Ghost Festival - An auspicious month

The Chinese Seventh lunar month begins at 17^th August till 15^th September this year depicts an important traditional event of worshipping the soulful deceased. Ghost ? If you may like to call…

In premodern China till now, the great majority of people held beliefs and observed practices related to death that they learned as members of families and villages, not as members of organized religions. Such beliefs and practices are often subsumed under the umbrella of "Chinese popular religion." Institutional forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and other traditions contributed many beliefs and practices to popular religion in its local variants.

Chinese emphasized biological continuance through descendants to whom they gave the gift of life and for whom they sacrificed many of life's material pleasures. Moreover, personal sacrifice was not rooted in a belief in asceticism per se but in a belief that sacrificing for one's offspring would engender in them obligations toward elders and ancestors.

Human soul if any…

Soul ? Does human body consist of soul? Of course, it’s my/our belief since umpteen ancestral years back. Most Chinese embraced the doctrines of karma - retribution for past actions, causality and, samsara (cyclical existence) in their thinking about life and death.

In essence, the body can be viewed as a horse, while the soul is the rider. The definitive question of life is; who is leading who, and in which direction is ones life headed?

Do Westerners believe in soul ?

Traditionally for Christians, "a human becomes a person at ensoulment"（神授以魂魄，即上帝為每一个新身体创造一个灵魂）.

In both ancient Hebrew tradition and early Christian tradition, ensoulment happened when the child took his or her first breath - the soul being directly equated with the breath of life.

Modern Christian views of the ensoulment tend to equate first conception with the new soul. 

Alas, this does have some problems, however. If 'ensoulment' happens at conception what happens if the mono-zygote（受精卵)produces twins? Do identical twins have identical souls? Secondly, if ensoulment happens at conception, and science has shown that roughly 80/90% of all products of conception will either not implant or will abort within the first month of the pregnancy, isn't that a lot of wasted souls then ?

Human Soul and DNA…

我们常认为人的基因决定来自父母俩的基因结合已被证明是远远错误的事。其实DNA在某种情况下是可以“被改变”的。譬如怀孕母亲的饮食也有很大的影响。
同样的，一些发展中的基因需要某些细菌存在，而最令人惊讶的是，孕产妇当即的健康水平更可以决定哪些区域会“基因甲基化”– DNA methylation。因此它们“根本上的改变”是不难解释，而我们常自以为是的概念是不准确的。
现代研究表明，只有30％或更少的受精卵将继续成为胎儿，许多的这些在早期流产是由于染色体（chromosomes）数目异常。所以，“认为每一个受精卵是一个潜在的‘人’是错误的观念。”

所以嘛，即使是灵、肉也有其不同之类！好比孔老夫子用以看‘人’的名句：-“君子和而不同，小人同而不和。”