Can Buddhists Believe in Ghosts?

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 June 2026 · Updated 13 September 2026

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Can Buddhists believe in ghosts? Yes — and in a way Buddhism takes them more seriously than the modern world does. The scriptures describe hungry ghosts (petas), gods, and many unseen beings as entirely real. But a Buddhist “ghost” is not quite the Western one: a peta is a being reborn into a realm of unquenchable craving, not simply a dead person’s spirit haunting a house. Understanding that difference is the key to the whole question — a corner of Buddhist cosmology that is more precise, and stranger, than it first sounds.

Hungry ghosts are in the scriptures

Far from dismissing ghosts, the Pali Canon devotes an entire book to them: the Petavatthu, or “Stories of the Departed.” The peta — the “hungry ghost” — is a being reborn, as a result of intense greed, stinginess, or clinging in a former life, into one of the six realms of existence (five, in some early schemes). Tradition pictures them with enormous bellies and needle-thin throats: beings consumed by a hunger they can never satisfy — a vivid image of what a life ruled by craving becomes. Buddhism, then, does not ask whether such beings exist; it takes their existence for granted and asks what we can learn from them. (We explore them in full on our page about hungry ghosts.)

Feeding the departed

One of the most touching early texts is the Tirokuṭṭa Sutta — “Hungry Shades Outside the Walls” (it appears in the canon twice, as Khuddakapāṭha 7 and Petavatthu 1.5). In it, relatives who have died and been reborn as hungry ghosts return to their old homes and stand outside the walls, hoping to be remembered. The Buddha teaches the living to make offerings and dedicate the merit to them — traditionally by giving to the Saṅgha in their name — and this merit, like water flowing down to fill the valleys, reaches and relieves the departed.

From this root grew some of the most widely observed practices in the Buddhist world: festivals of the dead such as the Ullambana (the Hungry Ghost Festival) and the Japanese Obon, in which families make offerings for their ancestors. Belief in “ghosts,” here, is inseparable from love and gratitude for those who have gone before. The early texts are also more exact than “offerings reach the dead.” In the Jānussoṇi Sutta (AN 10.177) a brahmin asks the Buddha whether memorial gifts really aid departed relatives, and is told they aid one reborn in the ghost realm and not one reborn as a human, an animal, a god, or in hell — each of those lives on the food of its own realm. Some departed relative is always in the ghost realm to receive what is given, so the donor is never without reward. (Our page on merit sets the passage out in full.)

A canon full of unseen beings

Petas are only part of a crowded unseen world. The scriptures are populated by devas (radiant gods of the higher realms), yakkhas (powerful nature-spirits, sometimes fierce, sometimes protective), nāgas, and more. Buddhism is emphatically not materialist: it does not claim the visible physical world is all there is. Where it differs from popular superstition is that these beings are not worshipped as saviours and hold no ultimate power — they too are caught in the round of rebirth, and even a long-lived god will eventually die and be reborn.

Why nobody sees them

If the unseen world is this crowded, why does nobody meet it? Because the texts never claimed it was ordinarily visible. The Lakkhaṇasaṁyutta (SN 19), a chapter of twenty-one short discourses in the Saṁyutta Nikāya, is built entirely of sightings by a single monk. Descending Vulture’s Peak, Venerable Mahāmoggallāna smiles at a certain spot, and says why only later, in the Buddha’s presence: he “saw a skeleton flying through the air,” and watched as “Vultures, crows, and hawks kept chasing it, pecking, clawing, and stabbing it in the ribs as it screeched in pain” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). The Buddha confirms the sighting — and then says something no ghost-hunter would ever say.

Disbelief is treated here as the reasonable, expected response — so much so that the Buddha had kept the sighting to himself rather than be doubted. Nothing is offered as proof, and no one is asked to go looking. What the Buddha does explain is the cause: the being “used to be a cattle butcher right here in Rājagaha,” and now “experiences the residual result of that deed.” Even the ghost story turns out to be a teaching about karma.

What the texts tell you to do about them

Not exorcism. The two responses the early discourses describe are both forms of goodwill. The first is the one above: give, and dedicate the merit. The second is paritta, protective recitation, whose charter text is the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta (DN 32). In it the four great kings come to the Buddha late at night, and one of them, the Great King Vessavaṇa, explains that most spirits have no confidence in the Buddha — because “the Buddha teaches them to refrain from killing living creatures, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and consuming intoxicants of beer, wine, and liquor,” and “mostly they don’t refrain from such things.” What he asks for is a protection for the people who meditate in lonely places.

What follows is a homage to the seven buddhas and a recital of the four quarters and their kings, and monastics and lay people alike are told to “learn this Āṭānāṭiya protection well and completely memorize it.” Even the emergency measure is social rather than magical: if some fierce non-human who obeys nobody troubles a person, the discourse says to call out to the great spirits and their generals — “This spirit’s got me! This spirit’s entered me! This spirit’s annoying me!” — appealing, in effect, over the offender’s head. And this is still living practice. The Āṭānāṭiya is the discourse that ends The Book of Protection — the Sri Lankan paritta anthology, in Piyadassi Thera’s translation. Monks are invited into homes “on occasions of domestic importance, such as birth days, house-warming, illness, and similar events,” usually for the three best-known discourses; on special occasions they recite “right through the night or for three or seven days, and at times, for weeks,” working through the entire book to its last discourse. How such a recital is conducted, and why the tradition insists it is not a spell, is set out in our guide to Buddhist chanting.

But not quite the Western ghost

So when someone asks “do Buddhists believe in ghosts?”, the honest answer needs one clarification. A Western ghost is usually imagined as a dead person’s disembodied spirit lingering at the site of their death. A Buddhist peta is something else: a complete being with its own karma, reborn into a particular realm — a mode of existence, not a haunting. The two overlap in the popular imagination, and folk Buddhism across Asia is indeed full of local spirits, protective charms, and rituals for the restless dead. But at the level of doctrine, the Buddhist “ghost” is a lesson in the machinery of rebirth: a being made by its own craving — and a mirror in which we are meant to see, and loosen, the grasping in ourselves. (For the realms of rebirth, see the realms of existence and the six realms.)

Can a dead person linger?

This is what most people are really asking, and it is the one point where the traditions genuinely divide. Theravāda says there is no interval to linger in. Its Abhidhamma text the Kathāvatthu (“Points of Controversy”) takes up the proposition “that there is an intermediate state of existence” in the section titled Antarābhavakathā (Kv 8.2) and argues it away: if such a state existed, the Theravādin presses, would it be “a fifth matrix, a sixth destiny, an eighth station for reborn consciousness, a tenth realm of beings?” (trans. Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids). Rebirth follows death directly, and nothing is left over to hover.

Tibetan Vajrayāna maps that gap in detail. In Liberation Upon Hearing, Minling Terchen Gyurme Dorje’s explanation of the phenomena of the intermediate state, the bardo of becoming runs in seven-day spans: a consciousness that has not yet found a body dies and is reborn again, and the process continues “for a maximum of forty-nine days in total, within which one will find the conditions for rebirth” (trans. Adam Pearcey, Lotsawa House, CC BY-NC 4.0). That is as close as Buddhism comes to a dead person still about the place — and it is still not a haunting: someone on the way to a next life, on a clock, not a tenant of the staircase. For the fuller comparison see what happens after death in Buddhism; for the text that maps the passage, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.