Celestial seductresses and hungry ghosts : preta narratives in early Indian Buddhism
Adeana Shel McNicholl (Author), Paul M. Harrison (Degree supervisor), John Kieschnick, Kathryn Gin Lum, Justin McDaniel, Stanford University Department of Religious Studies
In this dissertation I examine tales about the departed (Sanskrit: preta) composed in Sanskrit and Pāli from approximately the third century BCE to the sixth century CE. I argue that the body of the preta was essential to the construction of a Buddhist cosmology rooted in a socio-karmic discourse that is fundamentally physio-moral in nature. Through the body, I trace the transformation of the departed preta to the preta as a ghost constituting a separate realm of rebirth in the Buddhist cosmos. By telling stories about pretas, whose bodies are constituted by their prior actions and simultaneously restrict their ability to act toward soteriological goals, Buddhist authors created and illustrated their understanding of moral law of cause and effect. Additionally, the Buddhist saṅgha's claim to be able to transform abject preta bodies into divine ones allowed monks to elevate themselves as the superior mediators between humans and non-humans. While all men and women in these stories act immorally, their depiction is influenced by a social system that upheld the patriarchal householder structure and by a monastic institution that guarded itself against sensual desires and attachment to the body. For this reason, preta tales produce an ideological discourse of the body
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2019
[Stanford University], [Stanford, California], 2019