Continuing on from yesterday, here are a few of the stamps you can put on your egg. Starting from right to left, the group of three on the right are for
Praying for Business and Money
1, business is bigger and bigger
2. more successful in the future
3. a lot of money
The other group is for...
Praying for Money and Benefits
1. a larger money storage place - so basically there is this belief that for each person there is a place that stores your money, not a real physical storage space, but a metaphysical one.
2. win the lottery
3. a lot of money
4. to hold a lot of money - i guess this means to have a lot of money in your pocket rather than an overall amount of money, these are the most basic of translations though and even in chinese it's a bit confusing what the differences are.
5. we are too poor to understand - nobody can tell me what this one means, so i just translated it as we are too poor to understand and only people who are already rich use this one.
Also promised from yesterday is the most important thing you must know about praying for something in Taiwan. After you pray and it comes true, you MUST go back to the temple and thank the god(s) and give some offering. If you don't you will get bad luck, get sick, and possibly die.
How this really plays out is somebody goes to pray for something, then totally forgets about it, after a few weeks. then that person gets some bad luck or gets sick, and they start to think about what happened to cause it. They will then remember that they never went to thank the gods and will view this bad luck or illness as a punishment. so they will bring some gifts to the temple to thank the gods they prayed to. Then of course they will pray for some new wish...a few weeks later forget about it.... get bad luck.. the cycle continues.
The fascinating thing though is that in Taiwan they don't take prayers or wishes very seriously, but they take curses very seriously. if something good happens or they get good luck, they don't often think that it's the gods' intervention that helped them even if they prayed for that, while if some bad things happens to them a lot of people's first reaction is that they have been cursed. this whole way of thinking seems like it means that deep down everybody thinks that the gods are evil. Since they basically seem to feel that good things are their own doing but bad things are gods' doing.
