What is it like to belief into Hinduism? Who is Shiva, Rama or Lakshmi? How do you perform a Puja or how do you have to behave when entering a temple?
Many teachers of the religious education department of the Johannes-Turmair-Gymnasium had been thinking over these questions over and over since the teacher of Lotus Valley International School Ms Radhika Babbar had given a short lesson about Hinduism during her last stay in Germany. Today Mr Wolfgang Poeschl who visited India several times and got to know the Indian way of religious life tried to answer some of these questions during a teachers’ workshop.
For this workshop he prepared a room and built a small house temple. He also prepared Halwa to have proper Prasad and invited all the teachers of the department for religious education to join him for a proper Puja. During two and a half hours he tried to explain the major concepts of Dharma, Karma or Mukti and even taught them to sing the Gaiatry Mantra.
The teachers already know quite a lot about Hinduism because of their lectures about world religions during university time and that’s why a quite sophisticated dispute about similarities and differences between Hinduism and Christianity arose. Beside moderating the discussion Mr Poeschl also showed them a lot of pictures and videos of modern religious life in India.
The workshop was such a big success that the Johannes-Turmair-Gymnasium will make a small exhibition about Indian religions during its open day in March.
If you have any hints what they should display and what they mustn’t forget to mention please leave a comment.
In addition: In the meantime the Johannes-Turmair-Gymnasium published its own article about the workshop on the school’s homepage. The article is in German only.