Temple food fights
I recently read an op-ed in the Liberty Times [the Taipei Times’ sister paper] that called for a new approach to handling food offerings at pudu (普度) ceremonies held for the dead by temples during Ghost Month, and I fully agree with it.
There is a famous temple in Miaoli County that holds a pudu every Ghost Month, which is the seventh month of the lunar calendar. After the ceremony, worshipers are allowed to take food offerings home. Often, while the masters of the temple are still chanting, worshipers begin fighting over the food, using plastic bags, sacks or even carts to haul the offerings away.
The chaotic scenes at the temple repeat year after year, and they sometimes even make the news. For people unfamiliar with the ceremony, the prayers must look as if hungry ghosts have descended on the temple to gorge themselves.
Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “food fight” was suspended last year. I wonder if the temple will also suspend the food offerings this year to save its image.
It is said that grabbing offerings means grabbing “luck” and that eating such food can keep you safe. This is as groundless as the practice of racing to offer the first incense stick at temples on the Lunar New Year’s Day. Such absurd and irrational behavior reflects not only people’s greed, but also their lack of morals. In Buddhism, personal karma is determined by one’s good and bad deeds. So your karma results from a cause-and-effect relationship — just like oil floating on the surface of water and a rock sinking to the bottom. You reap what you sow, and your luck has nothing to do with the offerings. Such superstition is beyond comprehension.
On the contrary, some temples in Chiayi City try to make the best use of food offerings during Ghost Month, donating all of the food to local disadvantaged groups, such as residents of elderly care homes and orphanages, and low-income households.
When I recently volunteered to help at a temple, I was assigned to deliver the offerings to indigenous people in remote areas, remote schools and low-income families. In this way, those in need could receive actual aid and the practice makes the best use of resources.
As Buddhists, Taoists and other folk believers hold ceremonies across the nation during Ghost Month, instead of allowing the worshipers to fight among themselves for food offerings, it would make more sense to distribute the food to those truly in need, whose status can be confirmed by village and borough wardens or government agencies. Resources can then be distributed widely and effectively, while also ensuring that the religious ceremonies remain dignified and attendees are sincere.
As the Book of Rites (禮記) states, in an ideal world “people do not like goods to go to waste on the ground, but preserve them, and not just for themselves alone.” This is exactly the real spirit of pudu, which means to deliver others from suffering.
Wu Yi-chung
Chiayi County
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