Koreans Feed Their Ancestors
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 7 years before Jul 22, 2018
Dear Beloved 7 years ago
My fiancée is a South Korean lady and I frequently visit her family. A couple times in the past month I've witnessed the ritual of respecting and feeding the ancestors. For the departed souls, the living family performs this ritual three times a year (Asian New Year, Thanksgiving, and the ancestor's birthday).
A table is set in the senior father's home for the grandmother or grandfather or both and filled with fresh-cut fruit, dried sweets, a couple meat servings, dried fish, and whatever else the family desires. The picture of departed person is set in front of the table and the whole family lines up to acknowledge them. Then the senior family members give water and bow two or three times while wishing good things. This continues down the family line until the youngest children have also gone before the ancestors and offered water and wished good things.
This is primarily done by Buddhist-leaning Korean families and they feel like the ancestors need food to survive in the afterworld and also that they will be coming back in the form of reincarnation.
At one ceremony, the grandson took a couple cigarettes and put them on the table since apparently grandfather was a big smoker. I wondered aloud why they would do that since it would encourage a bad habit if he was reborn. However, the object of the ceremony is not to reform old habits, but to please the ancestors.
In addition, the ceremony which is led by the senior male in his house allows him to exercise leadership over the family and reinforces the family-based culture of respect that exists in the Korean society. The older members in society receive a great deal of respect here and the Korean language even have four or five different ways to say everything based on the age of the person to whom you are speaking.
MiBeloved 7 years ago
Dear Beloved wrote:
My fiancée is a South Korean lady and I frequently visit her family. A couple times in the past month I've witnessed the ritual of respecting and feeding the ancestors. For the departed souls, the living family performs this ritual three times a year (Asian New Year, Thanksgiving, and the ancestor's birthday).
A table is set in the senior father's home for the grandmother or grandfather or both and filled with fresh-cut fruit, dried sweets, a couple meat servings, dried fish, and whatever else the family desires. The picture of departed person is set in front of the table and the whole family lines up to acknowledge them. Then the senior family members give water and bow two or three times while wishing good things. This continues down the family line until the youngest children have also gone before the ancestors and offered water and wished good things.
MiBeloved’s Response:
The offered items have psychic or astral counterparts which are taken by the departed relative. The departed person would only take what he or she was used to eating while living on this side, regardless of whether such eatable were healthy or not.
========================================
Dear Beloved wrote:
This is primarily done by Buddhist-leaning Korean families and they feel like the ancestors need food to survive in the afterworld and also that they will be coming back in the form of reincarnation.
MiBeloved’s Response:
Because the ancestor is focused back into this world, he or she carries a psychology which is suited to this existence and not to the astral world. And so their needs from the former life continue. People usually think that they will adapt to a heaven or to a divine world of a deity or to something else, even to all-pervasiveness but it does not work in that way because one is already adapted to this existence and unless one can radically change that while using the physical body, one will not be able to adjust that in the hereafter.
Nobody should waste time thinking of adjusting the psychology after death. The place to do that is right here.
========================================
Dear Beloved wrote:
At one ceremony, the grandson took a couple cigarettes and put them on the table since apparently grandfather was a big smoker. I wondered aloud why they would do that since it would encourage a bad habit if he was reborn. However, the object of the ceremony is not to reform old habits, but to please the ancestors.
MiBeloved’s Response:
Unless we are sure that the living descendants are more psychically powerful than the ancestor, it would be a miscalculation to think that they can reform the old geezer. The other thing is that even if they are more powerful, his or her pious merits might be greater and in that case, they will be held under the spell not of the ancestor but of the ancestor’s contribution to that family line in the past life.
========================================
Dear Beloved wrote:
In addition, the ceremony which is led by the senior male in his house allows him to exercise leadership over the family and reinforces the family-based culture of respect that exists in the Korean society. The older members in society receive a great deal of respect here and the Korean language even have four or five different ways to say everything based on the age of the person to whom you are speaking
MiBeloved’s Response:
This sort of respect is being washed out by modern descendants who are themselves older relatives reborn but who have forgotten the past life. One may now wonder about the relevance and value of such cultural nuances. In some old cultures the memory of the past life of a person functions as an instinct which caused that person to respect elders, but with the advancement of human civilization with its mobility, people are freed from tradition and consider it to be very limited and irrelevant.
It will be interesting to see if Science which spear-headed the death of tradition will itself call on human beings to reestablish tradition, when Science finds out that it is worth the while for human beings to foster the psyche of departed souls. Sounds far-fetched today but it might not be tomorrow. You never know.
