Today is the 15th day of the 7th lunar month. The middle of the month when the gates to the underworld are said to open, and all manner of ghosts and spirits released. The Hungry Ghost Festival, or 中元节 (zhōng yuán jié), also known to Buddhists as Ullambana.
Growing up in a largely-secular Chinese household, my feelings towards the festival have always been some combination of familiarity, amusement and annoyance. Familiarity because burning paper offerings is probably the first religious practice I ever partook in. Amusement because of the many superstitions about what you should and shouldn’t do to avoid the wrath of spirits released from the underworld. Annoyance because, as delightfully capitalist as hell money and paper iPhone offerings are, the smoke and incense from burning them still isn’t very pleasant when it wafts through the streets and into your home.
Recently however, while walking past a tent set up for a hungry ghost ceremony, I finally learnt from my mother what the ceremonies are called in Chinese: porh dorh, which is Hokkien for the characters 普渡, pronounced pu du in Mandarin. 普渡, as in the Chinese Buddhist term for universal salvation, poetically elaborated by one of the couplets that hung by the sides of the ceremonial altar:
普渡众生过苦海
To bring all beings across the suffering seas
接引幽魂登乐天
To escort [all] spirits up to joyous heaven
The intensity of moral vision wasn’t quite what I was expecting from a festival I had connected with fear and superstition. Alleviating suffering wasn’t a concept I would have associated with it. But there were the words, right before me. I was immediately struck by their resemblance to the first bodhisattva vow:
众生无边誓愿渡。
Sentient beings are numberless, [I] vow to save them.
When I realised the deep commitment of the bodhisattva towards alleviating the suffering of all sentient beings, it was the first time a Buddhist teaching had resonated strongly with my then-irreligious mind. Learning the name for hungry ghost ceremonies was similar — a sudden recognition of truth in a tradition I felt part of but had never really understood. Could the Hungry Ghost Festival really be a practice of all-encompassing compassion?
The roots of the festival, as it turns out, are a little complicated. The festival is said to have originated from the Ullambana Sutra, hence the Buddhist name for the festival, transliterated into Chinese as 盂兰盆 (Mandarin: yu lan pen). The sutra itself is traditionally held to be translated from Sanskrit around 300 C.E., but more recent scholarship suggests that it is was actually composed in China between 500 and 600 C.E. If you take a look at the text, and are at all familiar with filial piety as a Confucian virtue, you’d almost definitely agree:
The Buddha enjoined men and women of good families, “Disciples of the Buddha who practice filial piety should constantly think of their parents and make offerings to their parents of the past seven generations. Every fifteenth day of the seventh month, out of filial piety recall your parents of the past seven generations and prepare a tray of offerings for the Buddha and the monks in order to repay your debt to your parents. All disciples of the Buddha should uphold this teaching.”
— The Ullambana Sutra, translated by Shōjun Bandō
In fact, the sutra is none other than a version of the well-known Chinese morality tale, 目连救母, or Mulian Rescues His Mother. It tells the story of the monk Maudgalyāyana, or Mulian, who rescues his mother from her fate as a hungry ghost through his Buddhist practice and intense filial devotion. The emphasis upon filial piety is what gives it away as a thoroughly Sinicized Buddhist sutra.
If it hasn’t already come across, it was a tad disappointing for me to learn of the connection to filial piety. As admirable as Mulian’s devotion to his mother might be for the layperson, it seems more than a little parochial when compared to the scope of the bodhisattva vows. I’m not a big fan of Confucian values either, especially when it has been traditionally held that the worst kind of filial impiety is to not have descendants, and when “Asian values” continue to be deployed as tools of oppression.
Where did the idea of ‘universal salvation’ come from then? I couldn’t find detailed sources online, but it seems to have emerged from a kind of Buddhist-Taoist syncretism. While traditional Buddhists place the emphasis of the Hungry Ghost Festival upon filial piety, Taoists supposedly place the emphasis upon appeasing the wandering spirits released from the underworld. And in aiming to alleviate the sufferings of these spirits, what could be more natural than to borrow the Buddhist term for universal salvation?
Indeed, why limit ourselves to the sufferings of hungry ghosts? That seems like a natural question to ask, given that hungry ghosts, or pretas, comprise just one of the six realms of samsara. Perhaps we can take our compassionate practice beyond just our ancestors and the dead. Perhaps, in cultivating bodhicitta, we can extend our care towards sentient beings of all kinds.
This Ullambana then, I rededicate myself to the welfare of the pretas and the devas, the hell-beings and the humans, the animals and the asuras.
Through my practice, may the suffering of all sentient beings be alleviated.
