The Season of the Hungry Ghosts

When the vitality drains from tree leaves, their basic color stands forth. Camouflaged by chlorophyll no longer, they are stripped down to blazing redness, or to golden ruffles of leaves that rattle and dance and dive into gusts of autumn wind.

These have been glorious days, blustery and cold and bright. Everyone on the city streets seems to be savoring this beauty as a prelude to the grey slickness of winter. A gust comes, the air fills with leaves, and people walking along turn their faces skyward as an audible “ooh!” rises unbidden from their throats.

So it is, at the dying of the year.

I had never recognized change as constant death, or death as a beautiful thing. In spite of all the thinking—so much thinking!—I’ve done, about the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of life, I have been slow to value the ending and cycling of things.

The Buddha said it: everything that arises passes away. How obvious. As is the fact that passing away makes room for new iterations of life.

I have been totally changed by life in the monastery, but my life now resembles the life of four years ago: life in a vibrant city that pulses with lights and exhaust and the possibility of sex. The city shapes a person, as surely as life in a religious community does—or academia, or a family that existed long ago .

Becoming and dying require one another and propel one another: a child-self died; a earnest and then bitter scientist died; a little Zen nun who forgot how to have an opinion is gone. As the unnecessary bits shrivel and blow away, the structure is revealed. I see how much I can change, and I see how I am the same person I’ve always been.

What is revealed in death is not all graceful branches reaching to the sky: there are scarred and wounded parts too, the diseased areas that are not easily healed. When things fall away, what is left is what we are—and what won’t let go of us. So Autumn is the season when the dead return, and when unresolved energies—ghosts—that just won’t die visit the world of the living.



In Buddhism, “Hungry Ghosts” personify the unsatisfied longings and obsolete “issues” that still strangle us. My favorite ceremony is Segaki, the feeding of the Hungry Ghosts. Often held near Halloween, it addresses the dysfunctional aspects of self with offerings of junk food and cacophonous sound; with an altar turned backward; and with a general disintegration of the usual staid formality of Zen ceremony. Because, you know, some part is always resisting the highest aspirations (or are they pretensions?) of the human spirit.

Participants wear costumes. The hall is hung with images of madness and death. And the ghosts do come: you can feel them creeping out of hiding, hobbling into the room on crabbed legs to gorge on sweets, and to be healed. Perhaps those whose time has come will take their leave; perhaps they will be transformed by the sweet nectar of the Dharma. Or they may simply be noted, and then turn back into the darkness for another year. Either way, the human receptacle of these energies is subtly changed by the ceremony. When the ghosts do creep back into the recesses of the self, they have lost some of their power to shame and to drive us.

This year, there was no formal Segaki ceremony in my life. But on the day of Halloween, I took out my ink and my brushes, and allowed the hungry ghosts to come forth. Doubt, disgust and anxiety growled and cowered through the bristles, and flooded the paper.



The next day, I turned thirty-three, passing away and preparing to begin anew.


link:Article by Vicki Austin about Hungry Ghosts


I forgot to include this wonderful lyric--as best I recall it--by Krishna Das...I find myself singing it a lot at this time of year.

Calling all you hungry ghosts
Everywhere through endless time--

You who wander, you who thirst--
I offer you this Bodhi mind.

Calling all you hungry spirits
Everywhere through endless time--

Calling all you hungry hearts
All you lost and you left behind;

Gather 'round, and share this meal;
Your joy and your sorrow, I make them mine.