Ep. 346 | The Hungry Ghost Festival

The China History Podcast

Laszlo Montgomery

Places & Travel, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is the third time the history and traditions behind a Chinese holiday is being introduced. The history behind the Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival were both presented back in the days when I knew even less than I do now about how to podcast. The Hungry Ghost Festival goes by a number of names, mainly because it's one of those rare festivals that is celebrated by both Daoists and Buddhists. It's called the Zhōngyuán 中元， Qīyuèbàn 七月半, Yúlánpén 盂兰盆, and Ullambana Festival. Daoists and Buddhists have their own spin on the legends behind the Hungry Ghost Festival. But the main idea remains the same. On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the gates of hell open up for all Hungry Ghosts to return to the world of the living and for the living to show them the respect and kindness they were denied in their living forms. https://www.instagram.com/lahungryghostfest/ https://chssc.org/event/la-chinatown-hungry-ghost-festival/ https://lahungryghostfestival.com/ https://www.micahhuangmusic.com/ https://www.instagram.com/hungryghostnote/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone welcome back again Lhasla Montgomery here with another China history
0:04.4	podcast episode
0:06.5	it's gonna be a rather short episode this time but this will offset some of the past
0:10.7	episodes that ran a little long thanks to the occasional
0:14.0	loquacity of your humble narrator. Today we're going to explore another
0:18.6	holiday, the third traditional Chinese festival to be featured in this long-running family program now in its
0:25.6	15th year in the biz. If you'll indulge me, I'll never forget the Chinese New Year holiday episode from 2011 back when I first started the
0:36.3	CHP. This was the 30th episode I had ever recorded and I was in Frankfurt for a show and leaving the next morning on an early flight back to LAX. It was just before Chinese New Year.
0:48.0	And I didn't go to sleep that night out of fear of my alarm not going off, you know, causing me to miss my flight.
0:55.0	And as a result, I stayed up all night and wrote the whole Chinese New Year episode,
1:01.0	including the recording, and posted it before I left the hotel around 5.30 that morning.
1:07.0	That I set my alarm to 4.30 a.m. and also scheduled a wake-up call with the front desk,
1:13.0	wasn't enough to allow me to fall asleep that night.
1:16.0	I'm like that the day before I travel.
1:18.0	And then later in the same year, I did one on the mid-autumn festival,
1:22.0	at Jong-Chilge.
1:24.1	And now there's this one.
1:25.7	And with the Jong-Yun Hungry Ghost Festival holiday coming up,
1:29.7	I thought, man, this would be an opportune time
1:32.2	to introduce that holiday that I hate to say this
1:35.2	sort of slips through the cracks so let's see what this one's all about I also
1:40.5	want to get this out before the date of the holiday on the Chinese
	...

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