The Ghost Festival in Medieval China

Stephen F. Teiser is a scholar of Chinese Buddhism, and this Princeton University Press book is his standard academic history of the seventh-month Ghost Festival for the dead, tracing how the festival developed by weaving together Buddhist, Daoist and popular Chinese religious strands from the sixth century onward. Its strength is showing that the festival was never a purely Buddhist import but an actual synthesis, built from close reading of medieval Chinese Buddhist and Daoist ritual texts alongside popular practice, rather than assigning it to one tradition alone. Its limit is that it documents the festival's medieval formation specifically, so a claim about how the Ghost Festival is observed today, in its modern regional forms, needs a source addressing contemporary practice rather than this medieval history.