Reading Opening Pages

Bhutanese read religious scriptures as a ritual for wellbeing. They believe that merely possessing, seeing, writing and reading the sacred scriptures leads to a lot of merit and that the righteous spirits flock where the sacred scriptures are kept. Thus, families often sponsor the reading of the Buddhist canon or part of it for merit making and also as a ritual to avert problems. When they cannot undertake the full reading of a scriptural corpus, they do the ritual reading of just opening the book by reading a few pages in the beginning. The act of even opening the book and reading the first page is said to have great benefit in making merit and pleasing the righteous deities.