Living abroad
Four names, one offering: 十方眾生, street clothes, 施孤 and 盂蘭
Ask a relative, read a forum, walk into a joss paper shop, and you will hear four different words used almost interchangeably. It is easy to assume they are four separate rites, and to worry about picking the wrong one. They are not. They are four ways of describing the same act.
十方眾生 (all beings of the ten directions), 燒街衣 (burning street clothes), 施食 / 施孤 (food-giving) and 盂蘭 / 中元 (the Yu Lan or Zhongyuan festival) describe one practice from four angles: who it is for, where it is done, what kind of act it is, and when.
It is an offering for the dead that nobody is left to remember, and the closest single word for it is charity.
Which ten directions?
The Chinese Wikipedia entry 〈十方 (佛教)〉 explains that ancient India used ten directions to stand for every direction there is: front, back, left, right, the four diagonals in between, up and down.
In other words: north, south, east, west, everything in between, above and below. All of it.
So 十方眾生 simply means all beings. The number ten is not the point. The point is that nobody is left out, and that idea is the heart of the whole practice.
You may come across a different list of ten online. The same Wikipedia entry notes that its source is unclear, so we leave it out.
Who it is actually for
The Chinese Wikipedia entry 〈孤魂信仰〉, on beliefs about lone spirits, lists who they are: people who died before their time through war, feuds, epidemics, killing, injustice, crime, natural disaster or road accidents, and people who died without descendants or died young.
Put plainly: people who died suddenly, who had no children, whose family line ended, or whose names nobody knows any more. In Chinese they are often called 孤魂野鬼, literally “lone souls and wandering ghosts”.
Different places call them different things: 好兄弟 (“good brothers”), 有應公, 大眾爺, 萬善爺, 下界爺. Traditionally there were public places to look after them too, such as charity graves (義塚) and altars built for them (厲壇).
Four names, four angles
The four terms are talking about roughly the same thing. Each one just looks at it from a different side:
| Term | Which angle it describes |
|---|---|
| 十方眾生 all beings | Who it is for: every being, without exception (a Buddhist term) |
| 燒街衣 burning street clothes | What you do, and where: burn by the roadside. The Wikipedia entry 〈中元節〉 describes it as a common Hong Kong custom: people go out in the evening with food offerings, incense, candles and paper money and make offerings to wandering spirits at the side of the road. |
| 施食 / 施孤 food-giving | What kind of act: giving. The entry 〈施孤〉 defines it as giving food and drink to hungry ghosts out of compassion, to ease their suffering. |
| 盂蘭 / 中元 Yu Lan / Zhongyuan | When, and on what occasion: the rites held on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month |
An easy way to remember it: one act. “All beings” says who it is for, “street clothes” says where you burn, “food-giving” says what kind of act it is, and “Yu Lan” says when.
The “clothes” are paper, like everything else. What gets burned is a 衣包, literally a “clothes packet”: a paper bag holding paper clothing, paper money and folded gold and silver paper, sent off as one parcel.
Earning merit, or giving to all beings?
You may also hear this offering described as 積德, “accumulating merit”. The two framings lean in different directions. “Merit” leans towards benefiting yourself; “all beings” leans towards benefiting the lone spirits.
How do the two fit together? Start with two related words, 功德 and 福德, both usually rendered “merit”. The Chinese Wikipedia entry 〈功德〉 says:
The two are not sharply distinct and usually mean the same thing. Where the emphasis is on blessings in this world, people tend to say 福德; where it is on blessings beyond this world, 功德. (Our translation.)
Then there is 迴向, dedicating merit. The entry 〈迴向〉 lists three kinds. One is dedicating it to all beings, “so that all beings share in the blessing and benefit”.
The traditional order is: help others first, and whatever good comes back follows from that. It is not a payment made in exchange for something. The order matters. Reverse it, and a good deed turns into a lottery ticket.
That is why we call this packet 十方眾生, “for all beings”, and do not describe it by what burning it might bring you.
Three common mix-ups
- “It’s feeding ghosts, so it must be something to be afraid of.” The traditional framing is giving and compassion from beginning to end, not fear. The 〈施孤〉 entry says outright that it is done “out of compassion”. Put simply: this is not a burglar alarm. It is handing out dinner.
- “It has to be brought inside and worshipped.” Traditionally, street clothes are burned at the doorway or by the road (as in the 〈中元節〉 description quoted in the table), while ancestors are honoured at the home altar or at the grave. Practice varies from place to place.
- “The ten directions is a place.” It is not a place. It is every direction, which means everyone. Nobody is fetching anything from a region called “the ten directions”; it is a way of saying everyone gets a share.
One more fact worth knowing. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry 〈香港潮人盂蘭勝會〉, the Yu Lan festival of Hong Kong’s Chiu Chow (Teochew) community was added to China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2011, and to Hong Kong’s own representative list in 2017.
So one large public form of this practice, the Chiu Chow Yu Lan festival, is officially listed heritage.
This packet goes through the same process as the others. On ordinary days it is usually burned within three days once your payment is confirmed (festivals excepted). Each day, sometime between 3 and 6 pm Hong Kong time (HKT, UTC+8), that day’s packets are taken to be burned together, as one batch.
It is not only for the seventh month. The shop treats it like giving to charity, something you can do at any time. If you do want it done for the seventh month, festivals take longer than three days and people tend to order ahead, so ordering earlier is simpler than waiting until the fourteenth.
It also asks the least of you. There is no ancestor’s name to supply: the bag is addressed to 十方眾生, and the only name on it is yours, as the sender.
Street clothes go by different names in different places, and the placement and timing differ too. Follow whatever your family has always done. There is no answer sheet to check yourself against.
If this would help
This one is a good deed from start to finish. Whether you do it, and when, is entirely up to you.
See the all-beings packet