Prabarana Purnima today ----

The Buddhists will celebrate their second largest religious festival Prabarana Purnima in the city as elsewhere across the country with due solemnity and traditional enthusiasm, reports BSS.

The festival is also known as Ashwini Purnima that marks conclusion of the three-month-long seclusion of the monks inside their monasteries for self edification and atonement of their defilement.

The Purnima follows a month-long preaching of sermons by the Buddhist monks for the welfare of every beings and the whole humankind through a month-long yellow robes offering ceremony that begins on the day after the Purnima.

According to the legend, Buddha once clipped some strands of hair from his head and said that if he was qualified to attain supreme wisdom and enlightenment, the hairs would not fall down but go up instead, in the long run which they did.

To mark this event, the Buddhists will release candle-lit air balloons made of coloured paper (fanush) and set free to flow towards the autumnal sky in the evening which is the chief attraction of the festival.