Buddhist “Magic” and Buddhist Modernism

Abstract

Abstract Based on comparative anthropological fieldwork observations in Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United States, this chapter examines the lived experience of prēta or “hungry ghosts” in Asian Buddhist lifeworlds. The chapter parses out and defines the spectrum of “modernist” and “vernacular” orientations to Buddhism, and it suggests how these concepts can be useful for a nuanced study of religion, specifically for how Buddhists conceive of, experience, and live with, ghosts. The ethnographic case studies illuminate how prēta relate to Buddhist concepts like karma, craving (taṇhā), compassion (karuna), and enlightenment (nirvāṇa). These ideas play out in ritual practices that involve symbolically and substantively feeding and sharing karmic merit with known ancestral ghosts and unknown orphaned ghosts. The ethnographic case studies illustrate how a variety of social actors—from monks, to Buddhist laity, to ritual adepts and divining spirit mediums, to deities, and to prēta—are all intricately linked under the authority of the Buddha, the Buddha’s teachings, and the Dharmic cosmos. Spirit possession—whereby a person is “porous,” permeable and vulnerable to spirits—is a vernacular Buddhist phenomenon. Ethnography in urban Singapore, and in rural Sri Lanka, demonstrates how ancestral prēta, deities, and female deity mediums reinforce filiality and relatedness between the living and the dead. Rather that requiring “exorcism,” ancestral prēta can create intricate healing links that connect laypeople, deities, mediums, to the sacred power of the Buddha—a meritorious relationality that in turn allows the prēta to gain good karma and become reincarnated in better future lifetimes.