Pretas, the Hungry Ghosts

The Sanskrit word preta means “gone forth” or “departed”. In the Vedic tradition the dead were believed to pass to the world of the ancestors, the pitris, and the living sustained them with offerings of food and water. The household ritual manuals of the first millennium BCE set out these rites in detail. Between death and arrival among the ancestors lay a dangerous passage, and during it the dead person was called a preta, a soul without a proper body, hungry, thirsty and potentially harmful if neglected.

Early Buddhism took over the word and transformed it. In Pali the peta became a being reborn in a realm of suffering, alongside the hells and the animal world, as a result of its own deeds. The Petavatthu, “Stories of the Departed”, in the Pali Canon collects tales in which ghosts explain to monks and lay people the misdeeds that brought them there: a woman who refused alms, a man who lied about a gift. Another early text, the Tirokudda Sutta, pictures the dead standing outside the walls and at crossroads, waiting for relatives to remember them.

Buddhist art and literature describe the hungry ghosts with haunting precision. Their bellies are vast, their necks or mouths as thin as a needle, so that they can swallow almost nothing; in some accounts food and water turn to flames or filth as they reach for them. Later writers listed many kinds of preta, some wandering among humans, some living in deserts or near graveyards, and they agreed on the cause: greed, avarice and clinging. The hungry ghost is the image of desire that can never be satisfied.

The condition is not eternal. Like every realm of rebirth, it ends when the force of past deeds is spent, and the living can help. Buddhists give food and gifts to monks and dedicate the merit of the gift to their dead relatives, and the texts say that ghosts who rejoice in this act benefit from it. Compassion for ghosts thus became a religious duty.

In Hindu practice the preta is more closely tied to the funeral itself. For about ten to twelve days after death, the family offers rice balls, pinda, which are understood to build the subtle body the dead person needs for the journey. The rite of sapindikarana, often held on the twelfth day or after a year, unites the preta with the ancestors, after which it is honoured as a pitri. The Garuda Purana describes the fate of those who are left without these rites, wandering as tormented ghosts, and pilgrims travel to places such as Gaya to make offerings that are believed to free them.

The story that most shaped the hungry ghost in East Asia is that of Maudgalyayana, known in Chinese as Mulian, one of the Buddha’s great disciples. According to the Ullambana Sutra, he used his powers to look for his dead mother and found her among the hungry ghosts, starving. When he offered her a bowl of rice, it burst into flames before she could eat. The Buddha told him that his strength alone could not save her, but that offerings to the community of monks at the end of their summer retreat, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, would release her and seven generations of ancestors.

Scholars widely regard the sutra as composed in China in the fifth or sixth century, though it was presented as a translation from India. Its message joined Buddhist merit-making to the Chinese ideal of filial devotion, and the festival it founded was celebrated at court by the sixth century. Later versions of the Mulian story, told in popular narratives and plays, sent the devoted son through the underworld in search of his mother, scenes still performed in parts of China.

Other tales show how stinginess, not wickedness alone, leads to the ghost realm. In the Petavatthu, ghosts confess to having refused food to monks, begrudged the gifts of others or spoken harshly of the virtuous, and their punishments mirror these faults: those who withheld food now find none, and those who spoke ill suffer in their mouths. The tone is less one of horror than of warning and pity. Monks who meet such ghosts in the stories usually help them by encouraging the living to give in their name, and the ghost, released from its suffering, appears again in radiant form to thank them. The lesson for listeners was clear: generosity in this life protects against hunger in the next, and generosity on behalf of the dead can ease their lot.

The Ghost Festival is still observed across the Chinese world on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, in a Ghost Month during which the gates of the underworld are said to open. Families make offerings to ancestors and to wandering spirits without descendants, burn paper goods, float lanterns on water and stage performances, sometimes leaving the front row of seats empty for invisible guests. Daoist priests and Buddhist monks hold rites to feed the hungry dead.

In Japan the same roots produced Obon, when ancestral spirits are believed to return home and are welcomed with lanterns, offerings and the Bon dance, and sent back with fires or floating lanterns. Japanese temples also hold segaki rites to feed the gaki, the hungry ghosts, and the twelfth-century Scroll of Hungry Ghosts gave them a vivid visual form. Korea, Vietnam and Tibet have their own observances, and in Cambodia families spend fifteen days of Pchum Ben bringing food to temples for the dead. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, merit is shared with departed relatives after funerals and on anniversaries.

In Hindu families the preta rites remain among the most important duties of a son or other heir. Mourners observe a period of ritual impurity, offer the pinda and, in many families, perform annual shraddha rites, above all during Pitru Paksha, the fortnight of the ancestors in late summer or early autumn.

In modern culture the hungry ghost has become a metaphor for insatiable consumption and addiction. In the traditions that gave it birth, it remains a reminder of the bonds between the living and the dead, and of generosity as the cure for craving.