Brief Discussion on Material Elements (Draft)

Seven. Question: Is the external object-aspect (nimitta) seen by hungry ghosts the same as that seen by humans? For example, when a hungry ghost looks at a river, a human looks at a river, and a deva looks at a river, they are clearly looking at the same river, yet what they see differs: humans see a river, devas see lapis lazuli, and hungry ghosts see flames or thick pus and blood.

Answer: Since they are seeing the same river, the external object-aspect (nimitta) must certainly be the same; only the internal object-aspects differ for each of them, and these different results are caused by the power of karma. If a hungry ghost sees a river in the world of the hungry ghosts, then it is certainly different from the river in the human world that humans see—the external object-aspects are different. If a hungry ghost sees things in the world of the hungry ghosts, that has nothing to do with us humans, and the external object-aspects are different. But if it is looking at the mountains, rivers, and great earth of the human world here, although what it sees differs from what humans see, the external object-aspect is the same—what it sees is still a river in the human realm.

Although the ghost realm has its own way of life and its own sentient environment (bhājana-loka) as the living environment for ghosts, there are still differences from our human realm. But when it sees people and things in the human realm—for example, when a ghost sees a human—is that a person in the ghost realm or a person in the human realm? The person it sees is the same person that others see; can the external object-aspect be the same? It is certainly the same.