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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Adeana McNicholl, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Description: 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: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford UP, 2024) 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 expl...