Can you burn joss paper for a pet?

What the tradition actually provides for

We went looking for a textual basis — classical ritual texts, folklore scholarship, Cantonese custom guides — and found nothing.

Not finding something is not the same as it not existing; a great deal of household practice was never written down by anyone. But it does mean one thing plainly: we are not going to tell you this is ancient.

What the search does turn up is recent commercial material. And the single most substantial statement in all of it comes, awkwardly, from a company that sells the paper:

“In earlier custom, pets did not have funeral arrangements on the same footing as people” — but as households came to treat animals as family, owners wanted a way to carry the feeling forward.

“Whether or not you burn paper for a pet is not governed by any fixed rule; it is more a matter of feeling.”

Source: a Taiwanese paper-goods retailer’s content article, republished across four of its own domains — we count it as one source. ⚠️ We reached this only through search summaries; all four domains blocked us, so we could not verify it against the original page word for word. Translation ours. The party saying it sells the product, which normally makes a source weaker — except that here the statement runs against its own interest, since it concedes the practice is not traditional. Checked 6 September 2026.

In Hong Kong the practice is at least eight years old in public: a newspaper reported paper shops selling cat and dog offerings on 2 April 2017 (we could only read the headline of that one — the paper has since closed and we never saw the body text), and HK01 ran a feature on pet paper goods on 17 October 2018 (updated 12 February 2025) listing food, bones, toys, clothes, beds and houses.

The detail worth noticing in that feature: it quotes no shopkeeper and no scholar on where the practice comes from. It talks only about what owners feel. A reporter working the story could not find a custom-based source to cite either.

Two things that argue the other way

So the honest position is not “there is no basis, therefore do not.” Two things support doing it, and both already existed before anyone thought about pets.

One: the mechanism is additive. The practice this site is built around, 附薦, is essentially adding a name to the list. There is no requirement anywhere in it that the recipient be a blood relative.

Two: the trade sorted this out some time ago. One Hong Kong shop sorts its offering packets by recipient into five categories: generations of ancestors, a named individual, a deceased friend, 冤親債主, and pets. A deceased friend is not a relative either. The category of “people you loved who are not on the family tree” was quietly accounted for long before anyone asked us about it.

Which is roughly where we land: this is a modern practice, built on an old mechanism that was never fussy about who was on the list. You do not need permission from a text that does not exist.

Buddhism does not have one answer here

This section is not here to settle anything. It is here so you know that the disagreement is real, documented and attributable — and that anyone answering you with total confidence has skipped this page.

The framework. The six paths of rebirth include an animal path, so animals are already inside the system rather than outside it.

What one Pure Land source actually recommends — and it is not paper. A Pure Land question-and-answer page on pets published by 華藏淨宗弘化網, drawing on teachings of Venerable Chin Kung, sets out three steps: recite the Buddha’s name for the animal, dedicate the merit, and give it the three refuges. Ten to thirty minutes for a small animal, about an hour for a larger one. The refuge formula it gives includes a line asking that the animal not be reborn in the animal path.

Burning paper is not mentioned anywhere in it. Not argued against — simply absent. That is worth sitting with if you came here assuming paper was the religious answer.

And the open dispute. An HK01 report of 24 September 2019 (updated 12 February 2025) on the subject in Japanese Buddhism records two positions by name:

• Against: Adachi Toshihide of the Jōdo-shū research institute holds that an animal cannot be reborn in the Pure Land directly from animal form, and would need a human rebirth first.
• For: Professor Hayashida Yasunobu of Taishō University holds that dedication of merit by the owner can achieve it.

The same report describes a temple in Setagaya, Tokyo, whose abbot began holding rites for pets thirteen years earlier and where 46% of the rites performed each year are for animals. That figure describes one temple, as reported by HK01 on 24 September 2019; we cannot tell you what it means anywhere else.

And on burning generally, Venerable Sheng Yen wrote something blunter than anything a shop would put on its own website: that Buddhism does not hold that a person becomes a ghost at death — that is one outcome in six — and does not accept that burned paper goods can be received and used.

Sources for this section: 華藏淨宗弘化網, question-and-answer on pets and rebirth; HK01, 24 September 2019 (updated 12 February 2025), on the question in Japanese Buddhism; Venerable Sheng Yen, Orthodox Chinese Buddhism (正信的佛教), on whether burned paper goods can be received. All checked 6 September 2026.

So this page will never contain the sentence “your pet received it.” Nobody knows, the tradition itself is split, and we are not going to trade a sentence we cannot stand behind for an order.

Three things we will not tell you

We wrote these down before we wrote the rest, so you have something to hold us to.

We will not describe where your animal is or how it is doing. Nobody has that information. See the section above for how contested it is even inside one tradition.

We will not call this the last thing you can do for them. It is not true. If you do nothing this month and want to do something next year, or in five years, that is available. No door closes.

We will not use the night it happened to sell you anything. People are unusually hard on themselves after a pet dies, and that particular feeling is the most sellable thing in this entire trade. Which is exactly why we leave it alone.

Wanting to do something because an animal kept you company for years is a complete reason. It does not need a second one.

If you do want a packet: what goes on it

What you supply is one thing: the name. Whatever you called them. A nickname counts. A name only your household would understand counts.

On script, the shop has settled one useful point: Chinese, English or a romanised spelling can all go on a packet — Chinese is the most common and the safest, and it is not a requirement.

How the packet is addressed — we can answer this now. The top line reads 往生寵物 XX, “to the departed pet XX”. The sender line reads 家人 XX 送, “sent by their family XX”.

Note the word: family, not owner. Whether owner belongs in a ritual line at all is something we never found a source on, and the shop’s own wording sidesteps it.

Be clear about what kind of answer that is. It comes from the person in our family who writes these packets by hand — not from a text. Everything the second section of this page said still holds: we could not find a single published example of pet packet wording, in English or in Chinese, and the language has no relationship term for an animal the way it has 先父 for a late father. So this line is our shop’s answer to a real gap, not the discovery of an old rule. Follow it if it helps; if your own household has a different wording, yours stands too.

What goes inside, also answered: folded gold and silver ingots (元寶), loose “stream” paper money (溪錢), rebirth money printed with a sutra (往生錢), a sheet carrying a seven-character mantra (七言咒), four kinds of hell banknotes, folded sheets of gold and silver paper, and nine small folded lotus flowers.

No paper clothing and no shoes. An ancestor packet has both; this one has neither, and the nine lotus flowers sit where they would be. That is the shop’s own practice rather than a general standard. There is a Taiwanese rule of thumb that gold paper is for deities and silver for the dead, and a good deal of pet product on the market is sold as “pet gold paper” — but Hong Kong works on a different paper system, so we are not going to import someone else’s rule and use it to worry you.

Things that are not burning

Whether you can burn anything where you live is decided by your building and your local rules rather than by you — we set that out in whether burning joss paper is legal where you live and whether it is realistic in a flat. If the answer is no, that is an address problem, not a character problem.

And the paper was never the whole of it. Things that work anywhere:

• Write it down while you remember. How they arrived, how they got their name, the worst thing they ever did. This detail goes fast and nothing brings it back.
• Keep one or two objects, not everything. A collar, a lead, one photograph. Keeping all of it and clearing all of it are both hard; one or two is usually the version people can live with.
• Walk the route again. The one they pulled you along every evening.
• Tell somebody who knew them. A neighbour, the vet, whoever always stopped you in the lobby. You will get back a detail you had lost.
• Do nothing. As normal as the rest. Some people simply sit the period out, and it is not a failure of feeling.

None of the five is a substitute for anything, because there is no original of which they would be the substitute.