Ullambana: The Buddhist Ghost Festival

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 13 August 2026 · Updated 5 November 2026

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Ullambana — the Buddhist “Ghost Festival” — is an East Asian festival of the dead, kept on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, on which people make offerings to the monastic community and to their ancestors and transfer the merit to their departed parents and to suffering hungry ghosts.

Known in China as Yulanpen and in Japan as Obon, it grows from the story of the disciple Mulian — the monk we met in Pāli as Mahā Moggallāna — rescuing his mother from a wretched rebirth. It is among the most tender of the Buddhist festivals.

The story of Mulian and his mother

At the festival’s heart is the story of Mulian and his mother, as the Yulanpen Sūtra tells it. Mulian — the Chinese name for Maudgalyāyana, the disciple foremost in psychic power — having just gained the six supernormal powers, used his spiritual sight to seek out his deceased mother. He found her reborn among the hungry ghosts (pretas), with nothing to eat or drink, reduced to skin and bone. When he filled his bowl with rice and took it to her, the food turned to burning coals before it reached her mouth.

Grief-stricken and unable to free her alone, Mulian went to the Buddha. The Buddha explained that the burden of her past deeds was too heavy for any single person to lift — but that the combined merit of the whole monastic community, offered on his mother’s behalf at the close of the rains retreat, could reach where he could not. Mulian made the offering, and his mother was released. The festival re-enacts that rescue every year: through generosity to the Sangha and the transfer of merit, the living reach back to help the dead.

The story did not stop with the sūtra. Among the documents found at Dunhuang, the Silk Road city in north-west China, are eleven manuscripts of a tenth-century popular retelling, the Transformation Text on Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld — a bianwen, a genre that grew out of storytellers singing and narrating to pictures. There Mulian searches the hells and finds his mother in the lowest of them, Avīci; the Buddha tells him that offering food and drink to the monks on the fifteenth day of the seventh month will save her, and in the end she is reborn as a human and rises to the Heaven of the Thirty-three. The scholar Ryu Takai, who has examined one of those manuscripts at the British Library, judges that the retelling enjoyed significant popularity in its day. It is a later work, separate from the sūtra, and it helps to know which of the two a telling follows.

Many names, one festival

The festival travelled, and took on many names — worth keeping straight:

• Ullambana / Yulanpen (盂蘭盆) is the Buddhist name (the Japanese Bon is a shortening of Ullambana).
• Zhongyuan (中元) is the Daoist name for the same day, honouring a different festival calendar that happens to coincide.
• The “Hungry Ghost Festival” is the popular, folk name, wrapped in customs about wandering spirits let loose during the seventh “ghost month.”
• Obon (お盆) is the Japanese form.

This overlap is itself instructive: Ullambana is an East Asian observance — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese — in which Mahayana Buddhism, Daoism, and older folk religion have long intermingled. It is not a Theravada festival, and one should be careful not to flatten its distinct Buddhist, Daoist, and folk strands into a single thing.

The scripture — and an honest note

The Buddhist basis of the festival is the Yulanpen Sūtra (the Ullambana Sūtra), which tells the Mulian story. Here honesty about sources, which this site holds to, requires a clear note: the Yulanpen Sūtra is widely regarded in modern scholarship as a Chinese composition — an “apocryphon” — rather than a translation of an Indian scripture. No Indic original survives, and the text places great weight on filial piety, the Confucian devotion to one’s parents that runs deep in Chinese culture. The standard scholarly study, Stephen Teiser’s The Ghost Festival in Medieval China, traces how the festival rose to prominence in medieval China on exactly this fusion of Buddhist merit and Chinese reverence for ancestors. The Chinese-composition view has its challengers, though: Seishi Karashima argued in a 2013 paper that the sūtra is not apocryphal, and Xiaohuan Zhao, of the University of Sydney, makes the case for its Indic origins in Chindian Myth of Mulian Rescuing His Mother (2023).

None of this lessens the festival’s meaning for the millions who keep it. But it would be inaccurate to present the sūtra as canonically Indian, and so we don’t. What the festival unmistakably is — a yearly act of love toward the dead — needs no false pedigree.

When it falls

Ullambana is kept on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, the high point of the “ghost month” of Chinese tradition — usually falling in August by the Western calendar. Japan’s Obon varies by region: most of the country keeps it around 15 August, parts of Tokyo in mid-July, and some areas still by the old lunar date. As ever with the Buddhist calendar, there is no single fixed day.

How it is observed

The festival’s acts all flow from the Mulian story. Families make offerings of food to the monastic community, understood as the “field of merit” through which help reaches the departed; they set out offerings for their ancestors and for the wandering, unclaimed “orphan” ghosts who have no descendants to feed them; and they transfer the merit of all this giving to their parents and forebears. In Japan, Obon adds its own gentle customs: visiting and tidying family graves, lighting lanterns to welcome the ancestral spirits home and to see them off again, and the communal Bon-odori folk dance of welcome.

Beneath the imagery of ghosts and merit lies something simply human: the wish to care for those we have lost, and the refusal to believe that death ends our responsibilities to them. For anyone carrying such a loss, our reflections on grief may be a quieter companion; for the beings the festival reaches toward, see hungry ghosts; for its Japanese form, Obon; and for the disciple whose love began it all, Mahā Moggallāna.