There’s a pretty clear, well-defined set of traits that make up a ghost in the Western world—from the mushy green slimers of Ghostbusters to translucent, pudgy Casper to the myriad diaphanous denizens of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.
They’re immaterial, legless floaters that often care little for the material concerns of the living. It’s mostly a reflection of the Western conception of the afterlife, as place above (or below) the living world. But ghosts in other parts of the world can be rather different. In China, for example, ghosts experience the same desires and, quite literally, appetites of the living. And it’s in our best interests to give them what they want.“The traditional view of death in China is different from the traditional view of death in the West,” says Nick Tackett, an historian from University of California, Berkeley, who studies traditional Chinese death rituals, especially those from Song and Liao periods. The spirit of the deceased separates into two parts, which one might call two souls. One of which resides—and ideally remains—in the tomb, and one of which resides in the ancestral tablet,” a plaque kept in shrines in homes or temples. After burial, souls need to be fed constantly, Tackett explains. “Regular offerings at the ancestral altar and periodic offerings at the grave helped satiate the souls of the deceased.”
But if something goes awry—forgetful relatives who neglect their feeding duties, an improper burial, or some unfinished business on Earth—a dead person’s soul can wander out of the tomb, hungry. These ghosts rarely meddle in the affairs of the living, but starting on the 15th day of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar—roughly sometime in July/August—the gates of the underworld unlock, allowing flocks of hungry ghosts to roam freely for a month, the appropriately titled Ghost Month (鬼月), also known as the Yulan or Zhongyuan Festival.
The origins of this belief are thought to go back to a third-century tale about a Buddhist monk, Mulian, whose deceased mother came back to haunt him as a thin-throated, huge-stomached, ravenous apparition. Mulian desperately wanted to satisfy her, but he was unable. The more he fed her, the hungrier she became. It turns out she had been too greedy during her lifetime, leaving her insatiable in death. So the monk turned to Buddha for advice and learned that, on a particular auspicious day, he could visit the temple with food, money, and all sort of goodies to fill the ghost’s appetite. It worked, and the “Hungry Ghost” tradition was born.
Of course, the true origins of the ghost rituals are a little more complex. They developed out of a centuries-long process of mixing and matching of local folk traditions, Taoism, and Buddhism, dating to well before the third century. “Although the Ghost Festival is found only in East Asia in medieval times, many of its rituals and mythological components derive from lands to the West of China, not only India but the many kingdoms and trading centers of central Asia so crucial in the dissemination of Indic and Aryan culture to the east,” writes Stephen S. Teiser, a scholar of Buddhism and religion at Princeton University, in The Ghost Festival in Medieval China.
But Mulian’s tale is a significant part of the practice today. “Hungry ghosts are the spirits of people who always wanted more than they had, were never grateful for what they were given, and cannot find peace in the afterlife any more than they could when they lived,” according to writer Emily Mark in the Ancient History Encyclopedia. “They are often depicted as people with enormous stomachs but tiny mouths and necks which no amount of food could ever fill.”
On top of being rather hangry, these ghosts have some particular preferences during their month-long wandering…
The post In China, Ghosts Demand the Finer Things in Life appeared first on FeedBox.