Superstitions are a deep part of the roots of every culture. Anyone dropping into the West on October 31st without a knowledge of the culture and customs of Halloween would be very confused by what they saw, children and adults wandering the streets in macabre outfits and demanding ‘trick or treat’. A festival like Halloween is a complex cocktail of centuries of influences, some modern and commercial, but others stretching back to the earliest attempts of people to make sense of their world. In the dark origins of Halloween we can find echoes of the ancient Celtic festival of ‘Samhain’, when it was believed that the border between the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead dissolved and spirits could cross over and walk amongst us.
In this article I want to talk to you about 中元节, Zhōngyuán Jié , which is a Chinese festival with some remarkable similarities to Halloween and some important contrasts. Zhōngyuán Jié is a lunar festival like most Chinese festivals and takes place on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. This means it takes place in August or September. I wonder if this means we can see the origins of both Zhōngyuán Jié and Halloween linked to the farming year. This might suggest that the time of communication with the dead occurred after the harvest of the next year’s food and was a time for thanking the ancestors for their contribution to gathering winter supplies. In China, as we shall see, the spirits are mostly good. In the West, the spirits have become something to fear, possibly a strong influence of christianity, which teaches that people who do bad things in life will become ghosts unable to enter heaven.
Where did Zhōngyuán Jié begin? There are origins in both Daoism and Buddhism. Daoist beliefs are remarkably similar to Celtic Samhain, suggesting that they both began in shamanic ideas about closer ties between people and nature. In Daoism, this time of year is when the gates of the underworld are opened, which allows the spirits to return to earth. The spirits that return to Earth are believed to be the ones that died as a result of injustice or those ancestors whose family had not taken enough care during the burial rituals. We’ll return to these ideas when we talk in a little while about the customs Chinese people follow even today.
The other source is in Buddhism. The Buddhist story concerns a Buddhist sage called Mulian. Mulian’s mother was suffering agonies in the land of the ghosts. Mulian asked the Buddha for advice. The advice was to give food and prayers to a local community of Buddhist monks on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. According to Buddhist beliefs, the mother was released from her torment. This leads to a further set of customs, as we shall shortly see.
I spoke to my Chinese colleagues to see if Zhōngyuán Jié is still an important part of the experiences of ordinary people. Somewhat to my surprise I was given a picture of traditions still very much alive. Like most things in China, family is at the heart of it. One mother described for me how it is very important to be back in the hometown if they possibly can. In an echo of the Daoist ideas seen above she told me how at this time, there is communication between the living and the ancestors. There are two important aspects to looking after the ancestors. The first set of customs concern food. The family prepare twelve flatbreads which are offered to the ancestors on the family altar. Pieces of the same flatbread are hung on red thread to make protective necklaces worn by children. Other traditions involve burning paper money and paper gold ingots. These symbols of wealth are set on fire so that their value passes to the ancestors who can use the money to buy happiness in the after life. We can also see how this connects to the Buddhist beliefs about releasing the deceased from any suffering. In turn, if the ancestor spirits are well looked after and contented in their spirit world then they will have no reason to cross over into the world of the living.
Another explained to me how, now that she has to live in Beijing, an impossible journey away from her hometown, the customs of Zhōngyuán Jié are fading. However there is one common sight in Chinese cities at this time. If you’re walking in the streets at night you will come across small groups carefully tending a fire on the pavements, often at crossroads, and feeding the flames paper money. She explained that with urbanisation and increasing wealth, enormous sums of ‘money’ are passed to the ancestors in this way, sharing the family’s increasing prosperity back through the centuries. In her version of this tradition, people will chant or talk to their ancestors as they burn the money, thanking them for all of the family’s newfound income, telling the ancestors just how much is being sent to them and detailing the sort of protections the family needs at that moment. Although I’ve never seen it myself, a similar custom in southern China involves releasing lanterns shaped like lotus flowers drifting across lakes, to guide any wandering ancestors back to the comforts of the after life.
All of this is a long way from the evil ghosts and ghouls of halloween. Of course now we know the background to these cultures it’s easy to explain the differences, isn’t it. To the western mind, the ancestors are either sleeping peacefully in heaven, or condemned to a life of unbearable suffering in hell, or wandering somewhere between. It’s even arguable I think, that the deceased have lost their humanity and become either ‘souls’ or ‘souls in torment’. It’s ‘resurrection’ when we are promised a return to ‘eternal life’. This leaves abundant room for ‘evil spirits’ who take on the form of ghosts, ghouls and goblins and need to be brought off with candy on halloween.
On the other hand, if the deceased are still essentially family members, then it’s unlikely that you’d think of them as evil or threatening. In fact don’t you think it’s arguable that if at Zhōngyuán Jié, what the Chinese people do is to communicate and commune with past members of their family, then this can’t really be called superstition at all. I for one certainly feel no sense of the strange about the fact that I still think frequently of my ‘dead’ maternal grandmother, who in many ways is still alive to me, influencing my thoughts and actions. Is that weird?
However things are never quite so simple. I’ve mentioned Daoism and Buddhism as relatively benign influences on the Chinese Ghost Festival. However, just like in England, there are strands of gory and gruesome folk tales wrapped around the tradition that are much darker. One of my colleagues told me that it’s one thing to be at peace with the ancestors in your own family, but you might have every reason to be worried about the bad habits of ghosts from other families, possibly an intriguing twist on hometown feuds and rivalries spilling down the centuries.
Just like in English popular beliefs, this fear of the ‘evil dead’ gives rise to fascinating superstitions. In England I will always remember the idea of ‘widdershins’, that at halloween if you ran anti-clockwise around a church, the devil was sure to snatch you away. In China there’s a version of this about water. Rivers and lakes are the haunt of 水鬼, Shuǐ guǐ, water demons, who snatch unsuspecting swimmers and pull them under.
Furthermore, there’s a list of do’s and don’ts for anyone unlucky enough to have to be outside in the dark during the festival period. If you hear someone call your name, you must never turn around. It’s almost certainly a ghost trying to lead you astray. You should never, ever whistle outside in the street late at night because you will undoubtedly catch the attention of a ghost who will follow you home. If you feel like a breather on your nocturnal walk home, never lean on the wall because one of the favourite habits of ghosts at night is to hang around on walls waiting for victims. Perhaps most wonderful of all is the advice that you should never hang up your clothing to dry outside at night, for fear that a ghost will steal the clothes or even worse steal your identity by making off with who you are, along with what you wear! Don’t say you haven’t been warned!
When I first arrived in China ten years ago, there were some western style celebrations of halloween. These have since all but disappeared as people have realised that, like Christmas, these festivals without roots in Chinese culture are just carefully exploited excuses for commercialisation. And who needs imported traditions, when there is so much happening in your own cultural customs. In this article, I’ve only scratched the surface of Chinese traditions of ghost stories and supernatural tales. I’d love to hear from you if for another Halloween special you’d like to share your passion for the more macabre side of the Chinese literary imagination, for example Liáozhāizhìyì, or ‘Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio’ as it’s usually called in English, by the seventeenth century author, Pú Sōnglíng.
Happy hauntings!