Feeding the Hungry Dead

The Ghost Festival is observed in the seventh lunar month, and especially on its fifteenth day, across the Chinese religious world, where Buddhist and Daoist traditions have given the season overlapping meaning. In the Buddhist form, the Yulanpen or Ullambana observance, the festival is tied to the story of the monk Maudgalyayana (Mulian), who rescues his mother from suffering among the hungry ghosts through offerings made to the monastic community, and the day became one for transferring merit to deceased parents and ancestors.

In the Daoist form it is the Zhongyuan festival, a day of pardon presided over by an official of the cosmos. In popular practice the seventh month is when the gates of the underworld are held to open and the dead return, so that families make offerings of food, burn spirit money and paper goods, and set out provisions for wandering ghosts who have no descendants to care for them. The observance thus binds together filial devotion to one's own ancestors and a wider charity toward the neglected dead.