Paper Gifts Offer Symbolic Comfort to the Departed Soul : In Thailand, Care for Dead Reaches Festive Heights

In a large workroom beside the Neng Noi Yee temple in Bangkok’s Chinese quarter, video recorders go for about $10. It’s a fair price for a gift, and you only have to carry it a few steps to the funeral.

If you doubt that the loved one wants to while away the life beyond watching videotapes, you might pick up a guitar instead, or a helicopter. A house costs less than $25.

All the gifts are made of paper, some full-size, some in miniature. But to the Thai-Chinese community here, and Chinese families elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the sentiment is real: to provide comforts and necessities for a departed soul while it waits for reincarnation.

The practice of providing toys and tools for the afterlife reaches back to early civilizations. Egypt’s King Tutankhamen was interred with a full-size boat and various splendors. An army of terra-cotta horses and cavalrymen surrounded the burial place of a Chinese emperor. Humble men and women have been laid to rest with hand tools or simple jewelry.

Goodies and Prosperity

The Thai-Chinese have carried the symbolism to festive heights. Created with flour paste and bright-colored paper, the gifts make the ceremony seem more like a wedding than a funeral. The more prosperous the family, the greater the goodies. At the close of the funeral, which can last up to seven days, the paper goes into the temple incinerator, and up in smoke.

Every funeral includes a gift of make-believe money and gold for the life beyond. Anything else depends on the family’s reading of the deceased’s needs and wants.

“The children will know” what a parent would wish for in the hereafter, a Thai-Chinese explained. “My father loved this, my father loved that.”

For those who lived this life in the fast lane, there are scale-model Mercedes-Benz sedans, full-size portable stereos and two-foot-high paper servants offering tea.

Ice Coolers, Fans

For others, families provide the things that made life easier here in the tropics: ice coolers, air conditioners, electric fans. The Chinese, being practical, give thought to each gift.

“Somebody came in to buy a car,” recalled Piboon Dejpokkej, who owns a shop that deals in funeral gifts, “but first they wanted to know if there were gas stations in heaven.”

They also have an eye for the mundane, those little necessities that others might overlook. Paper umbrellas are popular, the weather in the afterlife being uncertain. Nothing seems too inconsequential to recreate--rubber sandals made of paper, for instance.

Personal tastes are important. An elderly man had spent his waning years watching boxing on television, so the paper TV set presented at his funeral showed boxers on the screen.

Extravagant Presents

Over the years the presents have become more extravagant, even as the thought behind them has diminished.

“Business has been better,” Piboon said. “The young people seem to be buying only because it’s the thing to do. They don’t consider the meaning of it.”

The generic name for the gifts doesn’t translate well. In English, it comes out roughly as “paper sets for gods.”

At the Hua Lam Pong temple near Bangkok’s main railway station, four or five Thai-Chinese funerals were under way the other day, and Pramahanarintorn, a Buddhist monk robed in saffron cloth, explained the origins of the tradition. He insisted it was a folk practice, tolerated in the temple but with no roots in the Buddhist faith.

According to the monk, a Chinese king died and went to heaven, then suddenly found himself returned to his former life. He was visited by a spirit who called on him to spread the word to burn money for the dead. If they had led good lives, the spirit said, the wealth would return to them beyond the grave, and they would need it.

Karma a Consideration

Those who lead an evil life, whose karma is bad, are probably headed to the Buddhist hell, as horrible as its Christian counterpart, and won’t have time for material things. But a family never knows for sure, so gifts are given to everyone who dies.

The monk saw a positive side to the practice, despite the materialistic overtones. The survivors, by helping the soul of another in the life beyond, are making merit, doing good in the Buddhist sense.

“I have no problem with it,” he said.

The question, of course, is whether the symbolic gifts really fulfill the needs and wants of the departed soul during its travail between incarnations.

Piboon, the shopkeeper, pondered this puzzle and then answered with a question of his own: “Do you want to risk dying to find out?”

Times secretary Pharadee Narkkaphunchiwan contributed to this article.