Macao, place of wonder and history! Asia's largest entertaining place! As we have all seen all the PRs of Macao, that place sure is amazing! Full of joy and friendliness. But little does people knew about Macao's traditional Buddhism and some other horrific "under world" culture.
Me and my 2 friends went to this amazing entertaining place 2 months ago. We went to lots of famous historical places to see those historical monuments. We brought our "dictionary of Macao" with us read the history and the meaning of each of the place, we stopped at a bakery cafe and checked our map on where our next destination will be closer. One of my friend said that he wanted to go to a casino and so we went to the most famous and the oldest casino hotel that we have known since it was very close. We walked passed the new hotel and crossed the road to get to the old hotel.
We are surprised how popular the place still is after decades or a century? We see lots of tourists taking pictures at the lobby, lining up to check-in and so on. After crowds of people we finally got to the casino floor. It was huge and there were lots of people around betting and shouting for their fortune. I was already half lost then all the sudden my friends were gone. I tried to walk out of the crowds of people and get myself out of the casino floor.
I saw one of my friend wondering around looking for the other, I shouted at him and we got together. He said he have lost the other friend. We both got out of the casino floor first then hoped that we will meet him outside, he was not there. We tried to call him but his phone was not working at the time. We went off to a cafe and sat down, we heard our friend coming down the hallway with some security guards. We stopped them and asked what happened, the security guards replied, "He was cheating!" I could not believe that at first and asked to see the video, it took awhile and finally they showed us a footage on my friend's game. My friend was playing blackjack at the time and hit for more cards. He held out both of his hand and a mysterious hand appeared from under the table.
First, he thought that it was one of us, he looked around but saw none of us he dropped his Spade 5 and hand changed it to an Ace and held it back to him. He did not know what made him do it or why did "it" want him to cheat at all. The security guards claims that they knew that he was cheating and was grouped with some others. The 2 of us explained and told them when the hand appear none of them were there. After a long argument, the casino let my friend go without any finds. He told us later that during his game he heard a chanting which went "Um pretaya swaha". We looked up prayers and chants, and we found that it was a chanting from the preta's prayer "Prayer of the dead spirits of hungry children".
We did not know much of what that really was until we met out Thai professor who himself was once a Buddhist monk. He told us that people will buy "human oil" to keep the spirit of the child. It was said that by keeping the spirit, it will help to win more fortune to the keeper. That means that the spirit will do anything for the person who keeps them. But that sometime is risky since you will have to give it what it want or else you will be cursed forever by it.
Hearing the preta's chants had a few different occasions. When you hear it during a business talk, that will mean that your partner is trying to lead you to the wrong direction. When you hear it during a meal, that will mean that you are being too greedy, and needs to share more, so on.
The occasion of my friend would be considered that he is giving away his richness, the spirits will sometimes make its own rules on chanting its prayer, said our professor. He assumed that one of the players on the table must have been keeping a child's spirit, and was too greedy that he needed to give away and share his richness, the spirit had chosen my friend probably he was going to lose badly on that game.
I am out of Macao now of course. I was planning to go back and thank the "spirit" for trying to help my friend out, but I don't know what to do since my religion is different. I asked my professor whether we shall offer the spirit something. He said it's up to us but we have to know that the spirit is being "kept" by others, it will not be there for ever like other "wild" spirits. But what I feel very wrong about this culture of keeping a child's spirit is we buy human oil... From where will they get the human oil from?
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That is why it is illigal, we are not aloud to keep dead bodies of any person, so don't be out of your mind.
E.Lynx