Photo credit to Serena Davies. A view of the Royal Chapel, Luang Prabang
This Buddhist festival celebrates and remembers the spirits of the dead each year in Luang Prabang. During the festival, offerings are presented to Buddhist monks, mostly of food but sometimes clothes as well. On the final day of the festival, which is always the Full Moon, every family makes their way to a temple to make offerings to the deceased.
It is especially important to give offerings to the deceased a year after a person has died and the festival is similar in this respect to the Japanese festival of Obon. In both festivals, the Buddha's exhortation to honour the dead and present them with offerings is observed. To forego these familial duties to the dead has disastrous consequences - if the spirit does not receive offerings, then it will bring the living bad luck.
A good place to be for the Festival of the Dead is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang. During the festival, the Mekong is jammed with amazing gold and red boats, beautifully carved, with snake-heads for prows. The snakes are known as nagas and local beliefs take them to be water spirits which live in seven points of the river around Luang Prabang. The naga spirits snatch small children to be witnesses to their gloriously ornate weddings, said to take place at the bottom of the river.
The naga also appears in Buddhist literature when the God Ananta comes out of a pond when the Buddha is sitting contemplating. A storm is imminent and just as the first raindrops fall, Ananta slithers out of the lake, coils its body for the Buddha to sit upon and then spreads its cobra hood to form an umbrella for the Enlightened One. For this reason, the boats are sacred and are normally kept inside the temple precincts.
Each temple has its own parish equivalent. During the festival, 40 men from each temple-parish volunteer to race in their temple's boats against men from different areas.
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