embassy of the Republic of Korea is organising the opening ceremony for the exhibition ‘Encounter with Korean Traditional Buddhist Culture in India, the Land of Buddha’ today at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, at 11 am.

Hosted by NGMA, the Embassy of the Republic of Korea and Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, it has been organised by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India; UNESCO; the Cultural Heritage of Humanity’s Yeon Deung Hoe and Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism.

The dignitaries present will be the Most Venerable Jinwoo, President of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism and H.E. Chang Jae-bok, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to India.

The exhibition means ‘lighting up a lantern’. It symbolises that the mind and the world, darkened by greed and ignorance, will be bright and happy by lighting up the lantern of wisdom. The basic spirit of the Yeondeunghoe is to light up the mind and the world with lanterns as bright as lanterns and hope that wisdom and mercy will be realised. Yeondeunghoe, a ritual to praise Buddha’s birth and light up lanterns with wishes, is Korea’s representative intangible cultural heritage and a festival that has been handed down over more than a thousand years of history since the Silla Dynasty.