Buddhism fastest-growing religion in Singapore

မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာၾကီးကေတာ့ ကြဲအက္စျပဳေနပါျပီ။ မြတ္ဆလင္ကထြက္ရင္ ေသဒဏ္ေပးမယ္လုိ႔ တားျမစ္ေနရတဲ့အထိပါပဲ။ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာကုိ ေ၀ဖန္တဲ့ ၀က္ဆုိက္ေတြကုိ မြတ္ဆလင္အစုိးရေတြက ၾကည့္ခြင့္မေပးေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ေျခမကိုင္မိ၊ လက္မကုိင္မိ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကေတာ့ လုံး၀ျပတ္သားတယ္။ ယုံၾကည္ရင္လက္ခံ . . . မယုံၾကည္ရင္ လက္မခံနဲ႔။ ဒီေန႔မၾကိဳက္ဘူးေနာ္.. မနက္ျဖန္ တျခားဘာသာ ေျပာင္းမယ္ဆုိရင္လဲ ရပါတယ္။ ဘာအတားအဆီးမွ မလုပ္ပါဘူး။ မေလးရွားလုိ႔ တရားရုံးတက္ျပီး အေရးဆုိဖုိ႔လဲ မလုိပါဘူး။
လူတစ္ဦးခ်င္းရဲ့ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခြင့္ကုိ အေလးထားတဲ့အတြက္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဟာ ဖြ႔ံျဖဳိးျပီးႏုိင္ငံေတြမွာ အင္မတန္ကုိ တုိးတက္ေနပါတယ္။ အေနာက္ဖက္မွာသာမကပဲ စင္ကာပူမွာလဲ ဖြံ႔ျဖဳိးမွဳအျမန္ဆုံးဘာသာ ျဖစ္ေနပါျပီ။

DPA, May 19, 2008

Singapore -- Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in Singapore, particularly among the young and educated, a census conducted by The Straits Times showed Monday.

The number of people aged 15 and over who are Buddhists had jumped from 31 percent of the population in 1990 to 43 percent, or 1.1 million people, 10 years later, making Buddhism the largest religion in the city-state.

The census figures published in the newspaper showed a fourfold jump in Buddhists who were graduates between 1990 and 2000.Membership numbers of Buddhist youth groups have soared.

Converts told the newspaper that the religion offered comfort in the face of uncertainties and disasters. Moreover, they said, it was a constant reminder to look beyond materialism to attain calmness and happiness through meditation and reflection. 'Through Buddhism, I can be a better daughter, a better sister, a better friend and a better colleague,' Hindu-born Tara Melwani, the 43-year-old director of a retailing group, was quoted as saying.

Actress Nadya Hutagalung, 34, born into a Christian family, said she was attracted by the philosophy of Buddhism, according to the newspaper.

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )