Made in Macao | In the month of ghosts

Jenny Lao-Phillips

This is the time of year when the air is permeated with the smell of burning paper and incense – the seventh month of the lunar year in China, commonly known as the Ghost Festival 鬼節.
It is believed that the gates of hell will open this month. On the fourteenth day, the gate is fully opened, so July the 14th is referred to as Ghost Day. Some people only burn joss paper for the ghosts on the 14th, but some continue this ritual for the whole month.
This is also the month when we hear stories of ghost sightings and encounters. However, we seem to have understood the Ghost Festival in the wrong way.
Every seventh month of the lunar year, someone asks me why people are burning piles and piles of paper every year. I used to explain that those joss papers were hell’s currency, and by burning them, ghosts would receive the money. And people were burning joss paper on the street to pay the ghosts that were passing by. For many years, I thought that people burnt money for ghosts wandering on the streets for their own safety, in the hope that the ghosts would take the money and leave them alone.
Well, I was wrong, and so are many people from my generation.
Since we were kids, we have heard stories that the wandering ghosts are looking for substitutes. If they take enough lives of others, they will meet their quota for reincarnation. So came the many taboos during the ghost month: we should not go swimming because those who died from drowning would pull swimmers down in the water with them. We should not wear red or open an umbrella indoors, because that would attract ghosts to us. We should not wander the streets after midnight, lean against walls, take selfies on the streets, and more.
If all these taboos were real, a curfew would have to be imposed for the whole seventh month to prevent any accidental deaths. However, all these scary stories and common beliefs of Ghost Day are misunderstandings caused by the many horror movies using the Ghost Festival as a setting.
So what exactly is this festival about?
The Ghost Festival actually started as a time for accumulating merit and for saving souls, not unlike the All Souls’ Day celebrated by Catholics. The Ghost Day began as Yu Lan Pen Festival 盂蘭盆 for Buddhists and as Zhongyan Festival 中元節 for Taoists. For Buddhists, it was the day to make food offerings to the bhikkhus and to the deceased in order to accumulate merit, so their ancestors who were sent to hell could be absolved of their sins. According to the Taoist tradition, Zhongyan Festival is the birthday of the earth god, the day that he absolves the sins of the deceased, so incense was burnt to pray for forgiveness for our ancestors. Later, these rituals went beyond asking for forgiveness for our ancestors and extended to all those who were deceased.
So the Ghost Festival is not a scary time, right?  Of course, it is less exciting too. But knowing the real practices of the Ghost Festival makes me look differently at the old people burning incense and joss paper on the streets. They are not doing that for their own safety, but to seek forgiveness for the sins of all those in purgatory.