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New Podcast Episode! Book Notes: Adeana McNicholl, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts"
Adeana McNicholl talks about the misunderstood realm of the “pretas,” typically translated as the home of “hungry ghosts” but in fact host to an entire history of the ancestral “departed.” Following Indic “preta” narratives from their Brahmanical ritual origins through the construction of a Buddhist karmic cosmology, McNicholl considers the moral aesthetics of punishments designed to disgust, the gendered appetites of semi-divine seductresses, and the Sanskrit story that puts the whole chronology of “preta” literature back together.
Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024). Interview by Miles Osgood.