VU LAN CEREMONY IN VIETNAM: ORIGIN AND MEANINGS

Abstract

Vu Lan ceremony, which is a Buddhist festival, annually held on the full moon in the seventh month of the lunar calendar. Vu Lan ceremony combined with the folk sins of the dead to create a beauty in the spiritual life of the Vietnamese people with unique rituals and profound. The main content of Vu Lan ceremony is the Buddhist ideology of filial piety. The ceremony consists of ethical factors and social meaning, having a very deep spiritual significance. It is a deep gratitude to the births, showing the filial heart of children towards their parents. To clarify the content of the research problem, the article uses logical - historical methods and synthetic analysis. The research results provides several theoretical and practical values, and thus could help the readers to better understand the meaning of Vu Lan ceremony for the moral life of Vietnamese people.