Spirits of Air and Goblins Damned: Life in the Light on the Six Realms Commentary

Scholarship in Buddhist Studies, particularly among philologists and philosophers, often overlooks cosmology, karma, and rebirth. This neglect is a legacy of a deep and long-standing anti-metaphysical spirit that pervades the empirical and philosophical frameworks employed in the discipline. This study engages in a philological close reading of four manuscripts of an unedited and untranslated Pali commentary on the Cha-gati-dīpanī “Light on the Six Realms”, a work on karma and rebirth composed possibly in Pagan, Myanmar, in the early second millennium. This text is particularly significant as one of the oldest Pali works from the region, drawing on now-lost Sanskrit (or possibly Prakrit) sources and offering unique insights into broader Buddhist debates, such as the ontological status of hell guardians. I examine the text’s depiction of the hell and animal realms and reassess some of our scholarly paradigms that often frame the kind of ideas the commentary presents as irrational, figurative, or “folk”. Ultimately, this study calls for greater attention to such works and their perspectival horizons to enrich our understanding of the intellectual life of medieval Buddhism beyond the constraints of modern empirical and philosophical assumptions.