Southeast Asian Countries Celebrate Songkran Water Festival

Published: 13 April 2024 at 11:13

Travel

Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, celebrate the Songkran water festival as a traditional Theravada Buddhist New Year celebration where celebrants splash water on friends, family, and strangers to beat the seasonal heat.

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Water Festival (Wikipedia)

The Water Festival is the New Year's celebrations that take place in Xishuangbanna (China) and Southeast Asian nations such as Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia as well as among the Dai people of China, and the southern parts of Vietnam. It is part of the broader South and Southeast Asian solar New Year. It is called the 'Water Festival' by Westerners because they notice people splashing or pouring water at one another as part of the cleansing ritual to welcome the Songkran New Year. Traditionally, people gently sprinkled water on one another as a sign of respect, but as the new year falls during the hottest month in South East Asia, many people end up dousing strangers and passers-by in vehicles in boisterous celebration. The act of pouring water is also a show of blessings and good wishes. It is believed that at this Water Festival, everything old must be thrown away, or it will bring the owner bad luck.

Songkran (Thailand) (Wikipedia)

Thai New Year: 802 : 127 or Songkran: 802 (Thai: เทศกาลสงกรานต์, pronounced [tʰêːt.sā.kāːn sǒŋ.krāːn]), also known as Songkran Splendours: 127 , is the Thai New Year's national holiday. Songkran is on 13 April every year, but the holiday period extends from 14 to 15 April. In 2018 the Thai cabinet extended the festival nationwide to seven days, 9–16 April, to enable citizens to travel home for the holiday. In 2019, the holiday was observed 9–16 April as 13 April fell on a Saturday. The word "Songkran" comes from the Sanskrit word saṃkrānti, literally "astrological passage", meaning transformation or change. It coincides with the rising of Aries on the astrological chart and with the New Year of many calendars of Southeast and South Asia, in keeping with the Buddhist and Hindu Calendar. The New Year takes place at around the same time as the new year celebrations of many regions of South Asia like China (Dai people of Yunnan Province), India, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.In Thailand, New Year is now officially celebrated 1 January. Songkran was the official New Year until 1888, when it was switched to a fixed date of 1 April. Then in 1940, this date was shifted to 1 January. The traditional Thai New Year Songkran was transformed into a national holiday. Celebrations are famous for the public water fights framed as ritual cleansing. This had become quite popular among Thai and foreigners.

Songkran (Wikipedia)

Songkran is a Thai word: 261–262 : 26 , derived from the Sanskrit word: 260 , saṅkrānti (or, more specifically, meṣha saṅkrānti: 188 : 9, 25–31 : 10 ) and used to refer to the traditional New Year for Buddhist calendar celebrated in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, parts of northeast India, parts of Vietnam and Xishuangbanna, China. It begins when the sun transits the constellation of Aries, the first astrological sign in the Zodiac, as reckoned by sidereal astrology. It is related to the equivalent Hindu calendar-based New Year festivals in most parts of South Asia which are collectively referred to as Mesha Sankranti.

Buddhist calendar (Wikipedia)

The Buddhist calendar is a set of lunisolar calendars primarily used in Tibet, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam as well as in Malaysia and Singapore and by Chinese populations for religious or official occasions. While the calendars share a common lineage, they also have minor but important variations such as intercalation schedules, month names and numbering, use of cycles, etc. In Thailand, the name Buddhist Era is a year numbering system shared by the traditional Thai lunar calendar and by the Thai solar calendar.The Southeast Asian lunisolar calendars are largely based on an older version of the Hindu calendar, which uses the sidereal year as the solar year. One major difference is that the Southeast Asian systems, unlike their Indian cousins, do not use apparent reckoning to stay in sync with the sidereal year. Instead, they employ their versions of the Metonic cycle. However, since the Metonic cycle is not very accurate for sidereal years, the Southeast Asian calendar is slowly drifting out of sync with the sidereal, approximately one day every 100 years. Yet no coordinated structural reforms of the lunisolar calendar have been undertaken.Today, the traditional Buddhist lunisolar calendar is used mainly for Theravada Buddhist festivals. The Thai Buddhist Era, a renumbered Gregorian calendar, is the official calendar in Thailand.