Ask A Buddhist: What do Buddhists believe about demons?

Sarah Conover has been a Buddhist practitioner for nearly three decades. She’s ready to answer your questions about the faith. What do you want to ask a Buddhist?  Fill out the form below or submit your question online. 

What do Buddhist believe about demons or evil spirits? 

To answer this question accurately, one would have to research every Buddhist denomination and enclave in the world throughout Buddhism’s long history.

Are these aspects of Buddhism that the Buddha himself discussed? Yes. The Buddha most definitely spoke of beings that we cannot see. In fact, his very first sermon, given to a small group of monks, the “Discourse on Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma,” mentions them explicitly:

When the Blessed One had set in motion the Wheel of Dhamma, the Earthbound devas proclaimed with one voice, ‘The incomparable Wheel of Dhamma has been set in motion by the Blessed One in the deer sanctuary at Isipatana, near Benares, and no seeker, Brahmin, celestial being, demon, god, or any other being in the world can stop it.’

A little bit like the Chain of Being in Christian religious literature of old, word of the Dhamma soon moves upward from earth to the sublime realms, past the devas (celestial beings), past the Brahma realms (entities of universal love) until “the ten-thousandfold universal system trembled and quaked and shook, and a boundless, sublime radiance surpassing the power of devas appeared on earth” (translation Abhayagiri Monastic Foundation).

In other instances the Buddha discussed the six types of form realm existence, one of which is the hungry ghost realm, characterized by intense suffering from craving. The “evil spirits” referenced in the question could well fall into this category.

Perhaps the question itself, however, needs scrutiny as behind it lies a distinctly modern hermeneutic that views the Buddha’s words about invisible spirits as metaphorical, not literal. Many practitioners in the West, consciously or unconsciously, would like to transition Buddhism to secularism, leaving aside what they consider the mythological.

Our modern lens of science considers only collections of observable and verifiable facts to be true. Fair enough. So let’s apply those same standards to the Buddha’s words of long ago and to the master Buddhist practitioners over millennia who have corroborated and confirmed the Buddha’s words about invisible beings. Because few of us have cultivated the internal tools to confirm these aspects of a deeply focused spiritual life does not mean these phenomena don’t exist.

Another way to view the realms of invisible spirits, of  devas and Brahmas, is to equate them with various states of mind. Some folks (and perhaps I am one of them) might breathe a sigh of relief, because it’s an avenue for the unenlightened to taste a bit of the nectar that the Buddha pointed to. All of us have experienced, at one or another time in our lives, sublime states of mind. As a child, the Buddha’s experience of such a state, of rapture while sitting under a tree, figured large in his faith that a life free from suffering was available to human beings.

That being said, the Buddha enjoined us to not accept dogma without experiential confirmation. Faith at every step of the Buddhist path includes an awareness that our vision opens and deepens as we tread along it. That our understandings are provisional (except for the fully liberated) remains a given for every practitioner.

The present field of Buddhism is fluid, in the flux of the now-permeable boundaries between ancient religions and modern worldviews: In other words, we live in a fascinating time in Buddhism’s evolution. Some long-established Buddhist cultures have flourishing immigrant communities in the West; not a few Westerners go to ancient Buddhist cultures to study the Dhamma (Thailand, Sri Lanka, Burma and India to name a few); and lastly, secularism is busy adapting the Dhamma to Western sensibilities and paradigms.

As Westerners scrutinize and sift through the teachings of the Buddha, they may turn aside from the so-called fantastical and still develop their wisdom and happiness. But they should be aware that the Buddha wasn’t speaking figuratively about these things: that fact stands front and center in his very first sermon as well in many of the seventeen-and-a-half thousand suttas of his teachings. And perhaps traditionalists, from countries where the Dhamma has been established for millennia, are doing much the same as Westerners but in reverse—ferreting out the Dhamma’s truth and beauty as it is pressed up against globalism’s garish, loud reach.

In a certain sense, these days every Buddhist practitioner, whether embedded in Eastern or Western paradigms, is in a similar position as the Buddha found himself 2500 years ago. During the very robust time of competing spiritual schools when he taught, the Buddha formed his teachings in response to dozens of conflicting beliefs. Like him, each of us must investigate what is true and wholesome by living the Dhamma, and, until we experience liberation, hold as articles of faith those things that we have yet to understand.