Changhua County’s Qingsheng Temple said the substitution of joss checks for joss paper as the temple’s offerings during Ghost Month has reduced paper-burning by 5 tonnes this year.
Qingsheng Temple was founded two decades ago in Shetou Township (社頭). The temple is dedicated to Xuantian Shangdi (玄天上帝) and worshipers from all over the nation visit for its Ghost Month services, temple chairman Chen Tseng-neng (陳增能) said.
According to traditional beliefs, the seventh month of the lunar calendar is Ghost Month, when the gates of the netherworld are opened and dead souls wander the Earth. This year’s Ghost Month ran from Aug. 22 to yesterday.
Photo: copied by Yen Hung-chun, Taipei Times
In the past, devotees would set up a spirit tablet at the temple to honor their ancestors, the recently departed or deceased infants and the temple would burn 1kg of gilded joss paper at each tablet, Chen said.
Last year, the temple set up 5,000 spirit tablets and it had to call in the county’s sanitation department, which sent five trucks to transport the burnt joss paper to an incinerator in Sijhou Township (溪州), he said.
After the government called on the nation’s temples to curb excessive burning that harms the environment, the temple decided to commission a custom-designed joss check to replace the gilded paper it used in the past, he said.
The custom-designed checks for spirits bear individualized serial numbers, the temple’s seal of approval, auspicious red stamps and written guarantees that they are payable by all the banks of the netherworld, Chen said.
Thanks to the joss checks, the temple has been able to reduce the amount of paper burned by 5 tonnes in Ghost Month this year, even though it set up 6,500 spirit tablets, Chen said.
A man worshiping at the temple surnamed Hsieh said he thought it was a good idea to use checks in lieu of joss paper and other temples should consider adopting it.
“Burning gilded paper is about having peace of mind. Burning more paper does not make you more devout,” Hsieh said. “It is good karma to save trees and slow global warming.”
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
RSS