How can "merit" (karma) be transferred?

Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Bhante, Wisdom Quarterly

• QUESTION: How can someone transfer merit (accrued good karma) to someone else? Karma is our actions, own deeds, and we alone will bear the fruit/fruit of them.

The Grateful Dead

If only there was someway to help our relative

ANSWER: It is possible. And it can be done without contradicting what karma is, which is quite correct as you put it. The departed having "died" have left here to go elsewhere, often to a dimension of ghosts (petas), spirits (devas), humans, animals, gods, or many other kinds of living beings.

The departed are not "dead" (nonexistent) in the sense of annihilated. They have carried on in the rebirth process. When a good deed is done here and they are aware of it wherever they are, they can rejoice in the good deed done here on their behalf or shared with them for their benefit. This very gratitude (of the grateful dead) is good mental karma and benefits them there.

The "dead" are all around at the gate, at the edges. If only someone would offer merit.

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Energy does not jump from here to there. Only information when the departed look in on us or are told what's happening in their honor. If one is raised in a culture with this practice, they will come to expect that this important ceremony is done for them.

The Buddha in explaining pointed out that not all being in all worlds are able to receive the "transfer," the caring act on their behalf, but in that case anyone of one's relatives may receive it, and it is impossible, according to the Buddha, that there not be a relative to receive it. So what counts as a "relative"? It is anyone extending back seven generations, but one might imagine relatives from past lives which may be included in this category.

In any case, whether the intended target or another relative receives it, it is good karma for the one who offers it. What one shares, particularly in the form of offering to the "great field of merit in the world," the monastic and, moreover, the noble sangha, will benefit one and not be lost. Even when it benefits the intended receiver it benefits the giver.

Obon, "Day of the Dead," memorial ritual.

Either way, the giver definitely benefits. And when the departed realize that someone thought of them or made offerings on their behalf, they are bound to be grateful, bound to become the "grateful dead." That's where the term came from, not just Jerry Garcia's band.

• [Jerry Garcia] picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary... [and in] that silvery elf-voice he said to me, "Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?" The definition there was "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial." According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls' Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of "Fictionary" [Note 29] In the Garcia biography, Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time [30]. The term "grateful dead" appears in folktales of a variety of cultures. More