CNN is reporting that udumbara flowers have been found at a convenience store in Seoul, South Korea. What’s so special about an udumbara flower, you ask? CNN explains that the udumbara is “a legendary flower in Buddhist literature believed to bloom once every 3,000 years”.
Why would the udumbara flowers appear at a convenience store? Apparently, it’s a message from the Buddha, telling followers to abandon the Middle Way and adopt the path of least resistance instead.
The udumbara flowers may have magical healing powers, CNN reports. What’s the evidence for that? Well, says CNN, the manager of the store where the udumbara flowers has told them that “A lot of sick people have been coming in to see the flowers. They sit in front of the flowers and some of them say they feel better afterwards.”
Who could disagree with such compelling evidence for supernatural Buddhist healing? Only “snarky netizens”, says CNN.
As a snarky netizen, I’d like to point out that the so-called udumbara flowers do not bloom every three thousand years. I reported on another incident of udumbara flowering in March last year – said to be found under a Buddhist nun’s washing machine. Before that, there was another appearance of udumbara flowers in 2008, and before that, udumbara flowers were seen in 2007.
Besides that, the udumbara flowers aren’t flowers. They’re eggs laid by the lacewing. The lacewing is a very common insect that lives all over the world, so udumbara actually happen all the time. It’s only a somewhat rare event for a gullible devotee of the Buddha to find them, because they’re small and tend to be laid in out of the way places so as to avoid predatory egg stealing by other bugs.
Udumbara flowers are the Buddhist equivalent of Catholicism’s apparitions of the Virgin Mary. In spite of the clear line of evidence contradicting the claim that udumbara flowers are mystical manifestations of the Buddha’s benevolence that bloom only once every three thousand years, followers of Buddhism keep on repeating the same old story. Why? Apparently, Buddhist enlightenment trigger the inability to perform basic mathematical computations.