Hungry Hungry Ghosts

The Stomach and the Jewel

There is in Buddhism a hungry ghost realm. The unfortunate ghosts within suffer huge distended stomachs, yet have throats the width of a needle. They wander the realm desperately seeking an end to their hunger and thirst, but anything they manage to ingest turns immediately into fire or excrement.

There are laughs in the shrine room. Some have shown up to the weekly class at the Buddhist centre for the very first time to immediately be learning about starving ghosts that can only eat shit.

It’s a potent image and amusing the way that the teachings hold up a mirror for you to see just how foolish you look. After class I’m having lunch with a friend and they ask “so when do you find yourself in the hungry ghost realm?”

Preta

At the time, what first came to mind was the experience of being on Hinge. But the image of the hungry ghosts has come back to me more recently as I’ve been re-evaluating my relationship with insight.

Last year I was woken up from a comfortable and predictable existence. My longest streak was 9 days of sauna in a row and every night I would walk home from the pool on a cloud.

I moved overseas, the illusion shattered, and I was left facing uncertainty.

I would crawl into books, rush through them, and with a brow knit heavy with tension try to harvest the insight. Then, when I got tired of reading, curl up on the sofa in an endless rabbit hole of recommended YouTube videos. Somehow I didn’t find what I was looking for in the 1.5 hour long AI voice narrated video about Saturnine cubes at two in the morning.

Initially, everything is so exciting. Complexity feels like depth. Every new bit of information contributes more to the uncovering of some great hidden secret of the universe. Each acquisition feels like a new Instagram follower—you can go back and look at your page from a slightly different perspective.

Learn something new, connect the dots, maybe write about your new understanding, then rinse and repeat with a different esoteric doctrine. And all the while, peppered delicately in amongst the seeking, the abstractions, the integration, there are moments where—

I slouch deeper into the sofa. It shifts slightly back along the wooden floor. I woke up this morning slightly hungover and tried for an hour to unclench my stomach and get back to sleep. Orange tulips are gradually wilting on the coffee table in front of me. My hands lie heavy on the keyboard and I feel my phone exerting its gravitational pull from beside me. As I walked to the dentist today I felt how unevenly my shoulders were sitting. I laid in the dentist’s chair trying to unclench my stomach. On the walk home raindrops made the skin on my face tingle.

In some depictions of the hungry ghost realm there is the lone figure of a Bodhisattva—an enlightened being. While the ghosts grasp their stomachs and endlessly search for food or water, the Bodhisattva holds in their hands a jewel.

I soften the muscles around my eyes.