Buddhist Halloween, why Buddhists celebrate Halloween

Buddhist Hallowe'en

Should Buddhists celebrate the ancient Celtic Druid festival of Halloween? Well, there's at least one Sangha who party in style.

But surely those can't be real charnel grounds around their Dharma Center? I would guess that if you tried to establish a charnel ground here in Cumbria the neighbors could object and the local authority would probably refuse planning permission, especially in a middle class residential area. Though I suppose you could try to convince the council that a charnel ground had tourist potential, or fitted in with their waste recycling strategy. Even so, the term 'charnel grounds' could cause a few raised eyebrows in the Environmental Health department. It might be better to call them 'temporary accommodation facilities for people with impaired viability'.

Anyway, to return to the main subject - why should Buddhists celebrate Hallowe'en? What's the connection between this pre-Christian Druid festival and Buddhism?

Buddhism teaches that the mind is not a physical entity. Consequently physical factors can neither create nor destroy it. The mind exists before conception and survives after death to be reborn into another body.

The Druids were ancient Celtic priests who shared the Buddhists' belief in rebirth and the indestructibility of the mind. They regarded the seasons of the year as being a metaphor for the death and rebirth of the human being. Halloween represented the death of the old year and was believed to be the time of year when the veil separating the human and ghost realms was at its thinnest.

Yule (the winter solstice) was the time of conception of the coming year and Imbolc (Candlemas) was the actual birth of the New Year, with the appearance of the first lambs and green shoots.

The period between Yule and Candlemas was the gestational period when the new animal and plant life, though growing and stirring, was still hidden in the body of its mother, or in the case of vegetation within the body of mother earth.

The significance of Halloween to Buddhists now becomes clear. In the Druid system the period of seven weeks between Halloween and Yule is the gap between death of the old and conception of the new year. This corresponds to the 49 days of the bardo.

Halloween thus symbolises the entry of the disembodied consciousness into the intermediate state between leaving one body and occupying another. In traditional Buddhist beliefs the bardo-consciousness will experience hideous apparitions - ghosts, demons etc. If the mind reacts with panic then a samsaric rebirth, possibly in unpleasant realms, is inevitable. However if the bardo-being recognises these apparations as hallucinations - projections and reflections of its own negative karma resulting from evil actions - then liberation remains possible.

The reasons for the Druidic custom of dressing up as ghosts, demons and so on may be to symbolise that these scary bardo apparations are in fact nothing other than aspects or appearances of the person's own self.

Do not go for refuge to samsaric gods

Celtic Spirituality | The three hares | Druids and Buddhists