“The Defects of Samsāra” outlined the sufferings that come from practicing samsaric activities: from the great yet mortal existence of deities, to the consequences of renouncing worldly attachment to live among the deities. Within the implicit premonitions to follow the dharma and the descriptions of the pretas, I interpreted that deformities in one’s physical appearance connect to the identification of those who are suffering. Despite the premium value placed on detaching from this existence’s illusory confines, this chapter seemed almost scientific in its descriptions of the physical world. Perhaps this level of detail caused me to think that the same level of detail would be directed into the assessment of one’s suffering, but instead of this, I read the descriptions like tropes that qualify an entity as a preta.
To establish a sense of how integral “The Defects of Samsāra” is to Tibetan Buddhist thought, I want to look at one of the final paragraphs of the chapter. Rinpoche explains the information presented in this chapter as “the basis and support for all the good qualities of the path” (Rinpoche 99). The ideas would then be identified as a canon, as they justify the practice of Dharma. The ideas of suffering create the necessity of practicing Dharma, because “[they make] you turn away from the goals of this life.” The suffering that he has described before this assertion is the motivation for practicing the Dharma, and it is central to the conception of action that pervades the religious thought. Through this centrality comes the validity of defining the world through their cosmology.
Without explaining what a preta is, Rinpoche describes them as a classification of entities characterized by their suffering “from external, internal or specific obscurations” or as those who “live out their lives in constant terror and hallucination” (72; 75) Despite the speciating differences of these characterizations, Rinpoche also asserts that “the pretas’ suffering is inconceivable” (76). The goal of these descriptions is to build an identity which followers of the religion do not want to bring upon themselves. To ensure that this does not come to pass, Rinpoche advises that practitioners “[mentally] take on the sufferings of those beings and cultivate love and compassion for them” (76). This empathetic regard for pretas creates an inherent mental separation from the conception of proper living of those who are identified as pretas, which is not entirely a clear physical entity.
Characterizing these entities through their suffering, and differentiating them from the practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism through empathy, aggregates on the anthropomorphic identity of the pretas and strengthens the sense that it imposes an outcast identity for those with bodies that somehow deviate from the norm of Tibetan society. In the text they are described as having “mouths no bigger than the eye of a needle…[when] they want to move, they cannot lift their gigantic bellies with their grass-like limbs” (73). Through these descriptions of human-like, yet deviated appearances, the pretas creates another section of the population who might be religiously persecuted due to the appearances, and who are precluded from reaching spiritual liberation. With the centrality of these tenets to Tibetan Buddhism, there is no means to circumvent this limitation, this social disability, enforcing the status of those who might fill the criteria as religiously impure and therefore socially outcast.
