Last Sunday, I headed to a Buddhist temple in Springvale, in Melbourne's south-east. I wasn't going for a Songkran festival (Thai New Year), and it wasn't a part of my routine.
I was going because my mother wanted to pray for her eldest sister, who had died on the Friday. My mum is over 80 years old. Her family here and in Malaysia suggested she should not make the rushed journey for the funeral in Penang as she would have to travel alone while grieving and it was in only two days' time.
My mother is a temple frequenter. For decades, she maintained a Kuan Yin (Goddess of Mercy) shrine in our family home. On official forms, she lists her religion as 'Buddhist'. When travelling, she'll want to visit temples, say a prayer and, usually, make a donation.
I am not a temple frequenter. I had not been to one for many years. I do not subscribe to a religion. I'm only in temples because of family commemorations or if I'm accompanying my mother. This Sunday was no exception.
When thinking about where to take her, my partner and I discussed what would be a good place for her to go — a space that would affirm the way she likes to express her faith. It needed to be a place that didn't require familiarity with those who ran it, and to which we could just turn up. It needed to be a place that had old school features and enabled traditional ways to worship.
The temple complex we went to was huge, as Springvale temples tend to be. There was a big main temple and many smaller ones, as well as shrine sites. There was an ease to the informality of the worshipping practices surrounding us.
Some people brought fruit offerings to set at the base of their preferred deity, others lit handfuls of incense and prayed on their knees, others still were there to assist in the running of the temple. A constant stream of visitors attended to their own spiritual practices, and many of them were intergenerational groups much like ours.
My mother gate crashed a service that was underway in the main temple but she wasn't excluded; the nuns just worked around her. She invited all of us to light incense and pray with her at various sites around the complex. My children had never been to a temple and had little experience of