Of Ancestors and Ghosts

How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics

Adeana McNicholl (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-774890-9 (ISBN)

Lieferbar (Termin unbekannt)
Versandkostenfrei
Auch auf Rechnung

Artikel merken

Of Ancestors and Ghosts analyzes a type of Buddhist literature in which immoral, stingy people are reincarnated as hungry, suffering ghosts. It traces the emergence of this genre in relation to contemporary ideas about the departed and the shape of the world. Adeana McNicholl argues that these narratives promote a complex ethical worldview that speaks to both lay people and religious experts.

In Buddhist cosmology, pretas make up one of several categories of rebirth. They are best known as "hungry ghosts," pitiful beings with miniscule mouths and bloated stomachs whose state of extreme starvation is a result of stinginess and immorality in a former life.

But they were not always portrayed in this way. Of Ancestors and Ghosts traces the construction of the Buddhist realm of the pretas through narrative literature composed in Pali and Sanskrit in the first millennium of Buddhism's development in South Asia. By exploring issues such as where the departed go after they die, how the living can assist the dead in the next world, and how the departed fits into a karmic cosmology, Buddhist monks used these stories to construct the preta realm and, with it, Buddhist cosmology as we know it today. In the process they established themselves as religious experts concerning the dead. Of Ancestors and Ghosts illustrates the importance of narrative for the construction of religious cosmologies, showing that cosmologies come into formation over a long, cumulative process.

Far from being simple morality tales, preta literature helped develop and articulate Buddhist understandings of actions and their fruits. In the process, these narratives portray ethical cultivation as inherently connected to the cultivation of bodies. As a result, stories about pretas speak to the vast range of embodied experiences in the Buddhist cosmos, including the intersection of human/non-human identity and class, caste, gender, and sexuality. These stories help model and elicit aesthetically informed embodied experiences that are themselves ethically formative. As a result, preta literature highlights the enduring importance of emotions and embodiment on the Buddhist path to awakening.

Adeana McNicholl is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. She specializes in Buddhism in South Asia and in the United States. Her research engages with Buddhist conceptions of embodiment in the past and present.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Entering the Realm of the Pretas

Part I: Constructing the Preta Realm
1. From Ancestor to Ghost: The Development of the Preta and its Realm
2. The Fruits of False Views: Arguments for Karma in Preta Narratives

Part II: Karma and Embodiment
3. Consuming the Fruits of One's Own Actions: Wealth, Class, and Caste
4. Virile Householders and Fertile Wives: Gender and Sexuality in this World and the Next
5. Decaying, Dying, Decomposing: The Aesthetics of Disgust and the Production of the Ethical Subject

Conclusion: The Afterlives of Preta Narratives
Works Cited
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	29.08.2024
Zusatzinfo	12 photos
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 221 mm
Gewicht	522 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Buddhismus
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-774890-2 / 0197748902
ISBN-13	978-0-19-774890-9 / 9780197748909
Zustand	Neuware