Which joss paper offering do I need?

Addresses, not sizes

The whole practice is built on the idea of posting a parcel. The packet is the parcel, the name written on the front is the address, and the fire is the postal service. If that is new to you, start with what joss paper actually is and come back.

Once you hold that picture, the offerings stop being a menu and become something much simpler: different lines to write in the address field.

So the question is not which one is better, or which one is more powerful. It is only this: who do you have in mind?

• Someone you can name, and miss → the ancestor packet.
• Nobody in particular, but something unfinished you have carried a long time → 冤親債主.
• Nobody at all — you want to give, broadly → 十方眾生.
• An animal who lived with you → the pet packet, which is the newest of the four and the one we have the least settled.

For your own dead (祖先)

This is the one usually meant when someone says they want to burn something for their father.

Who it goes to: your own dead, addressed by name. There are two accepted ways to write that line — one named person, or the family line as a whole. The second form exists precisely because families forget names, and it is not a lesser version. If that is your situation, we wrote it up separately: I do not know my ancestors’ Chinese names.

And it is not restricted to blood relatives. One Hong Kong shop sorts its packets by recipient — generations of ancestors, a specific person, a deceased friend, 冤親債主, and pets — so adoptive families, partners and friends were accounted for long before anyone thought to ask.

Why people do it: remembrance, not transaction. The Chinese Wikipedia entry on 孤魂信仰 (belief concerning unclaimed spirits) puts something in one line that took us a while to absorb: unclaimed spirits and ancestral spirits are the same in nature — the only difference is that one has someone making offerings and the other does not.

Sit with that for a second. The difference is not what they are. The difference is whether anyone remembers. Which means making an offering to your own dead is, quite literally, keeping them on the remembered side of that line.

What is inside: folded gold and silver ingots (元寶, the boat-shaped paper money of old currency); loose “stream” paper money (溪錢), thin scattering sheets; rebirth money (往生錢), printed with a sutra; a sheet carrying a seven-character mantra (七言咒); four kinds of hell banknotes; folded sheets of gold and silver paper; a set of paper clothes, men’s or women’s according to who the packet is for; and a pair of paper shoes.

That list is what our shop packs, given first-hand. It is not a national standard — another shop two streets away will have an item more or an item fewer, and neither is wrong.

When it is usually done: Qingming in spring, Chung Yeung in autumn, the winter solstice, Lunar New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the seventh lunar month, and the person’s own death anniversary — which falls whenever it falls, with no season to it.

Families differ enormously here, and always have. Some keep Qingming and not Chung Yeung. Some mark the autumn equinox instead. Some do nothing but the death anniversary. Whichever your family keeps is the right one. There is no register and nobody is checking.

For anyone you may have wronged or owed (冤親債主)

English sources almost always render 冤親債主 as karmic creditors, which makes it sound like a collections agency. That translation quietly drops the second character, 親, which means a tie or a bond — not an enemy. The term covers everyone you have unfinished business with, in either direction: people you wronged, and people who helped you and were never repaid. We took the phrase apart properly in what 冤親債主 actually means.

Nobody is named on this one. That is the point of it — the whole premise is that you do not know who. If you can name the person, what you are dealing with is probably a different matter altogether.

Why people do it: the honest reasons are all inward-facing. Something has sat there for years and you want a way to acknowledge it. A falling-out that never got repaired. Someone who helped you and died before you got round to saying so. It is not defensive, and it is not exorcism.

We are not going to tell you what happens if you skip it, because we do not know, and neither does anyone who says they do. Whether this one is for you is a question about your own head, not about the spirit world.

What is inside: ingots, loose “stream” money, rebirth money printed with a sutra, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded gold and silver paper, a pair of paper shoes — and both a men’s and a women’s set of paper clothes.

That last item is the one real difference from the ancestor packet, and it follows from the premise: an ancestor packet picks one set because you know who it is for. Here nobody is named, so the shop packs both rather than guess.

When it is usually done: there is no fixed day. Of the three inherited packets this is the most freely timed. The seventh lunar month is common, as is the fifteenth of the seventh month, and so is whenever it came to mind — which is a perfectly ordinary reason.

For everyone, in every direction (十方眾生)

十方 means the ten directions — front, back, left, right, the four corners, up and down. It is an old Indian Buddhist way of saying every direction there is. The number is not the point; the point is that nobody is left out.

Who it goes to: the same Wikipedia entry lists them concretely — people who died in wars, fights, epidemics, violence, injustice, natural disasters, traffic accidents; people who died young; people whose family line simply ended. In short: the ones who died suddenly, or have no descendants left, or whose descendants lost the thread, or whose names nobody knows.

In Hong Kong this is usually called 燒街衣, burning street clothes, because it is done at the roadside or in a doorway rather than at the family altar. Ancestors get the altar; this one goes outside. Placement customs vary by region, so treat that as the common pattern rather than a rule.

A misunderstanding worth clearing: people sometimes assume this is feeding ghosts to keep them away, and then feel uneasy doing it. The traditional framing is the opposite — it is described in terms of compassion and giving, and one Hong Kong shop’s own product page calls it the equivalent of charity. It is not a burglar alarm. It is a meal handed out.

What is inside: exactly the same as the packet above — ingots, loose “stream” money, rebirth money, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded gold and silver paper, both men’s and women’s paper clothes, and a pair of paper shoes.

The two packets are packed identically. Everything that distinguishes them is written on the outside — which is as plain a demonstration as we can give you that these are addresses rather than products.

When it is usually done: the seventh lunar month is the traditional season — the first of the month, the fourteenth, the fifteenth (the Hungry Ghost Festival), and the end of the month. The shop’s own view is that this packet is not tied to that month at all: it is closer to giving to charity, and people do it at any time of year. If none of those dates mean anything to you yet, we explained the whole month in Hungry Ghost Month, explained.

One more thing about this one, which we will state and then leave alone: for someone who has moved far from where their family is buried, “the dead nobody visits” is not an abstract category.

For a pet — the newer one

Who it goes to: an animal who lived with you, named. Whatever you called them — a nickname counts, an English name counts.

What you supply: the name, and nothing else.

How the packet is addressed: the top line reads 往生寵物 XX — “to the departed pet XX” — and the sender line reads 家人 XX 送, “sent by their family XX”. Family, not owner.

That is how our shop writes it, and it is worth being exact about what kind of answer this is: it comes from the person who writes the packets, not from a text. We still could not find a published example anywhere, in English or Chinese. The language genuinely has no relationship term for an animal the way it has 先父 for a late father — so this line is the shop’s own solution to that gap, and you should read it as such.

What is inside: ingots, loose “stream” money, rebirth money printed with a sutra, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded gold and silver paper, and nine small folded lotus flowers.

No clothes and no shoes — this is the only one of the four packed that way, and the nine lotus flowers stand where the paper clothing and the pair of shoes would be in the other three.

When it is usually done: there is no traditional date. We could not find one, so the day is yours to choose.

And the part to be straight about: the inherited framework has no slot for pets. We found no classical or ritual basis for it; what exists is recent. That is not the same as illegitimate — 附薦 is a mechanism for adding a name to the list and never required a blood tie, and one Hong Kong shop has sorted its packets by recipient into five categories including deceased friends and pets for some time. But the honest label on this one is modern practice, not ancient custom.

The fuller version — including where Buddhist opinion splits on animals, and the things nobody should be telling you — is in can you burn joss paper for a pet.

What each one asks you to supply

This is the practical difference, and it is the one nobody publishes.

	Ancestors	冤親債主	十方眾生	Pets
Addressed to	Your own dead, by name	Anyone you may have wronged or owed	The dead nobody is left to remember	An animal who lived with you
Anyone named?	Yes	No	No	Yes — the animal
Usually burned	Qingming, Chung Yeung, winter solstice, death anniversary	No fixed day; often the seventh lunar month	The seventh lunar month	No traditional date; your choice
You supply	Relationship term + name, or the collective family form; whether they were a man or a woman; your own name	Your name and your Gregorian date of birth	Your name; nobody dead is named	The animal’s name, and your own
What is inside	Ingots, stream money, rebirth money, mantra sheet, four hell banknotes, folded gold and silver, one set of paper clothes, paper shoes	The same, but both sets of clothes	Identical to the packet on its left	Ingots, stream money, rebirth money, mantra sheet, four hell banknotes, folded gold and silver, nine lotus flowers. No clothes, no shoes
In one line	Posting a parcel home	Saying sorry	Giving to strangers	Saying thank you

Two consequences worth drawing out.

The all-beings packet asks for the least. No names, no dates of birth, nothing about your family at all — which also means it is the one that puts the least personal information into anyone’s hands. If you are wary of typing your grandmother’s name into a website you found ten minutes ago, that is a reasonable instinct, and this is the offering that does not require it.

The ancestor packet does not require Chinese characters. The shop confirms that English and romanised names are written too — Chinese is the most common and the safest choice, but if all you have is the spelling on a passport, that is workable. This is one of the things that stops people most reliably, and it should not.

The “you supply” row above is deliberately short, because the format itself is a page of its own: which line takes the name, which takes the sender, and why the date is the day it is burned rather than a birthday — what you write on a joss paper packet.

Can you order more than one? Yes. They are not mutually exclusive, and one, two or several is an ordinary order. Whether they can all go on a single order and be burned the same day, and in what arrangement, is a question about our shop’s actual practice rather than about tradition:

The menu is tidier than the practice

Having laid all that out in neat boxes, we should admit that the boxes leak.

One Hong Kong shop’s own description of street offerings says it is an act of merit, a giving to wandering spirits, the equivalent of charity — and then adds, in the same breath, that it can also carry something to ancestors far away.

That is a shop describing its own product, and it is quietly telling you that the categories are a way of organising a shelf, not a set of rules. Real households have been mixing these for a very long time.

So if your family did it differently from the description above, your family is not doing it wrong. They are doing it the way it is actually done.