Who Is It That Comes Home at Obon?

The one you welcome at Obon is that person, whose face rises the moment you say their name.

Being reborn does not mean they are no longer here.

The equinox week is less a day for meeting ancestors than a time for walking toward the buddhas.

Let me begin with your premise, that the two must contradict each other. They do not. The folk custom is built on the foundation of the teaching. Who is it we meet at Obon. Whether offerings reach them. Whether your own former life is being memorialised. And what the equinox week is for. I will answer in that order.

It feels that way because you imagine a soul inside the person who died, and that soul leaving the body and moving into the next one. Once it has moved, no one is here any more, and the welcoming fire has nothing to receive.

But the Buddha did not teach that. One of his disciples once declared: “This mind, the one that sees and hears and feels. This is what passes unchanged into the next life.” The Buddha rejected it outright.

What he used at that moment was the image of fire. A fire is named after whatever is burning: wood burns and we call it a wood fire, grass burns and we call it a grass fire. The mind, he said, is the same (Madhyama Āgama 201).

Picture feeding fresh logs to a campfire. The fire keeps burning. But no little ball of flame from the old log has hopped across to the new one. The new log is simply burning anew. And still the fire has not gone out. The way a life continues is close to that. No fixed substance called a soul moves house, intact, into the next life.

So if you go looking for where that person's soul is right now, no answer comes back. Buddhism never looked at it that way. Not knowing is fine. What you offer from here still reaches them. Why it reaches them is the next part.

What follows is another family's story, from long ago. There is no need to lay it over your own.

Among the Buddha's disciples was a man named Maudgalyāyana. He learned that his mother, after her death, had been born into a world of endless unsatisfied hunger — the realm of hungry ghosts. There was nothing he could do, and he wept.

The Buddha told him this: on the day the monastics come out of their summer retreat, set out food and give those monastics a feast. It was the fifteenth day of the seventh month by the old calendar. He did as he was told, and that same day his mother was released from her suffering.

What matters is that his mother had already received her next life. Even so, what was offered from here reached her. So the sutra says. Here is the passage. The original is dense classical Chinese, so please read only the translation.

Turning the fruit of your own good actions toward that person is called dedication of merit. Setting out a meal, reciting a sutra, and inviting a priest at Obon are all done for the sake of it. Wherever and into whatever life they have been born, the bond you send from here is not cut.

This sutra does not go so far as to say that the dead come home every year. What it establishes is that offerings reach them. So what are we actually doing when we kindle the welcoming fire and say, “Welcome home”? That is what comes next.

Picture the sun. When thick cloud comes over, the sun is no longer visible. But it has not broken, and it has not gone out. When the cloud clears and the light comes through, the sun has not been newly born either. What was there all along has simply become visible again.

The buddha at the very source of Shingon Buddhism is called Mahāvairocana — Dainichi Nyorai, the Great Sun. This buddha's light is stopped by no cloud and no night, and it reaches the living and the dead alike.

The sun in our sky, mind you, falls far short as a likeness. It is only a little alike, and for that we add the word “Great,” as the old commentary on the Mahāvairocana Sutra explains.

Why can we say it reaches even the dead? Picture a torch. Only what you point it at is lit, and everywhere else falls into shadow, because it shines from outside. There is a distance, there is a direction, and some places are simply never reached.

Daylight is not like that. It does not come at you from one point. The sky, the sea, your own hand are all simply within the brightness, and even the shaded side of things never goes pitch dark. This buddha's light is nearer to that. It is not aimed at you from outside; it was already filling everything. The life of this world and all that has shape, Shingon Buddhism says, is this buddha's own form, entire. So there is nowhere the light does not fall.

That person is within that light. So are you, right now. Being in the same light, there is no far and no near. It was never a question of how far the light carries. It is a matter of never having been apart. Becoming invisible and ceasing to exist are two different things.

On the distance between buddhas and ourselves, Kōbō Daishi Kūkai writes as follows. The phrasing is difficult, so feel free to let your eyes slide past it. I will put it in one line immediately after.

The root is the same; the form is different. It is so for you and that person too. You are in the same light, never separate at the root, and still you are you and they are they. You do not melt into one.

Shingon Buddhism later came to call this being “two, yet not two” — nini funi. The root is the same; the form is different. It is that one line, nothing more. You need not remember the name. What is worth remembering is only this: that person has not gone far away.

So “Welcome home” is not an account of the route a soul has travelled. Nor is it merely talking to a memory. You are calling out to someone from whom you were never separated in the first place. That is all it is. Call, and it reaches them. That is the answer about Obon.

Your question stopped me. If we are reborn, then I too have had former lives, and that former self had people who were left behind. Did they make offerings for me?

They did. And it is still going on.

In the dedication verse that priests recite at memorial services and at the segaki rite, one phrase never fails to appear: hokkai banrei, all the departed throughout the whole realm of existence. We do not join our hands for the ancestors of our own household alone. Every time, we send that fruit toward countless departed whose names we never knew and whose connection to us we cannot trace.

So whoever your former life was, that person is already receiving offerings. Somewhere today, in some temple hall, a person who has never heard of you is joining their hands for your former life. And when you join your hands this Obon, you will be joining them for someone's former life in turn.

Memorial practice does not close inside one household. It comes loose from who is doing it for whom, and runs round in a circle. Your question about your own former life has touched one edge of that circle.

On the equinox week, your reading is right. It is less a day for meeting ancestors than a stretch of time for drawing nearer to the buddhas.

Higan means the far shore: crossing from this shore of delusion to the far shore of awakening. The boat for the crossing is the six pāramitās, six practices. Giving, keeping the precepts, bearing what is hard, persevering, stilling the mind, and sharpening wisdom. Of the seven days in spring and in autumn, the six on either side of the middle day take one practice each.

That middle day is the equinox itself. The sun rises due east and sets due west. People bow to the setting sun and turn their hearts toward the buddha realm beyond it. In Japan the equinox rite settled onto these dates.

Is visiting the grave at the equinox, then, a mistake? Not at all. The first of the six practices is giving. Joining your hands for the departed, offering flowers, offering a sutra: this is giving, and it is already the crossing. The hand you hold out to your ancestors is the hand that carries you to the far shore.

Obon and the equinox week face opposite ways. At Obon we ask them to come to us. In the equinox week we set out toward them. We need both, I think, because neither alone would keep us going.

The Resident Priest's Answer

The one you welcome at Obon is that person, whose face rises the moment you say their name.

Your own former life, too, is being memorialised by someone, somewhere.

The equinox week is when you walk toward the buddhas.

Let me answer your concern about doctrine and folk custom once more. A welcoming fire and a spirit altar are certainly not rites written in any sutra. They are customs the households of Japan have raised. But the one point, that what you turn toward the departed reaches them, is exactly what the sutras teach. The custom is built on that. So a temple recommends it without hesitation.

As to your concern that doctrine and folk custom contradict each other, here is my answer. Kindling a welcoming fire and setting out a meal are certainly not written in any sutra. But the ground those customs stand on is exactly what the sutras teach. That is why a temple recommends them without hesitation.

Where that person is now, we do not know. Not knowing is fine. As the sun is there behind the cloud, that person has only become invisible. They have not ceased to be.

Kindle the welcoming fire without hesitation.