Troubled ghosts

I have been watching the television series The Haunted which appears on cable's Animalplanet.  While the description of the series says it explores the "connection between animals and the supernatural realm" it really explores how humans, who don't believe in the paranormal, are suddenly faced with strange encounters that Western scientific models can't explain.  The animals, as we might expect, are not prejudiced like their human masters.  They react, mainly out of extreme fear to the unseen.

This all reminded me of the Peta-Vatthu (S., Preta Vastu), The Stories of the Departed, which appears in the Khuddhaka-Nikaya of the Pali canon.  These are stories about spirits who are more like wraiths which might be described as troubled ghosts, although not, strictly speaking, hell beings who are confined to the torments of the hells.  This is to suggest that the peta can be saved by the devotion of friends and the transfer of merit.

By and large, Western Buddhists are uncomfortable with the ideas of rebirth and karma.  This might explain why works in the Khuddhaka-Nikaya like the Peta-Vatthu and the Vimana-Vatthu, which are stories about the departed who live in relative bliss, have been off the Western Buddhist radar.  This tells us something about Western Buddhism and the direction it wants to go which mainly is in the direction of Western scientific materialism.

This is not a good thing for Buddhism, in general.  The spiritual world is real and it was real for the Buddha and his disciples.  Just because Western Buddhists want to believe there is no immaterial, spiritual world, even one with petas, doesn't mean they have  the truth on their side.  It only means that they have elected to be radical skeptics that no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to convince them to change their attitude, or at least keep an open mind.

 

Comments

[Om nom nom]

Have you ever read about Susan Blackmore. She's a scientist who is also serious as a Chan practicioner. She started her research into ESP and other phenomena as a believer. After many years of careful research she gave up and was no longer a believer.

It is easy to posit a spiritual realm but once you do that you then have to choose that it takes one form over another. You're choosing to take one from a strand of Buddhist mythology. I grew up on Christian mythology and its idea of spiritual realms which is clearly incompatible with the ones that get your vote.

Now as it happens I think the three-bodies mythology (Physical, Spiritual, Pain) - not trikaya - is a reasonable experiental summary of how we know know the body maps itself. The physical body carries within it two mutable maps that describe the physical bounds of the body and from where pain arises. The physical body bounds map is easy enough to change and lots of sports and martial arts and other things rely on this mutability for ultimate performance.

Whichever spiritual view is correct will have little or no impact on daily life.

It seems to me that reincarnation was a nice little idea to reinforce the caste system in India and to allow full-time monks to explain through externalisation that their lack of any progress was not in fact anything to do with them.

So, I'm not saying that what you say is wrong, I am saying it's a belief that's unprovable.

I have read some of the 'past lives' testaments of others and whilst sometimes intriguing they do not support a reincarnation hypothesis since they do not exclude other spiritual explanations such as possession by ghosts which could explain the same phenomena.

And even with reincarnation mythology wasn't there a point where it stopped?