Guanyin oracle in Singapore

[by Simo Capecchi from Singapore]

Recently I flipped through an “old” sketchbook, where I reported a ritual inside a Chinese temple in Singapore during our Urban Sketchers Symposium in 2015 and nice memories of that trip came alive again.

In Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho temple, people of any age would stop for a long time or briefly, before going to work, to school or while going to the market, asking for a prediction to the merciful Guanyin. The temple is always so full! 

A box full of numbered sticks has to be shacked until just one will fall out. That number (your oracle answer) corresponds to an ancient poetry and provides an answer to your question, to be interpreted. Hundreds of bamboo sticks shaked produce a very loud noise inside the temple.

A guardian will give you a pink piece of paper with the correspondent oracle’s message. They will kindly skip number 100: a divination too bad to be given to anyone.

If the result is positive, you can keep the oracle in your pocket, otherwise is recommended to burn it right away.

Outside the temple, under umbrellas, many people offer their help to interpret the oracle’s answers.

I followed a girl during the whole ritual to discover it can be done in a few minutes:

A gentle guardian gave me as a present one bamboo stick, two red jaobei, some pink messages and an english version of the oracle numbers’ book… interesting text, not so easy to translate in proper answers. I even found an online version of the oracle. 

Popular devotion and rituals are an important issue in Naples too, where we have a 90 numbers system of (non-religious) sort of divination, to be used to interpret dreams…

And below is an Italian short version published a few days ago on “Dove” travel magazine , where I’m back-columnist.

Thanks to Francis Theo for his introduction to the temple in a hot morning of two summers ago. Complete sketchbook here.  Some participants sketches here.