Spirit Pager rattling, are you there?

After a few post regarding Cheng Ming, I am in the mood to talks about whatever related to spirits. Chinese follows a lot of tradition and the most confusing part is that we have Taoism and Buddhism. So all of the beliefs and traditions got mixed up, there are times I think it was all created to confuse us and some is created by business men to gain some financial rewards, like the burning of paper house, hell notes, paper car and etc. There are beliefs that the more smoke or fire it means the party that you are burning for will actually receive it. The belief is that the smoke will carry the essence of the “material” to the ancestors in the spirit world.

And who can forget the joss sticks, some believe the spirits smell in the smokes as a way to fill up their stomach like us human tugging and tearing away the skin off a KFC chicken. This is make worst with hundreds of ghost movies depicted it. Come to think of it what about the “Gwailo”, “Mat Salleh” or foreigner who has different type of beliefs. Does that means spirits of different origin behaves differently? Umm.. but in the human world we share the same loves for KFC, Mcdonalds, Tom Yam, Curries and all things with a lot of oils in it.

Does that mean when someone dies they went through a process to separate them into different hell and heaven? Whereby one part of the hell the spirit jumps around (like in most Chinese ghost movies) OR another part whereby they will turn to bats when they want to move around. The more I write the more I confuse I become. I guess there are similarity its just that we are exposed to a lot of movies and grapevine spread by human who allege that they have meet with one.

When my father passed away during one of the prayers session, I was asked to pray or call up to my father to come and accept the prayers and offerings. I was asked to start by saying my father name and then ask him to come to xxx place. I am not sure is this the way we human page for the spirit on the other side of the world. I guess it’s possible as now we have phone numbers, email address, blog site, umm it sounds logical, does it? I guess when someone dies, the first thing they got it’s a pager, a spirit pager.

When I went to the temple recently to perform the “Cheng Ming” prayers and the offering of vegetarian food to my father, I did the same thing; I say my fathers name and the address of the temple. I hope my father pager battery is fully powered and over the other side my father name is unique enough as someday I might just cooked some cod fish, bird nest and shark fin for him.