This belief shapes an enormous range of ordinary practice rather than remaining an abstract cosmological claim. Grave siting is taken seriously enough to support an entire specialist discipline, fengshui geomancy, on the premise that a well-placed ancestral grave channels favorable cosmic influence toward the family's living members, while a poorly placed one can bring generations of misfortune, giving material, practical stakes to what might otherwise look like a purely symbolic concern.
Annual observances such as Qingming, the Tomb Sweeping festival in spring, when families clean ancestral graves and renew offerings, and the seventh month Ghost Festival, when the wider category of unattended or forgotten dead receive placating offerings from the community at large rather than from any specific family, both operationalize the belief on a fixed communal calendar rather than leaving it to individual household discretion.
Anthropologists studying Chinese and Taiwanese communities have documented how a family experiencing a run of illness, business failure or other misfortune will often consult a temple medium or diviner specifically to ask whether a neglected or wronged ancestor is responsible, treating the ancestral relationship as a live, ongoing negotiation rather than a settled doctrine, closer in practice to an active social relationship with the dead than to a fixed article of faith.
Sources Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese VillageDavid K. Jordan with The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui: Chinese GeomancyStephen Skinner