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One of the easiest ways to get rid of the extra hair around your brow line, waxing is definitely note for those with very sensitive skin. It is more expensive than plucking your eyebrows but lasts longer too. It should best be done under professional supervision. Here are some tips to do eyebrow waxing:
Before waxing the brows, it is important to prepare them beforehand using a baby toothbrush to define their natural shape.
Apply astringent on the brow area to make it numb for sometime.
Calculate the length of the eyebrow you want by holding a ruler parallel to your nose, leveling it with the inner corner of the eye to see where you the brow should begin and mark the point with a dot using the brow pencil.
For people with close-set eyes, gap between the brows should be left wider while those whose eyes are far apart; the gap should be less for a balancing illusion.
To calculate the curve and mark the highest point of the brow arch, hold the ruler from the edge of the nostril past the outer edge of the iris up to the eyebrow and mark it with a dot too.
Link the dots in a gentle smooth arch that slightly tapers at the outer ends.
You will need a professional waxing kit that comes with a jar of hot wax which, a small spatula and muslin removal strips.
Warm the wax to an optimum temperature by keeping the jar in boiling water and then use the spatula to apply a thin layer of wax on the stray hairs under the eyebrow in the direction of the hair and remove it using the strips in the opposite direction of the hair growth as directed on the kit before the wax dries.
Never wax above the eyebrows.
For thick growth, it is better and less painful to wax off a little hair at the time.
Pluck any stray hair using a set of good tweezers and apply a soothing balm on the area.
Be careful enough to avoid direct sun light, acid based facial treatments, and liquid makeup for some hours at least.
Emphasize your brows using an eyebrow pencil or tinted brow shadow.

Ullambana festival is the most popular festival in China and Japan. On this day it is believed that the “Gates of the Hell” are opened and the dead ones pay visit to their loved ones. During this festival offerings are made to the spirits of the dead and to the hungry ghosts in order to bring good fortune and luck. It is celebrated on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month.

Origin, Significance and Legends

Ullambana is the festival of deliverance, and advocates and reinforces the concept of filial piety. The word ullambana translates into “deliverance from suffering”, and specifically refers to the salvation that is granted to tormented souls in hell.

According to Buddhist legend, the observance of this festival is based on the story of Maudgalyayana (Moginlin or Mogganalla, as per Oriental legends) and his mother.

Maudgalyayana discovers through his meditative powers that his mother has been reborn in the realms of pain and suffering. When he learns that her spirit is being subjected to hunger and misery, he decides to go to the netherworld to relieve her of her suffering.

Once he goes there, Maudgalyayana finds his mother starving and in a pitiful state. He offers her food, but when she tries to eat it, the food turns to smouldering pieces of charcoal.

Maudgalyayana is distressed and seeks advice and help from his master, the Buddha. Buddha tells him that his mother’s offences are deep-rooted and that he alone will not be able to ease her sufferings. He advises Maudgalyayana to make offerings of five fruits, incense, oil, lamps, candles, beds and bedding to the assembled members of the Order and pray along with them for the liberation of his mother’s soul.

The Buddha also tells Maudgalyayana that by making such an offering, not only his mother but his forefathers and kith and kin will also escape suffering and attain eternal bliss and salvation.

The day on which Maudgalyayana performed the act of compassionate filial conduct and brought salvation to his forefathers is celebrated as Ullambana. It is observed on the 15th day of the seventh Buddhist lunar month, and occurs in August in the Augustan calendar.

On this day, Buddhists offer prayers both to their departed forefathers and to their living parents and elders.

It is generally believed that one who performs a good deed accumulates spiritual merit. It is considered an even more pious act when the merit earned is shared with departed souls, which will help them to be reborn in good realms and alleviate their suffering.

Ullambana is celebrated by Buddhists the world over. Though there are slight variations in certain customs and beliefs, the fundamental rituals remain essentially the same. Besides offering prayers to the souls of deceased ancestors and welfare of their parents, people carry offerings such as food, medicine and clothes for monks and nuns in monasteries.

In China and Taiwan, Ullambana has absorbed the traditional Ghost Festival, which has the similar goal of praying for the welfare of departed souls. The two festivals are together celebrated as Chung Yuan Putu, translated as “Mid-origin Passage to Universal Salvation”. On this day, an offering of meat, together with a prodigious table of wine is made to one’s ancestors and ghosts from the netherworld.

In Singapore, the festival is known as Ching Ming Jie.

The date of Ullambana depends on the calendar that is followed, and varies slightly in different parts of the world.

Losar festival is celebrated to commemorate the advent of new year. It is the Ladakhi or Tibetan new year. The festival is celebrated for 2 weeks during the month of December and january as per the lunar calendar. The festival is marked with ancient rituals,the stage fights between good & evil, chanting and passing through the crowds with fire torches. The dance of the Ibex deer and the dramatic battles between the King & his ministers add to the joyous atmosphere. This festival is full of music, dancing and merry-making.

Origin, Significance and Legends

Kings hate to miss new year parties, too. Singme Namgyar, king of Sikkim, brought the Buddhist New Year celebrations forward by a month because he was going to be out at war on New Year’s day!

Even today, Sonam Losar, the Buddhist New Year festival in Sikkim, begins a month before the Buddhist New Year. Tibetans and other Buddhists in India kick off Losar festivities a month later - a week before new year’s day, in fact.

For all Buddhists, Losar is a sacred time and a time for feasting and celebration. It is a time to be with the family, and a time to ensure that bad omens are not carried into the new year.

Rituals

Homes are painted, new clothes are stitched, debts and quarrels are resolved, good food is cooked, and intoxicants are drunk in the run-up to New Year’s day. Homes are decorated with flour paintings of the sun and moon, and small lamps illuminate the house at night.

The first few days of festivities are exclusively family affairs, as are the first days of the new year. Later, the festivities roll out onto the streets. Tab-zan, a special bread, features in the family meals.

In Sikkim, on the fifth day of Losar, a special broth of boiled barley grains, peas and the stomach of a sheep, is prepared. Dib rug, a dish made by stuffing sheep intestines with barley dough kneaded in sheep blood, is another speciality during Losar.

In the night, the swishing sound of burning torches can be heard around a Buddhist home, as menfolk whirl flaming torches over their heads in an effort to ward off evil spirits, sickness, dog bites and other misfortunes from striking their family in the new year.

Since the new year is on the cards, Buddhist families take special care to ensure that positive things happen all the time. So, the ceremonies are umpteen.

In Sikkim, a male and female goat are sacrificed after a purification ceremony in which the animals are washed, their ears are stitched with ribbon, their bodies are smeared red, and they are made to drink the local brew, chang.

In another ceremony named Mesol, the family visit the resting places of their ancestors, light a lamp, and offer food and drinks. The family then eat the food, which is considered blessed. In some homes, the men race through the house firing guns or crackers. Costume dramas are performed. Archery contests and horse races are held. And everywhere, chang flows.

On the morning of the new year, families rise before dawn, bathe, put on new clothes and fine jewellery. Offerings of barley flour mixed with butter and sugar and yogurt are then made at the family shrine. This represents the hope for a good grain harvest. After a visit to local monasteries, the family settles down to feasting and drinking.

Celebrated In

Losar is celebrated as Sonam Losar in Sikkim, and also elsewhere in India by Buddhists.

Concealed in a deep ravine of the world, you come across the Hemis Gompa (Hemis monastery) round the mountain. The festival of Hemis Gompa brings families of Ladakhis close together as they begin arriving from all over the valley. Their ornate festival clothing reveals a Tibetan, rather than Indian, heritage.

Bright cummerbunds on the quilted coats adorn the men who are on their way to the mela. Many women wear the perak, an elaborate headdress with woven strips of beads and turquoise, silver dangles, and upright ears of braided yak hair.

Each family carries a savovar of yak-butter tea, and a canister of tsampa, a roasted barley flour.

The dances are accompanied by discordant sounds of brass trumpets that are three meters (10 feet) long. The lamas (monks) get transformed into demons and gods.

Horned devil-masks and padded brocade outfits come to life as they play out the scriptured battles between good and evil spirits. Lamas with red-robes and tall tufted hats bang on drums and crash symbols together as others gyrate and leap to fight off demons.

This two-day festival depicts a dance-homage to the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava .The festival is the largest and best of the Tibetan Buddhist gompa festivals in Ladakh. The lamas themselves offer contradictory explanations as to the meanings of the dances.

Buddha Jayanti or also known as Buddha Purnima is the most sacred festivals of Buddhist. Buddha Purnima (Buddha Birthday) is celebrated in remembrance Lord Buddha. Lord Buddha is the founder of Buddhism. This day is the birth anniversary of Lord Buddha. It falls on the full moon of the fourth lunar month (month of Vaisakh) i.e. April or May. This day commemorates three important events of Buddha’s life

- His birth in 623 BC.
- His enlightment i.e. attainment of supreme wisdom, in 588 BC.
- His attainment of Nirvana i.e. the complete extinction of his self at the age of 80.

This day is a thrice blessed day. Lord Buddha is considered the ninth avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu (Preserver in the Hindu Holy Trinity of Creator-Preserver-Destroyer). Gautam Buddha “lived and died in about the fifth century before the Christian era”. Buddha means “enlightened one” - someone who is completely freefrom all faults and mental obstructions.

Gautam Buddha was not a god and the philosophy of Buddhism does not entail any theistic world-view. The teachings of the Buddha are solely to liberate human beings from the misery and sufferings of life.

According to the Buddhism, sorrow and desire are the main cause of all the evil and suffering of this world. Lord Buddha advocated the Eightfold Path consisting of precepts like right conduct, right motive, right speech, right effort, right resolve, right livelihood, right attention and right meditation to gain mastery over suffering. It is only after following this path one can reach the ultimate aim of Nirvana. Nirvana is the transcendental state of complete liberation. Gautama Buddha lived and taught in northern Inda in the 6th Century B.C.

Buddha travelled far and wide teaching hundreds of followers. Even after death his disciples continued to spread his teachings.

Rich and poor alike were attracted by the simplicity of Buddha’s teaching and his emphasis on complete equality of all, a notion antithetical to the existing Hindu caste system. The Mauryan Emperor Ashoka espoused the Buddhist religion in the 3rd century B.C. and helped in spreading it far and wide. Sarnath and Bodhgaya are two of the most important pilgrimage centres for the Buddhists.

Though Buddhism originated in India and the religion has gained tremendous popularity throughout the Far East in Asia, there are very few practising Buddhists in the country. The number of Buddhists in the world ranges “from less than two hundred million, to more than five hundred million, with the lower number closer to reality.”

Buddha Purnima (Buddha Jayanti) 2008
Buddha Purnima will fall on 20 May on Tuesday in year 2008
 

Buddhist festivals are centered more or less around events connected to the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas, the compassionate Buddhas who stay on the earth until everyone has been liberated.

It is also said that these festivals were started by lord Buddha himself. As, he advised his followers that for keeping in touch and staying in a bond among themselves they should ‘meet together regularly in large numbers’. keeping this as a basis for the festivals several festivals are organized by the spiritual Buddhist leaders.

The public face of festivals is not too often seen, especially in India; that has much to do with the present state of the religion, but, if history is to be believed, little to do with what celebrations were like during the days when Buddhism flourished.

Historical writings tell of the days when the pomp surrounding Buddhist festivals was similar to that of the greatest of Hindu festivals now. Chinese traveller Fa Hien talks of the 400-foot tower in Peshawar, which had the Buddha’s alms bowl. There were also shrines throughout India which housed relics of the Buddha or his disciples, and hosted festivals on a grand scale. Shades of that scale are now restricted to a few events like the Festival of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where a tooth of the Buddha, encased in a casket, is taken out in procession on the full moon in August. The veneration and worship of relics on a large is unique to Buddhism.

Festivals nowadays are more spiritual and religious than social in nature; where social, they are more or less restricted to service to the community. They are more an occasion for the Buddhists to remind themselves of the spiritual path they have to follow.

Buddhist festivals are part of the long and hard life that this small but ever growing community have been through. Every festival have a particular legend attached to it and have a great story that follows it.