Hungry ghost (E gui)

The hungry-ghost concept derives from the Buddhist Sanskrit term preta and is elaborated in Indian and Chinese Buddhist literature (e.g., Avadānaśataka, Huayen Sutra). Sources associate rebirth as a hungry ghost with specific moral causes in a prior life — notably greed/avarice (mātsarya), denying sustenance to others (including monks), killing, stealing, sexual misconduct and other malign or mean deeds. Some Taoist and popular accounts also link violent or unhappy deaths and the neglect or desertion of ancestors to the emergence of hungry ghosts.

Traditional Buddhist and Chinese imagery commonly depicts hungry ghosts as beings suffering from extreme hunger: small mouths and throats paired with bloated bellies or distended stomachs and thin necks that prevent them from consuming food, imagery used to symbolize insatiable craving and frustration. Sources emphasize their psychological/emotional condition (ever-discontent, anguished, driven by animalistic needs) and note variants in imaginings — some traditions place them in the bowels of the earth, others depict them as living unnoticed among humans — rather than a single standardized corporeal form.

Hungry ghosts are described chiefly by their persistent, unfulfilled craving and compulsive seeking of nourishment; this condition is the direct expression of karmic consequences rather than a set of aggressive supernatural powers. Traditional ritual practice assumes that communal offerings (food) and presentation of Dharma (Buddhist teachings and precepts) can be summoned and given to egui to relieve their suffering and, by ritual efficacy and merit-transfer, improve their state. Legends in Avadānaśataka and related texts describe how specific unethical behaviors in life produced the hungry-ghost condition.