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The Koan of the Hungry Ghosts [1]
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Date: 2025-06-01
All of the Buddhas and Ancestors have passed on great gifts to us, but too many of us are like Hungry Ghosts, turning down the best spiritual food in favor of garbage and worse. Therefore, exercising skill in means, the great teachers have initiated the ceremony of Segaki, Feeding the Hungry Ghosts, and many other teachings. Among the worst problems that people fall into are denying karma (the worst form of the delusion of adequacy) and thinking that one is unworthy or incapable of understanding (the delusion of inadequacy).
A version of Segaki is first described in the Petavatthu, a late Pali sutta, and then in the Ullumbana Sutta. In both stories, a disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha (Sariputta or Maha Moggallana) asks how to help a deceased mother deal with past karma. The Buddha advised them to donate food to all of the monks in the area.
The sutra records the time when Maudgalyayana achieves abhijñā and uses his newfound powers to search for his deceased parents. Maudgalyayana discovers that his deceased mother was reborn into the preta or hungry ghost realm. She was in a wasted condition and Maudgalyayana tried to help her by giving her a bowl of rice. Unfortunately as a preta, she was unable to eat the rice as it was transformed into burning coal. Maudgalyayana then asks the Buddha to help him; whereupon Buddha explains how one is able to assist one's current parents and deceased parents in this life and in one's past seven lives by willingly offering food, etc., to the sangha or monastic community during Pravarana (the end of the monsoon season or vassa), which usually occurs on the 15th day of the seventh month whereby the monastic community transfers the merits to the deceased parents, etc…
Put aside the Indian superstitions brought out in these stories, and meditate on compassion for those suffering from them, who can indeed be helped by the practice of dana, making offerings in support of the teaching. There are no ghosts or demons, but there are people who are haunted within their own minds.
It turns out that feeding monks is not the only way to do Segaki. The best way is to awaken oneself from delusion, and short of that any form of Right Understanding or other achievements along the Eightfold Path will do, or any breaking of attachments, great or small.
Thus we come back to the vast array of great gifts laid out before us in suttas and koans, as I have been explaining here in considerable profusion.
Do not try to tell yourself or your teacher that you are inferior, and incapable of putting aside self, or whatever other attachment has your devotion. There is no self, nothing to put aside, and insisting that there is just makes one miserable to no point. Dogen Zenji was tied up for years in a version of this koan, until he was taught to let go of body and mind. Then he determined that he needed vastly more training than this great awakening, which had put him at the forefront of monks in Japan. He gave us the gifts of training many disciples who passed on his teaching; of writings and recorded lectures; and of his own collection of 300 koans.
Humans stand in their own shadows and wonder why it is dark. Only they can turn around.
But the rest of us can help.
It takes as long as it takes.
No fussing, please, at yourself or others, in matters of training and awakening. We do have to stand in the way of those who think to benefit themselves by harming others, of course. In law and in politics we can all set out great feasts even for those who hate, hate, hate being offered them.
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