Showing posts with label preta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preta. Show all posts

Friday, 11 July 2014

Obon means ghosts and remembering the dead

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Japanese-city.com; NHBT

I went into the sanctuary and could feel the ancestors around me (rpv-team/flickr).

What is Obon?
Animist, Buddhist, Pagan, and Catholic Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles may have the Day of the Dead (just after all ironic, nominal Christians celebrate Halloween).

But Japanese Buddhist and Shinto practitioners have much the same thing in this month's Obon Festival, which is being celebrated concurrently with the unrelated Lotus Festival and commencement of the annual Rains Retreat just a few miles apart.

Obon is an annual Buddhist event for commemorating one's ancestors. It is believed that each year during Obon, the ancestors' spirits return to this world in order to visit their relatives.
 
Traditionally, lanterns are hung in front of houses to guide the ancestors' spirits, Obon dances (bon odori) are performed, graves are visited, and food offerings are made at house altars and temples. 
 
At the end of Obon, floating lanterns are put into rivers, lakes and seas in order to guide the spirits back into their world. The customs followed vary strongly from region to region.

Obon is observed from the 13th to the 15th day of the 7th month of the year, which is July according to the solar calendar. However, since the 7th month of the year roughly coincides with August rather than July according to the formerly used lunar calendar, Obon is still observed in mid August in many regions of Japan, while it is observed in mid July in other regions. 
 
The Obon week in mid August is one of Japan's three major holiday seasons, accompanied by intensive domestic and international travel activities and increased accommodation rates. In recent years, travel activity in mid August.
  • Event Location: Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple
  • 815 First Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
  • Obon Festival + Bon Odori Schedule: http://bit.ly/bLkTf
Japanese Obon Festival and Bon Odori Schedule
    Posted by at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Monday, 27 January 2014

    Everyone loves a good ghost story

    Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Roger Clarke (Telegraph.co.uk)
    I don't see anything because I'm not looking to the left. OH NO! Shapeshifter!
    Ghosts/phantoms permeate European culture through and through (telegraph.co.uk)
     
    "Hungry ghosts" (pretas) depicted in Asia
    It’s the time of year [the dead of winter] -- a little before that other time of year -- when many people’s minds turn to spooks and ghost stories. Once, the parish bells rang out on Hallowe’en to scare away such prowling phantoms and demons speeding forth from what M.R. James, the Victorian ghost-story writer, would call “sequestered places.”

    But now, a commercialized Hallowe’en presents itself, imported from the United States, which in turn took its antecedents from an Irish Catholic celebration of seasonal misrule.
     
    Ghosts are real. Just ask Dr. Gabor Mate.
    Up to the 19th century, it was often said in rural England that none but a “Popish priest” could lay -- or exorcise -- a ghost, and much of traditional English belief in ghosts comes from the unquiet spirit of hidden Catholic traditions. 
     
    In earlier centuries, for example, to say you believed in ghosts was to identify yourself as a Catholic, or at the very least a religious dissident, since early Methodists believed in the same thing also.
     
    The infamous Cock Lane ghost that so convulsed London in 1762 was very much gingered up by a parish priest with Methodist inclinations; all of society, including Horace Walpole (who wrote the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto), flocked to a house in Smithfields to hear the ghost that scratched out pronouncements on the living and dead. 
     
    Ghosts can cook (M.A. Winkowski)
    The founder of the Methodist faith, John Wesley, came from a haunted family. The account of the Epworth Poltergeist in 1716 is one of the classic ghost stories in the canon, and it took place in the Lincolnshire rectory while 14-year-old Wesley was away from home. In letters to John’s brother Sam, his mother detailed how the arrival of two new servants at Martinmas (the feast of St. Martin on Nov. 11) was the beginning of... a whole panoply of terrifying sounds, groans and crashes that not even a sceptical father could explain. John Wesley’s father, a bad-tempered man who was constantly at war with his own parishioners, finally decided that these sounds came from Old Nick himself. More

    Real "ghosts" (shadows, poltergeists)
     (COMMENTARY)
    Seance faked hand image (Museum archive 1920)
    Ghosts (Sanskrit pretas, Pali petas) are real, though mostly harmless. They are unfortunate "spirits" (with subtle physical forms and often the power to appear in various shapes and guises). All of them lived before -- like all beings everywhere, just revolving and revolving in endless cycles of samsara.
     
    It is rebirth that can be brought to an end and, with it, all suffering (dukkha, disappointment) once and for all. But people are not interested in that. We're interested in trying to get ahead on this plane of existence. Just below us are the animals suffering terribly. No one cares. The ghosts have it even worse, though not nearly as bad as the ogres (yakkhas), cruel titans (asuras, "demons") and hellions (narakas).

    Shapeshifting "Old Hag" ghosts
    Just the other night I was accosted by "ghosts" due to the "Old Hag Syndrome." The female ghosts (not old, not hags) held my hands down against my will while I was conscious, upset, awake, and struggling. Because there was sleep paralysis, people will say d'uh it was "sleep" and therefore a dream. While dreamlike, it is not semiconscious, closed eye sleep. We can trigger paralysis through deep relaxation without actually being in a sleep state. The struggle to come out of paralysis lasted for what felt like ten minutes.

    (paranormal.about)
    Of course, it couldn't have helped that Mesmerist/hypnotist Rick Collingwood (mindmotivations.com) was on Coast to Coast talking about Hypnosis and Evil Spirits. He was not a believer until he hypnotically exorcised a "speed spirit" (a possession resulting from the use of speed such as meth or cocaine), which so weakens a person as to make him/her susceptible to entities seeking to attach or to behave parasitically as energy vampires).
     
    The fireplace will keep them away
    As usual, these usually-unseen beings seemed more mischievous than malevolent. But they are very happy to scare a person, as if to feed on the distress. If there are shining beings on the Abhasvara Plane who feed on joy, why not miserable eaters who zap energy away? So I cultivate compassion and annoyance rather than fear or actual malice ready to banish them with positive and protective energy.
    Posted by at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Monday, 28 October 2013

    "The Ghost Stories" (Petavatthu)

    Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Abbot Karunananda (Bodhi Vihara), Wisdom Quarterly; G.P. Malalasekera, Dictionary of Pali Proper Names  (Pali Text Society)
    The "Brown Lady" ghost seen manifesting as ecstoplasm on the staircase (answers.com)
     
    Seance, circa 1920 (C2C)
    PETA VATTHU: The seventh book of the Khuddaka Nikāya (The Miscellany) consists of stories of persons born in the peta (preta, ghost) world owing to karma manifesting as various misdeeds motivated by greed, aversion, and/or delusion.
     
    Dhammapāla wrote on it a commentary called the Peta-vatthu-vannanā, or Petavatthu Atthakathā, which forms part of the Vimalavīlāsinī (GV.60), the commentary on the Vimāna Vatthu, which describes the splendor of various space abodes belonging to different devas, obtained by them as a result of meritorious karma performed in previous lives.
     
    The Realm of Hungry Ghosts (peta loka)
    The arhat Mahinda -- the son of the Indian Buddhist emperor Asoka, who together with his enlightened sister Sanghamitta traveled south as missionaries to Sri Lanka with a cutting from the original Bodhi tree the Buddha gained enlightenment under, which is the oldest documented tree in the world and the progenitor of most bodhi trees (Ficus religiosa, sacred fig or pipal) in Buddhist temples today -- preached the Peta Vatthu to Anulā and her companions on the day of his arrival in Anurādhapura, Sri Lanka (according to the island's own history, the Mahavamsa or "Great Chronicle" (Mhv.xiv.58).
     

    What is a peta (Sanskrit preta)? Dr. Gabor Mate, the Canadian drug and addiction specialist, explains that it is a "hungry ghost." This refers to a poltergeist, a German term for a restless, unquiet, or "unclean" spirit, a banshee, a howler, a disturbance.

    There are countless worlds. The Buddha categorized them into 31 general planes of existence. Their diversity is unimaginable. Consider, for example, the Animal Realm (tiracchana), which includes lazy tigers and hungry termites, slimy amoeba and my puppy Rocky, and more than a million other kinds of sentient beings. Such is karma that it leads to this specificity in impersonally doling out results.

    Stories?
    (spiritualia.be)
    The ancient Buddhist book that follows the Vimana-vatthu is the Peta-vatthu. It contains stories of beings in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is in this world but mostly goes unseen. Once when the Buddha's male disciple "foremost in psychic powers," corresponding to the chief female disciple with the same designation (Ven. Uppalavanna), Maha Moggallana surveys an area to find how the hungry ghosts there were reborn into that realm. One passage states, "This woman ate meat and deceived with a lying word" (Petavatthu 3.4). 
     
    In another passage, a hunter kills deer and shares the meat with children every time he arrives back in town. In spite of his generosity, which when it comes to fruition will lead to fortunate and welcome results, the hunter is reborn as a hungry ghost because of murder -- killing of deer and butchering and distributing flesh (Petavatthu 3.1). 

    Ghost of Borobudur (Winterlicht/flickr.com)
    This happens not because killing animals leads merely to rebirth as a ghost -- it generally leads to far worse -- but because destination depends on when karma ripens. If it should ripen right at the moment of death/rebirth during what is technically called the "rebirth linking consciousness," it is a course of conduct that can lead to a miserable plane of existence, a world of torment far worse than the moderate "plane of deprivation" (apaya) ghosts exist on. The book also contains verses showing that the Buddha was offered vegetarian foods gathered and given out of compassion. Does this mean eating flesh (Dhamma Wheel) thereby causing and encouraging the captivity, cruelty toward, and killing of animals is unwholesome, unskillful behavior? Who can say?

    What leads to rebirth in this miserable destination among ghosts? Missing the mark of upholding The Five Precepts:
    1. to abstain from taking the lives of living beings or encouraging others to harm,
    2. to abstain from taking what is not given or encouraging others to steal,
    3. to abstain from sexual misconduct or encouraging others to violate this precept (which Wisdom Quarterly spells out elsewhere from the sutras as having sex with people who are off limits and not as being what we might imagine in our guilt-ridden Christian-Catholic-Jewish context but rather, more generally, as harming others motivated by our sensual lust),
    4. to abstain from false speech (perjury, slander, harshness, babble) or encouraging others to speak falsely,
    5. to abstain from intoxicants that lead one to violate these precepts or encouraging others to become intoxicated occasioning heedlessness.
    Posted by at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Friday, 11 October 2013

    "Hungry Ghosts Outside the Wall" (video)

    Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly based on Ven. Thanissaro verse translation of Tirokudda Kanda (Petavatthu 1.5, also in Khp 7)
    Gilded alabaster Buddha, Wat Si Chum, Sukhothai, Thailand (slowboat.teamworkz.asia)
    Hungry ghosts depicted on ancient scroll scavenging foul nutriment in charnel grounds
      .
    Hungry ghost (preta or peta)
    Outside the walls they [the hungry ghosts or pretas] stand, at the crossroads. At door posts they linger, returning to human homes of old.
     
    But though a meal with plentiful food and drink is served, no one remembers them. Such is the karma (the legacy of well- and ill- done deeds) of living beings.
     
    Who feels sympathy for dead relatives, give timely donations of appropriate food and drink -- exquisite and clean -- with the thought, "May this for our relatives' sake be! May our relatives be well and happy!"
     
    Can hungry ghosts eat our happiness? No.
    Those gathered there, assembled phantoms of relatives since deceased, with appreciation give their blessings for such plentiful food and drink (and thereby themselves make merit, so hard to make in that place of deprivation): "May our relatives live long because of whom we have gained [gifts]! We have been honored, and our donors are rewarded, too!"
     
    Death and rebirth there, like life and addiction here, means insatiable hunger (Dimmu)
      
    For there [in that gloomy realm or its earthly counterpart] there is no farming, no herding of docile beasts, no commerce, no trade with money.
     
    They live on what is given them from here, hungry ghosts whose time is run out. As water raining upon a hill flows down to the valley, even so what is given here flows down to the benefit of the dead and dearly departed.
     
    As rivers full of water fill the ocean full, even so does what is given here flow to the benefit of the dead and dearly departed.
     
    The ancient Pali Buddhist canon has a section called "Ghost Stories" (Petavatthu). This is documentary video footage of ghosts (poltergeists) from "Unsolved Mysteries."
     
    "He gave to me, she acted on my behalf, they were my relatives, companions, friends" -- offerings should be given for the sake of the dead when one reflects on things done in the past.
     
    For no weeping, no sorrow, no other lament benefits the dead -- a waste for relatives who persist in that way. But when offerings are given, well-placed in the [noble] Sangha, it works for long-term benefit of the dead, who profit immediately.
     
    In this way one's appropriate duty to dead relatives [defined by the Buddha as going back seven generations] has been shown! Great honor has been done for the sake of the departed! And monastics [preservers and intensive practitioners of the Dharma] have been given strength: The merit one thereby acquires [for oneself as the giver] is not small.
    Feminist icon and activist Gloria Steinem has something to say about daft Miley Cyrus. But it isn't what one might expect! The 79-year-old journalist weighed in on the Miley issue while speaking to "OMG! Insider" at the 2013 Women's...
    Posted by at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)