Perilous Crossings: Caring for the Living and the Dead through Food at a Vietnamese Zen Temple in Northern Virginia

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.