The Gaki: The Hungry Ghost Whose Throat Is Thin as a Needle
Across the whole Buddhist and Hindu world — from India, where they are the preta , to China and Japan, where they are the gaki — there wanders a class of the suffering dead so precisely and terribly imagined that no other figure in this chronicle's whole gallery of hungers can quite match it. The gaki, the hungry ghost, is one of the realms of rebirth in the Buddhist cosmos — the fate of those who die consumed by greed , by grasping, by envy and unappeasable craving — and its torment is written into the very shape of its body, drawn in the great medieval Japanese scrolls and the Tibetan wheel of life with anatomical exactness. The gaki has an enormous, swollen, distended belly — a vast hollow of appetite, a hunger the size of the world — and, above it, a neck and throat thin as a needle , a mouth pinched to a pinhole: so that it is all hunger and no capacity to feed it . It is ravenous beyond all bearing — its whole being is one starving belly's-worth of craving — and it can...