If you have sat long enough, you will know the moment when a teaching stops being a teaching and becomes recognition. You are in the grip of compulsive ruminating, bottomless and unsatisfiable, and suddenly the hungry ghost realm is not ancient cosmology. It is this.
In Buddhist cosmology, the hungry ghost realm is one of the six realms of existence. Hungry ghosts are depicted with distended, empty bellies rumbling with hunger, but the narrowest of throats through which only one grain of rice can be swallowed at a time. The hungry ghost is the image of craving that cannot be quenched, of hunger that feeding only intensifies.
I know the hungry ghost from the inside. The content changes—love and sex, money and ambition, perceived betrayal and heartbreak—but the structure is always the same: a downward spiral that never meets bottom. The form, the symbol, and the experience arise together, each making the others legible, and something becomes real that no amount of propositional belief could have made real.
This is what, I believe, practice is for. Not to offer a philosophy to accept or reject. Not to install a better belief system over a worse one. But to cultivate a quality of attention stable enough that when experience takes off in the body, in the room, in the street, it has somewhere to safely land.
I am a Sōtō Zen practitioner, an M.Div. in Buddhism and Inter-Religious Engagement, a theologian (dharmalogian?) formed at the intersection of dharma and liberatory thought, and a chaplain whose clinical work has taken place in hospitals, jails, and addiction treatment centers.
I cannot make sense of the dharma without structural analysis. I cannot hold the teaching on suffering without naming the systems that manufacture it. I cannot practice non-harm while looking away from the causes and conditions of sentient beings being harmed.
For me, the integration of Buddhist and radical analysis is not a supplementary political opinion added to a contemplative practice. It is a spiritual imperative, called for by the logic of the teachings themselves.
The Hungry Ghost Is Not Just Within Us
I begin with the Second Noble Truth. Buddhists emphasize that the cause of suffering is tanhā, craving, thirst, the grasping that can never be sated. We are taught to investigate this in ourselves, to trace it to its root in the illusion of a fixed, separate self that is perpetually insufficient and in need of completion from outside.
This is good practice. It is also incomplete.
Because when I meet the hungry ghost in myself, I mean truly meet it, not analyze it, not manage it, but make contact with it, I realize that the boundary between inner and outer is permeable. I am not claiming the boundary disappears. But when I bring my attention fully into awareness, something shifts. The boundary I always perceived to exist reveals itself to be almost translucent and fluid: present, but no longer concrete. And so too can I recognize the same bottomless craving within me and in the systems and structures around me. In economies built on manufactured insufficiency. In social media architectures designed to feed without satisfying. In the relentless production of desire that late-stage capitalism requires to sustain itself.
It is the same recognition event, at scale.
That movement, from meeting craving in myself to meeting it in the world, and seeing that they are not separate, is śūnyatā. Not a void, not an absence, but the dissolution of the membrane that made inner and outer appear to be separate things in the first place. The hungry ghost in here and the hungry ghost of the capitalist economy were never two different phenomena.
If that is true (and I believe the dharma makes the case that it is) then the practice of liberation does not stop at the skin.
The Turn We Have to Make
Broadly speaking, contemporary Western (convert) Buddhism has a tendency to apply the teachings inward while leaving the outer world largely intact. We learn to be with our craving without feeding it, to rest in awareness rather than reactivity, to soften around suffering. These are real and valuable fruits of practice.
But in my humble opinion, the tradition also contains another vector entirely, one much less frequently foregrounded in our dharma spaces. The Buddha was not silent on social conditions. The sangha he founded was, among other things, a radical reorganization of caste. The precepts are not merely personal ethics; they are relational and structural commitments.
Practice does not stop at the individual. Structural analysis of power, capital, and organized violence allows us to see clearly what tanhā looks like when it organizes entire civilizations, to see the hungry ghost not just in ourselves but in extractive economies, in carceral systems, in land theft, in the machinery of racial capitalism. And understanding that they are not separate.
Without this analysis, our practice risks becoming a spiritual bypass, a way of feeling better about conditions rather than transforming them.
As Angela Y. Davis said: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, but am changing the things I cannot accept.”
Why This Is a Dharmic Imperative
The word imperative is deliberate. I am not arguing that Buddhists who integrate radical analysis are doing “realer” Buddhism than those who don’t. I am arguing that the internal logic of the teachings, followed all the way, leads here.
Pratītyasamutpāda: interdependent co-arising. Nothing exists independently. Every phenomenon arises in dependence on conditions. If we take this seriously, if we let it function the way the hungry ghost cosmology functions, as a preparation for recognition rather than a doctrine to affirm, then we cannot hold a suffering person without seeing the conditions that produced their suffering.
We cannot investigate craving without eventually asking what is engineering it. We cannot practice equanimity in the face of preventable harm and call that non-attachment; sometimes what masquerades as equanimity is dissociation, and sometimes what looks like anger is karuṇā doing its job.
The point of the Buddha’s story, as I see it, is that outside of old age, sickness, and death, most suffering is optional. That means personal suffering, yes, and we learn to work with its energies to alleviate them without force.
But it also means collective suffering. The question then becomes: how do we work with the energies of collective suffering, without force or harm, to alleviate them? First, we are present to the suffering that exists. Then we apply the Eightfold Path, as both diagnostic tool and prescription. And as practice deepens, the Eightfold Path becomes prophylactic as well, shaping the conditions that produce suffering before they fully form.
In my experience learning social and religious ethics—i.e. organizing, abolitionist thought, liberation theology, transformative justice—I found that these traditions are, at their best, engaged forms of exactly this kind of seeing.
They ask: what are the conditions? Who benefits from their continuation? What does collective liberation require? These are dharmic questions. They have always been dharmic questions. Socially engaged Buddhists did not import them from somewhere outside the tradition. We are recovering them from within.
The Work Ahead
The dharma is not a private retreat from the world, and socially engaged Buddhism is not new. It is the same inquiry into the nature of suffering, its causes, and what genuine liberation actually requires.
The stakes of getting this right are not abstract. I have sat with people at the end of their lives in institutions built to disappear them. I have held space with people dying of manufactured despair—addiction, incarceration, poverty, gender and sexual violence, racism—and been asked, implicitly and explicitly, what the dharma says about that.
I do not believe the dharma says: look inward and make peace with conditions. I believe it says: see clearly, and let that clear seeing move through you into the world.
