Two Explanations for the Lanterns

Chinese sources offer two separate accounts of why the fifteenth day of the first lunar month came to be marked with lanterns, and historians of the festival treat both as genuinely attested rather than choosing between them. The older explanation ties the day to the worship of Taiyi, a supreme deity of the heavens in early Chinese religion, whom the Han dynasty court is recorded as honoring with an all night ceremony involving lit lanterns, a state rite that over time filtered down into popular practice as a night when ordinary households likewise lit lanterns and stayed up until dawn.

A second and later explanation, associated especially with the spread of Buddhism into China from the first century CE onward, credits the custom to a court ritual of lighting lamps to honor the Buddha, modeled on similar lamp lighting rites already practiced in Buddhist monasteries. Both threads run through the historical record for the festival, and popular retellings today draw on either or both without treating them as competing claims that require a single winner. Both practices converge on the same underlying idea, that light carried through the darkest hours of the lunar new moon's turn marks the household's protection and welcome for the year ahead, whichever ritual lineage a given community traces its own lanterns back to.