Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Adeana McNicholl, Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics

Pretas are best known as “hungry ghosts,” pitiful beings with miniscule mouths and bloated stomachs who reap the fruits of stinginess sown in a former life. But they were not always portrayed this way. In Of Ancestors and Ghosts (OUP: 2024), Adeana McNicholl traces the construction of the Buddhist realm of the pretas not through doctrinal treatises, but through narrative literature. Far from mere morality tales or simple scare tactics to promote Buddhist ethics, McNicholl argues that preta tales help model and elicit aesthetically informed embodied experiences that are themselves ethically formative. As a result, this literature speaks to the vast range of embodied experiences in the Buddhist cosmos, including the intersection of human/non-human and class, caste, gender, and sexuality. This roundtable brings together scholars of Buddhism and karma, caste, gender, and aesthetics to reflect on the role of cosmology and ghosts in ethical reflections on karma.