Special Topics / Spring Festival Series / Spring Couplets

Taiwan’s Lunar New Year also incorporates the use of the “Spring couplet,” a traditional Chinese form of poetic verse. The most important symbol of the Lunar New Year, the Spring couplet celebrates the ‘sweeping away’ of old things to usher in the new. On the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve, people paste the red spring couplet -- usually containing auspicious words such as “Spring,” “Blessing,” and “Abundance” -- on the doors, windows, and rice jar of their homes, along with other suitable places. It not only serves as a telling sign of the coming new year, but also aims to spread good wishes and blessings to all. The atmosphere is joyful, and for the Chinese people it is a time of great happiness and peace.

DDM is a Buddhist group which promotes the creation of a peaceful spiritual environment as its core idea. Since 1989, DDM has printed and distributed spring couplets written by Master Sheng Yen to address and speak to the needs of society. These couplets take this idea of the ‘spiritual environment’ as an essential message to be carried forth to encourage and support the public.

As with every year, this year DDM has printed spring couplets -- reading “Bring Blessings and Wisdom Home” -- to offer blessings to the public. People can pick up a copy of these couplets in the Taiwan branches of DDM. We hope through this spring couplet and its auspicious words, “Bring Blessings and Wisdom Home,” sentient beings will be granted this wish and have a happy and blessed year in 2017. We hope too that this ideal of spiritual environment could be practiced and realized in our families and in our own daily lives.

Translator: Frances Liu (劉珮如)
Editor: Matthew Stoia

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