Assisting the Deceased

by: Chanzhi Decheng

As Buddhist practitioners, our job is to teach people how to free themselves from suffering, and also to do service for others. We can do service by healing people, also by praying for them.

We have techniques to heal an ailing physical body, and to elevate the consciousness of a mind lost in ignorance.

But Perhaps one of the most essential functions that we serve as Buddhists here in Las Vegas is to help those who have died to pass on to the next realm. This really is one of our most important duties.

Not everyone realizes why we need to help the deceased.

We as Buddhists believe that everyone is always reincarnating in this wheel of rebirth. Everyone is on a journey. We have a lot of karmic ties stringing us together. We all owe someone something. Your greatest debt is if you owe someone a favor. Or if you kill someone, you owe them a life. Or if you hurt someone and cause bleeding, you owe a debt of blood. Or, if you take something from someone and do not return it, you owe them. If you do not respect your parents, you owe a moral debt. If you cheat your brother or your sister, you also owe a moral debt.

Many people think that these things will fade away, but they will not. The debt follows the soul wherever it goes, and must be repaid or forgiven.

When some people pass away, they carry such a heavy burden of karma that they are unable to move on. Many of them actually stay behind and try to plunder their living relatives so they wont have such a heavy burden.

Then there are those who die, but didn’t do any spiritual cultivation when they had a body, or worse, through immoral habits and behaviors, lost all their spiritual essence. These souls don’t even have enough consciousness to realize that they are dead. They wander around trying to fulfill themselves like they did when they had a body.

Sometimes people die violently, or accidentally, or in great fear, and many of these become ‘stuck’ as well.

Our currently held cultural habits and societal beliefs are creating a veritable sea of wandering spirits, poltergeists, and hungry ghosts, because many people are not doing their spiritual work while they are alive.

As Buddhist practitioners, one of our duties is to help these wandering souls to cross over to the other side.

We are able to do this using a ritual prayer ceremony, or a dharma rite to assist the deceased. In this kind of ceremony, many accomplished practitioners come together and chant Sanskrit prayers, calling on enlightened masters to help us, using our physical bodies, to cultivate what these wandering souls need to enable them to pass on.

Not only is helping the deceased beneficial for the dead, but it helps out the living as well. All of us have a spiritual connection through our parents and grandparents to our ancestors. This connection is called, ‘Ancestral merit’.

People who have strong ancestral merit receive a tremendous amount of spiritual assistance through unseen hands. Our ancestors can actually help us out from the other side. This is different from help from guardian angels or spirit guides.

People with lots of good luck and good fortune always have a strong connection with their ancestral merit.

Ancestral merit can be lost though. One of the quickest ways to lose it is by being disrespectful to our parents or spiritual teachers.

My master has said many times, “No matter what our parents may have done to us, we have to forgive them. If we cannot learn to forgive our own parents, how are we going to learn to forgive anyone?”

Without our parents, we wouldn’t even have a physical body. Without a physical body, we couldn’t even experience pain and suffering, much less happiness. Just for that, we are in their debt.

If we disrespect our parents, we are cutting our ancestral merit off at the roots.

Its not that our ancestors want to punish us, not at all. In fact, they are always extending us a helping hand, unconditionally. But if we have strong issues of anger or disrespect, we are in effect turning our backs not only on our parents, but on our entire lineage as well.

This is true also for our spiritual teachers.

I remember many times, when people would come to the temple looking for help with all kinds of problems, my master would tell them, “You need to reconnect with your ancestral merit.”

What’s the quickest way to accomplish this?

Well, one way is to have a temple conduct a ritual prayer service to assist your deceased relatives. If you are able to help your relatives cross over, then they can assist you from the other side.

We do this assist the deceased prayer ceremony twice a month. Once on the new moon, and once on the full moon. We also sometimes hold a special prayer service to help a soul who has just departed.

Bring pictures of your loved ones who have passed away, and we will place them on the temple altar during the ceremony. This will help them, especially if they carried a heavy burden of karmic debt when they were alive, and it will help you as well. Because the more you can reconnect with your ancestors, the easier it will be for you to attain happiness, health, prosperity, and good luck.