Removing my bad luck in 2008

I’m going to tell you my third visiting a temple in 2008 last Saturday. Last 2 visiting were for praying for good luck in this year, on the other hand this one was for removing bad luck for me.

We Japanese believe that every man and woman has 3 years bad luck terms in their own life 3 times.

Women’s bad luck terms:
1^st - 18 years old to 20 years old
2^nd - 32 to 34
3^rd - 36 to 38

Men’s bad luck terms:
1^st - 24 to 26
2^nd - 41 to 43
3^rd - 60 to 62

Basically the age is usually counted from 1 year old at a shrine/temple, so the age on the list above is one more than your actual age. In addition, women can allegedly remove their own bad luck by themselves by having a baby. It’s a useful custom...

This time I went to Jindai-ji in Chofu-city, the suburban area of Tokyo. This temple is the second oldest temple around Tokyo (the oldest one is Senso-ji in Asakusa). This temple is good at removing people’s bad luck. Though it is famous, I’ve been there just twice to just get off my bad luck in these 2 years.

We generally pray from outside the main building in the temple, but to remove the bad luck we do special things – we pay for the special praying fee and enter it. Actually we can enter it whenever you pay the special fee to pray something. Here’s the main building of Jindai-ji:

There were about 50 people there, but I’m afraid I couldn’t show you any view of inside. So I’ll try to introduce what it happened then. At first 6 monks were coming into the building. One of them blew a triton, and another one started to beat a drum. After that three of them started reading Buddhist sutra and a monk lit a holy fire to purge our wooden plate for keep off bad luck.

In fact we had to keep folding our legs under ourselves during the ceremony. After a half an hour, all the ceremony was finished and the lead monk told us to stretch them and lecture. Then I had pins and needles in my legs too much to hear his story and was worried about whether I could stand after all…Finally I managed to stand by myself without any problems and got a wooden plate.

Now I’m assured a peaceful year, that’s a relief for me.