In Buddhism, there are 6 paths of existence, or 6 types of living beings.
Hungry ghosts, or gaki 餓鬼, make up the 5th path, right above hell.
When you die, you get reincarnated into one of these paths
depending on how much good or bad karma you’ve collected in past lives.
Enough bad karma and you’re reborn as a hungry ghost.
You’re not as bad of a person as those pricks in hell, but people probably are ignoring your texts.
There are 36 types of hungry ghosts, each one suffers a different burden,
each one tied to an oddly specific sin.
The type of ghost you turn into depends on what sin you committed.
So what that means is…you can plan out your afterlife.
Just commit a sin over and over to maximize your chances of being reborn as a certain type of hungry ghost.
To help you, I’ll tell you all about which sins turn you into which ghosts.
It’s always good to plan for the future.
Don’t say I never did anything for you.
[where you degenerates are going]
The realm of the hungry ghosts is a realm for the greedy and stingy.
So I’m doomed.
It sits underground, but above the Buddhist hells.
Most of the ghosts are not stuck there though, they can walk around on earth among humans staying invisible,
or even hang out in the other realms above.
We’re not clear on how big these ghosts are.
Some people say they’re human height. Some say they’re only a foot tall.
Some say they’re as tall as the Himalayas.
Typical male hungry ghosts, always exaggerating their size.
The biggest downside to being a hungry ghost is that they’re cursed with hunger.
They’re always starving and it’s always hard to get food because each ghost can only eat one thing.
I feel really bad for the ones who can only eat poop.
I know, how do you live everyday only eating poop without a side dish of pee to go with it?
They have a lifespan of 500 years,
but one day in their life is as long as one month in a human life.
[How to be a Hungry Ghost]
Try looking into sins related to being greedy or stingy with food. There are a lot of them.
If you’re a woman and your husband tells you to give food to monks,
but you lie and say the family doesn’t have food to give, you’re in trouble.
I know, it’s very specific.
You become a needle mouth ghost when you die.
You have a mouth as small as the eye of a needle, but a belly as big as a mountain.
You live a life eating tiny bits of food, never getting enough to fill that mountain sized belly.
If you promise to give food to monks, the poor, or the sick,
but don’t follow through, you turn into a hungry ghost who comes to life from vomit
and lives in filthy alleys, just being a dirty dirty ghost creature.
These ghosts hang around places with a lot of people, like cities and towns.
They can only be seen at night.
Sometimes you might want to get cheeky and offer impure food to a monk, like meat.
It’s a sin for monks to eat meat, so you’d be tricking him into committing a sin.
Ha-ha very funny, until you become a ghost that can only eat poop.
And then it's actually funny.
If you ate good food but didn't share it with your spouse,
you become a vomit eater.
You go around eating vomit, but you’re always hungry because vomit is like love, it’s hard to find.
This may seem like a harsh punishment for a minor crime, but I assume that the universe
is always fair and you only become a hungry ghost if you already have a ton of bad karma,
and this not sharing food nonsense just pushes you over the top.
If you ate good food but didn’t share it with your kids or other family members,
you become a fragrance eater.
You go to religious ceremonies for the sick and suck in the smell of the food offerings to live.
If you’re a torturer in hell, and you steal food from someone in hell being tortured,
you become a ghost that eats the smoke that arises from corpses as they are cremated.
If you don’t like those sins, there are other sins you can do
related to stealing or tricking people into giving you money.
If you’re a woman who seduces men into secks then steals their stuff, you become a shapeshifting ghost.
You can change into anything, man, woman, even animal.
These ghosts shapeshift to enter houses and join ceremonies, so they can steal food.
They also seduce humans into secks.
If you’re a merchant and you dilute your wine before selling it, or if you put worms or
moths in the wine to fill up the container, you become a ghost that’s always thirsty.
These creatures have stiff and dry bodies. When they try to drink from a river,
demons come and beat them.
So they wait for people to swim across a river, then lap up the water that drips from the swimmer’s legs.
Or they wait for someone to do a ritual offering water to his dead ancestors,
then drink the water that falls from the person’s hands.
Seems to me like they didn’t try real hard to find other sources of water.
Welp, I can’t drink from the river, time to lick some legs.
If you trick a sick person by promising to heal him with a spell, in return for money,
you turn into a ghost who goes around finding children who are not yet able to walk, then eating them.
Now hungry ghosts don’t wake up everyday and go like,
“Aw man I can’t wait to pop a baby sandwich in my mouth.”
No, they find these things disgusting.
But they’re cursed with a need, like they have OCD that makes them want to eat poop or bebes.
There are people who visit villages and encourage others to make donations for the sick,
but then use the donations for themselves.
If you’re such a person, you become a ghost who loves disease and hangs around cemeteries
because you like being close to corpses.
These ghosts scare men who commit evil acts. They can even enter a person’s dreams and scare
the s--t out of them, then have the s--t eaten by that ghost who likes to eat s--t.
If you kill someone to steal their money, you become a ghost called a Cauldron Body.
This ghost has no face. It has arms and legs, but no hands or feet.
Their arms end in stumps, making them look like the legs of a cauldron.
A fire burns in their belly, torturing them from within.
If you sold low quality incense at high prices, you turn into an incense eater.
Your body is hairy, your hair is messy, and your face is super wrinkled.
You hang around temples and crossroads, feeding on the smoke from incense.
Okay if you don’t like those sins, we have a bunch of random sins you can choose from.
A person who abuses a position of power to steal from others,
becomes a ghost with mighty powers.
These ghosts live in the mountains, the sea, or the coasts.
Their lives are actually pretty sweet.
They don’t suffer at all, except that they’re always surrounded by demons who are being tortured.
These demons keep staring at the hungry ghost with sad eyes,
causing the ghost to feel a bit awkward. He might have to write about it in his journal.
If you give bad sermons just to be famous, you become a ghost who eats sermons.
These ghosts are super thin like they’re starving, with veins all over their bodies.
They’re the color of black clouds, and tears flow from their eyes like rain.
They’re always being bitten by bugs.
These ghosts are always hungry and only gain strength when they travel
near a temple or a monk giving a sermon.
They listen to the sermons and feed off them, like they’re consuming prayers and teachings.
If you kill someone with poison, you become a poison eater.
These ghosts live in caves with no water, or up on mountains where it’s either super hot or super cold.
There are always lions or tigers around, and birds that like to swoop down
and pluck their eyes. Sometimes knives or flames rain from the sky.
These ghosts eat poisonous grass, which kills them eventually.
But they just get reborn as a poison eater again.
Here’s a weird one.
If you cut down trees that belong to monks or the Buddhist community,
you become a ghost that lives inside trees.
These creatures are smooshed into a little ball inside a tree, constantly in pain.
Bugs bite them for fun.
Really seems like some monk who’s had it with these kids made this one up.
If you loot cities, or if you’re a government official who gained the emperor’s trust,
then became evil, you turn into a life force eater.
These ghosts are super hairy and are always burning.
They enter people’s bodies to devour their life force.
There are other interesting ghosts that you probably don’t want to be.
There’s one who kills the babies of pregnant women in the womb.
There’s one who gives birth to 5 kids everyday, and eats them.
There’s one who breaks its skull and eats its own brain.
And the worst one, a ghost that makes scary, distracting sounds while people try to meditate.
Now if you thought these punishments were wild, then you gotta check out
the really crazy stuff that happens in the Buddhist hells. Click here for that.
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