month. In India monks and laypeople engaged in a
cycle of exchange, laypeople providing food, cloth-
ing, and other necessities to the professionally reli-
gious, who in turn supplied instruction and the
chance of improving one’s REBIRTH. ANCESTORSand
filial piety were always important parts of Indian re-
ligion, and one of the DISCIPLES OF THEBUDDHA,
MAHAMAUDGALYAYANA, was well known throughout
Buddhism for his abilities to travel to heaven and hell.
Uniting all these elements, the Ghost Festival was
celebrated in China as early as the fifth or sixth cen-
tury. By that time canonical scriptures, probably com-
posed in China, provided a Buddhist rationale for the
practice. According to the Yulanpen jing(Yulanpen-
sutra), Mahamaudgalyayana searches the cosmos for
his mother. He finds her reborn in hell for her evil
deeds, but is unable to release her from torment. He
appeals to the Buddha, who founds the Yulanpen
Festival and decrees that all children can bring salva-
tion to their parents by making offerings to monks
on the full moon of the seventh lunar month. In prac-
tice the festival was part of the cycle of holy days,
Buddhist and non-Buddhist, linked to the lunar cal-
endar. With laypeople flocking to monasteries on be-
half of their ancestors, the ritual was one of the
highlights of the religious year, a kind of Buddhist
mirror to the New Year, held six months earlier. The
story of Mahamaudgalyayana proved that one could
be both a monk—one who renounces family and
leaves home—and a son who fulfills his obligations to
his ancestors. Tang-dynasty (618–907) commentaries
on the Yulanpen-sutraemphasize the importance of
filial piety (xiao), the central ideal of the Chinese kin-
ship system. Thus, the festival symbolized the accom-
modation between monasticism and lay life.
In later centuries the Ghost Festival moved
increasingly out of the Buddhist sphere and into
other domains of Chinese social life. The legend ofGHOSTFESTIVAL
Japanese Americans light candles during Obon, the Ghost Festival commemorating the ancestors, at Senshin Buddhist Temple, Los An-
geles, 1991. © Don Farber 2003. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.