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Another shot taken at Wat Chetawan in Petaling Jaya. Here, as devotees walked past a row of Buddha statues they dropped coins into the alms bowl as a donation to the temple.

It is a common sight in South East Asian countries where Buddhism is the main religion, to see monks going round early in the morning with their alms bowls to recieve food from lay devotees.

The alms bowl has symbolic association with the Buddha. It is said when he began meditating under a Bodhi tree, a woman offered him a golden bowl filled with rice, thinking he was the divinity of the tree. He divided the rice into 49 portions, one for each day until his enlightenment. But he threw away the precious bowl.

The simple begging bowl is thus a symbol of the Buddha's teaching on non-attachment.