Hungry Ghosts (Pretas) in Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 8 June 2026 · Updated 29 October 2026

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Hungry ghosts — pretas in Sanskrit, petas in Pāli — are beings trapped in a state of insatiable craving: forever hungry, forever unable to be filled. They occupy one of the lower realms of rebirth in the Buddhist universe (one of five destinations in the Pali discourses, of six in Tibetan and East Asian teaching), and few images in all of Buddhism are as vivid, or as quietly disturbing, as theirs.

They are craving itself, given a body.

Beings of endless hunger

Encyclopædia Britannica, in its article on the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival, describes the hungry ghosts as beings “with protruding stomachs and tiny mouths who are always ravenous.” Scriptures of the Chinese canon sharpen this into something almost unbearable. In the Flaming Mouth dhāraṇī sūtra translated by Amoghavajra (T1313), the ghost who appears to Ānanda is withered and gaunt, its mouth ablaze and its throat like the point of a needle (咽如針鋒). However desperately such a being craves, it can never take in enough to be satisfied. And in the Yulanpen jing (T685), when Mulian brings a bowl of rice to his mother, reborn among the hungry ghosts, the food turns to burning coals (化成火炭) before it reaches her mouth.

The result is a being condemned to unappeasable want — to hunger with the whole of its being, and never once be filled. It is one of the most haunting images Buddhism offers, and it is meant to be: the preta is suffering of a very particular kind, the suffering of craving that feeds on itself.

The karma of grasping

Why is a being reborn here? In the Buddhist understanding (the late Pāli verse collection Petavatthu, “Stories of Hungry Ghosts,” tells fifty-one stories of rebirth as a ghost for bad deeds, and the 84000 glossary calls preta birth “the karmic fruition of past miserliness”), the hungry-ghost realm is the karmic fruit of lives ruled by greed, miserliness, and grasping — by the refusal to give and the endless wanting of more. Britannica notes that rebirth there results from negative karma, and that the ghosts’ “continual attachment… to earthly life” — the very clinging that, in Buddhist thought, is the cause of suffering — is what brings them back to haunt the living. The realm is, in a sense, the perfect mirror of its cause: a life spent grasping becomes an existence of nothing but grasping.

In East Asian Buddhism, compassion for these beings is expressed each year in the Hungry Ghost Festival (Ullambana), when the living make offerings to feed the wandering ghosts and relieve their hunger — a tradition closely related to the Japanese festival of Obon.

Feeding the ghosts: dedicating merit

Buddhism does not leave the hungry ghosts only to their torment; it offers the living a way to help them. In the Tirokuṭṭa Sutta (“Outside the Walls,” Khp 7), the verses describe departed relatives reborn as petas who return to their old homes — where, in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, “Outside the walls they stand and wait, / at the junctions and the crossroads” and “wait beside the door posts” — yet when food and drink are set out, “no one remembers them at all,” and where they are there is no farming or trade to feed them. What can reach them is merit. When the living make offerings — food and drink given in the departed’s name, especially to the Sangha — and dedicate the goodness of that act to their dead, the ghosts receive it and rejoice. The Buddha gives a luminous simile: just as rivers running full carry their water down to the sea, so offerings devotedly given here flow to the departed there. (For the wider question of how literally to take all this, see can Buddhists believe in ghosts?)

This is the Pāli canon’s own teaching on feeding the dead (the East Asian Hungry Ghost festival, Yulanpen or Ullambana, shares its name with a different scripture, the Yulanpen jing, in which the Buddha tells Mulian to make offerings to the monks on the fifteenth day of the seventh month) — and the root of a tender truth: that compassion can reach even into the realms of suffering, and that remembering our dead, generously, is a real kindness to them.

Craving you can recognise

Of all the realms of rebirth, the hungry ghost may be the one a modern reader recognises most immediately — because it describes something we have felt. This is the realm most often read psychologically, as a state of mind rather than only a place of rebirth: the torment of addiction and compulsive craving, in which one consumes and consumes and is never satisfied; the ache of a wanting that no amount of getting can fill. Seen this way, the preta is not a distant monster but a condition the human heart falls into, whenever desire becomes a hunger that feeds on itself. (We take up this literal-or-symbolic question on its own page.)

And that is exactly where the teaching turns from horror to hope. If the hungry ghost is craving given a form, then the way out is the way out of craving itself — the very heart of the Buddhist path. The realm is terrible, but it is not a sentence: like every state in saṃsāra, it is impermanent, and the freedom the Buddha pointed to is freedom from the grasping that creates it. (For the realm in its scheme, see the six realms; for the wider map, the realms of existence.)