Everything You Need to Know About Vu Lan Festival

For decades, Vu Lan Festival has always been among the significant holidays in Vietnamese people's spiritual and cultural life. It not only shows Vietnam's "remember its source when drinking water" morals but also a day for descendants to honour their parents, grandparents, and ancestors.

When renting a car with driver with Vietnam Budget Car Rental, you have the opportunity to immerse themselves in meaningful activities in this Vu Lan ceremony.

What is Vu Lan Festival?

Many Vietnamese households begin planning for the Vu Lan festival (Ullambana festival) as the lunar calendar of July. It is known as name Amnesty of Unquiet Spirits. Celebrated by Vietnamese people, they engage in many religious rites and humanitarian activities, this is the second biggest annual traditional holiday of Vietnam following the Lunar New Year (Tet).

On the lunar calendar, the Vu Lan Festival is a customary celebration held yearly on the 15th day of the 7th month. Based on the solar calendar, this date usually matches a full moon in the middle to late August or early September. On Saturday, September 6th 2025, Vu Lan Festival will take place.

Participants in traditional robes hold lotus lanterns during Vu Lan Festival

Especially in Buddhist cultures, the occasion has great cultural and spiritual meaning. This is a time to pay respect for ancestors and thank their for their sacrifices and contributions. Families show respect to their lost loved ones by visiting ancestral cemeteries, saying prayers, and making gifts.

The Sanskrit term "Ullambana", "deliverance from suffering", informs the festival's name, "Vu Lan". The celebration's roots are in a narrative found in Buddhist scriptures concerning a student whose humanitarian deeds and Buddhist teachings helped him to free the soul of his mother from the domain of hungry ghosts.

Various customs and ceremonies are followed throughout the celebrations, including the cooking of traditional foods, lighting of incense and candles, and releasing lanterns or lotus blossoms into bodies of water. These symbolic motions are supposed to respect ancestors and guide their souls toward a quiet life in the next world.

Read more: Mother’s Day in Vietnam

History of Vu Lan Festival

The Vu Lan Festival comes from the narrative of Maudgalyayana, one of the two primary disciples of the Buddha who saves his mother from the domain of ravenous spirits. Maudgalyayana used his superhuman abilities to find his mother, Lady Qingti, was suffering in the next world because of the terrible karma she made throughout her lifetime. 

Devotees gather for a solemn candle-lit ceremony in front of a Buddha statue

Filial piety drove him to bring food to his mother in an attempt to satisfy her hunger and thirst. But as the food got to her tongue, the karmic results of her activities caused it burning embers.

So Maudgalyayana went back to the Buddha looking for a means of saving his mother. The Buddha counseled him, "You cannot save one's mother alone even with great supernatural powers".

You can only create enough merit to release their mother from suffering by depending on the collective power of the Sangha and providing them food and other basics with a sincere mind." The Buddha further said that the most fortunate day for this ritual was the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month.

Under the Buddha's direction, Maudgalyayana freed his mother from the domain of hungry ghosts and successfully offered food to the Sangha. The Ullambana Sutra claims the Buddha also taught, "all sentient who wish to express filial piety to their parents should follow this method". So, the Vu Lan Festival originated thus and has been seen ever since.

The Vu Lan ceremony has evolved into a celebration of filial piety among Vietnamese people towards parents and ancestors. Therefore, many Vietnamese sometimes pray for ancestors throughout the occasion besides doing good things and asking blessings for their living parents.

Apart from its religious importance, the Vu Lan Festival has great cultural value for Vietnamese people since it reminds them of their origins. Therefore, the celebration gets much more humanitarian and reflects the filial.

Handwritten prayers and wishes placed inside lotus lanterns

Top things to do at Vu Lan festival in Vietnam

1. Go to pagodas

You will finds Buddhists monks, nuns, and followers swarming pagodas all throughout the nation. Many people seeking to atone for their guilt, they go to rituals and offer incense to the Buddha. They also pray for their dead relatives and live descendants.

Should their moms be living, they will wear a red rose, should their mothers have passed away, they will wear a white rose. Because the rose represent love and sharing among parents and their children.

2. Prepare an offering tray

Apart from praying at pagodas, people often offer votive papers, flowers, fruit, salt, sticky rice cakes, cooked cassava, sweet potatoes and many other things to their ancestors in the assumption that the ancestors would hear their prayers and accept their offerings. 

However, the manner people honour this holiday is rather different from how people did many years ago.

While those with more money might spend millions of dong on paper villas, luxury cars, electric fans, and air conditioners, hoping their dead relatives would enjoy the comfortable afterlife in the same way the living do, low-income households usually prepare an array of food, incense, joss paper, and fake gold and banknotes for Vu Lan festival.

3. Release flower lanterns beside the river

For a long period, releasing flower lanterns has been a customary Vu Lan Festival activity. An essential component of Buddhism as well, this custom helps one pray for the departed. Every floral lantern is painstakingly crafted with a candle lighted before being dropped into the river alongside prayers for happiness and peace.

 

Floating lanterns illuminate the water, carrying prayers and wishes during Vu Lan Festival

4. Give gifts to dear relatives

Filial piety is also demonstrate love to family members. So, you can choose and give grandparents and parents with meaningful presents. Though gifts of high material worth are not necessary, let the recipient of the gift experience the love of the giver.

Places to join in Vu Lan festival

1. Tran Quoc Pagoda in Hanoi

Considered the oldest in Hanoi, Tran Quoc Pagoda is situated on a little peninsula northeast of West Lake and has 1500 years of history. In Hanoi capital, the temple is regarded as a hallowed Buddhist site. 

The temple draws many Buddhists and visitors from all around the world to visit and conduct ceremonies expressing their filial piety to their birth parents during the Vu Lan holiday season. Apart from honouring Buddha, visiting here allows you to experience a little purity amid really beautiful surroundings.

Read more: Top 11 Best Traditional Festivals in Hanoi To See

2. Hoang Phap Pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City

Most well-known temple in Saigon is Hoang Phap Pagoda. Apart from having a pure environment surrounded by cool nature, this site is also for those who come to learn Buddhism with their hearts and brains.

Arriving at Hoang Phap Pagoda, you can pray for peace, have a pure vegetarian lunch on Vu Lan day or wait for Sala flowers to fall on the temple grounds in expectation of more benefits.

Hoang Phap in Ho Chi Minh

3. Bai Dinh pagoda in Ninh Binh

Owning many well-known records including the biggest pagoda in Vietnam, the largest gold-plated bronze Buddha statue in Asia, Bai Dinh Pagoda used to be the venue to bring Buddha relics from India as one of the biggest spiritual tourist sites in Vietnam and the biggest temple in Southeast Asia as of 2018.

Plus excellent tourism potential in the Trang An eco-tourism complex. Surely this will be the perfect location for the Vu Lan celebration.

Read more: Ninh Binh Car Rental

Apart from this, several holy temples and pagodas including Truc Lam Zen Monastery in Da Lat, Thien Mu Pagoda (Hue), Vinh Trang Pagoda (Ha Nam), Vinh Trang Pagoda (Hue) and Tam Chuc Pagoda (Ha Nam), Vinh Trang pagoda (Tien Giang); Pho Quang Pagoda (Ho Chi Minh City),...

Targeted at honouring parents' birth, Vu Lan festival is one of the two largest Buddhist celebrations in Vietnam. Vu Lan festival is not only a holiday for Buddhists nowadays but also a common spiritual and cultural celebration of the society. Let Vietnam Budget Car Rental travel with you if you intend to visit tourist attractions for this big full moon!