The Hungry Ghost Festival: the month the gates stand open

Always the fifteenth of the seventh month on the Chinese calendar, which puts it on a full moon and almost never on the same western date twice. The lunar month runs new moon to new moon, so twelve of them fall short of the solar year and a whole extra month is added every two or three years to catch up; the festival keeps its lunar address and the Gregorian date swings by nearly a month around it. These dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter. The second column matters in Singapore and Malaysia, where the observance starts on the first of the month, not the fifteenth.

The Buddhist festival begins with a short sutra, a page or two long, that reached China in the third or fourth century under the name Yulanpen Jing. Its hero is Mulian, one of the Buddha's two chief disciples and the one famous for supernatural power. Having gained that power, the first thing he does is look for his parents, to repay them for raising him, and he finds his mother reborn among the hungry ghosts, starving, "skin and bone held together." He fills his alms bowl with rice and carries it to her. She shields the bowl with her left hand, grabs the food with her right, and before it reaches her mouth it has turned to burning coals. He runs back to the Buddha in tears.

The Buddha's answer is the festival. Your mother's sins are too heavy for one man's power, he says; what can lift them is the concentrated merit of the whole community of monks, and there is one day a year on which that community is at full strength: the fifteenth of the seventh month, when the three months of the summer rains retreat end and the monks gather to confess. On that day, prepare a basin of rice, fruit of a hundred flavors, lamps and oil and bedding, and offer it to the monks of the ten directions on behalf of your parents living and your parents dead for seven generations back. Mulian does, his mother is released, and he asks whether future disciples may do the same. "Very good," says the Buddha. That is the whole text. The word yulanpen is a transliteration nobody has securely explained; the pen at the end is simply the Chinese for the bowl.

By the sixth century it was everyone's festival. The Jingchu Suishiji, a calendar of customs from the middle Yangzi, gives the fifteenth of the seventh month a single line: "monks, nuns, clergy and laity all prepare bowl offerings." The commentary then retells the whole Mulian story, and ends on a detail that shows how far the bowl had already traveled from a bowl: people, it says, had taken to decorating the offerings with carved wood and cut bamboo, with sugar-paste and cut silk shaped into flowers and leaves, "to the utmost of their ingenuity." A meal for monks was becoming a display.

The Daoist festival on the same night has nothing to do with a monk's mother. Its name, Zhongyuan, means "middle primordial," and it is one of three: the fifteenths of the first, seventh and tenth months are the Upper, Middle and Lower Primordials, and each belongs to one of the Three Officials, of Heaven, Earth and Water. A scripture in the fifth-century Lingbao canon lays the system out with the precision of a civil service, which is what it is: the Heavenly Official has three palaces, three bureaus and thirty-six offices, the Earth Official three palaces, three bureaus and forty-two offices, the Water Official likewise, "one hundred and twenty offices in all." Three times a year, on those three dates, the officials convene to "audit the ledgers of merit and fault, of life and death," of everyone in heaven and on earth, the enlightened and the ordinary alike.

The seventh month is the Earth Official's, and the Earth Official's portfolio is the dead. A later summary, repeated in every account of the festival since, gives the three their slogans: the Heavenly Official bestows blessings, the Earth Official pardons sins, the Water Official dispels calamity. So the middle date became the day to confess. Daoist priests recited scripture through the night, the faithful asked to have their own entries in the ledger amended, and, because the books being opened were also the books of the dead, the night acquired a second purpose that the Buddhist bowl already served: getting a pardon for the people you had lost. Two religions, two theories, one practical outcome, on one full moon. By the eighth century the Tang administrative code was giving every official one day's leave for the fifteenth of the seventh month, in the same list as the fifth of the fifth and the ninth of the ninth, and nobody was keeping the two religions apart.

It helps to hold the three layers apart, because most of the confusion in English comes from mixing them. The bowl is Buddhist and for your own parents. The audit is Daoist and about your own account. The thing with the empty front row is neither, and is for everybody else.

The best single description of the festival as ordinary people kept it is nine hundred years old. Meng Yuanlao, writing in the 1140s about the Kaifeng of his youth, gives the fifteenth of the seventh month a full entry, and it is recognizably the festival of a Singapore housing estate today. Several days beforehand the markets fill with goods for the dead: paper boots and shoes, paper hats, paper belts with fake gold and rhinoceros horn, sets of clothes in five colors. Households buy sheaves of hemp and millet and tie them to the table legs, "to tell the ancestors the autumn harvest is in." A three-tier frame is built of split bamboo, three to five feet high, woven at the top into the shape of a lamp-holder; this, he says, is what people call the yulanpen, and the paper clothes and paper money are hung on it and burned. The bowl of the sutra had become a bonfire.

The entertainment was also already there. From the seventh day of the month, the night of Qixi, the theater troupes in the pleasure quarters staged the play Mulian Rescues His Mother, and kept staging it every night until the fifteenth, "with the audience doubling each day." The sutra's two pages had grown by then into an evening of hell-touring, demon-fighting spectacle, the version the Dunhuang manuscripts preserve from the ninth century and the one the opera stage would carry into the twentieth. And the state took part. Meng records that the imperial household sent carriages to the Daoist temples to visit the imperial tombs, that the government issued ordination certificates for the day, and that it "burned a mountain of money" at a rite "for soldiers killed in battle and for the lonely souls," the ones with no family to feed them. That is the origin of the pavement offering. The dead you do not know were the state's responsibility first, and then everyone's.

On the night itself the family dead get a proper meal, laid on a table at home or at the temple: cooked dishes, rice with the chopsticks standing up in it, fruit, tea, and then the paper. Joss paper is folded into ingots and burned in a red tin or a wire basket; "hell money" comes in denominations of a billion; paper shops sell whatever the dead might be missing, from shirts to smartphones, to be sent up in smoke. On the pavement a smaller plate is left, with incense pushed into a jar of sand, for the passing strangers. Nobody eats that one.

The prohibitions are custom, not scripture, and they are the part of the festival that English readers ask about most. The ones you will hear from every family: no swimming, because drowned spirits are said to be looking for someone to take their place; no moving house, no opening a business, no weddings, which is why Chinese wedding venues sit empty for a month; no laundry out overnight, no whistling after dark, no picking up money from the street, no stepping on the offerings, no sitting in the front row at the show. Different households add and subtract. What they share is the logic of a house with guests in it: keep the doors clear, do not make a spectacle of yourself, and be generous with whoever turns up.

One thing the festival is not is frightening. English writing tends to file it under horror, and the name does it no favors, but the tone on the ground is closer to a block party with obligations. The ghosts most people have in mind are their grandparents. The site's pages on the jiangshi and on Zhong Kui, the demon-queller cover the figures who do belong to the scary side of the calendar; neither is what the seventh month is about.

Mainland China keeps the fifteenth quietly, where it keeps it at all. The biggest version of the festival is in the Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaysia, where it is called Zhong Yuan Jie, or simply the seventh month, and where it runs from the first day of the month to the last. Roadside offerings appear from day one. Tents go up in the open spaces of housing estates and industrial parks, each one run by a neighborhood or trade association, with an altar, a paper effigy of the King of Ghosts presiding, a communal dinner for members, and an auction: "auspicious objects," from lumps of charcoal wrapped in gold paper to bottles of liquor to statues of deities, are bid for at prices far above their worth, and the money funds next year's tent and the local temple and charities. The SCCC, Singapore's Chinese cultural center, runs a primer on the festival that describes exactly that cycle.

And there is the getai, the "song stage." Singapore's National Heritage Board dates its pairing with the festival to the 1970s, when open-air pop shows gradually replaced the Chinese opera and puppet theater that used to be staged for the same audience. The audience is the point. A getai runs for hours in a car park, with singers in sequins working through Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay hits, comedians, and a front row of empty plastic chairs that nobody sits in, because those seats are for the guests of honor. It is the Song dynasty's week of Mulian plays, updated to keyboards and LED screens, and the logic has not moved: the visitors are here for a month, and you entertain them.

Zhongyuan (zhōng yuán) is the Daoist name, "middle primordial," the audit day. Yulan or Yulanpen (yú lán pén) is the Buddhist name, the bowl. Ghost Festival and Hungry Ghost Festival are the English names, coined in the colonial Chinese communities and now standard in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Ghost Month is the seventh lunar month as a whole, and Qi Yue Ban, "the middle of the seventh," is what people say at home. Japan's Obon is the same Buddhist bowl, moved to the solar calendar and turned into a homecoming holiday. The one thing the festival is not is Halloween, whose only overlap is that the dead are about; nobody dresses up, and the candy is for the ghosts.