We've been talking about sutras and also about Hungry Ghost month. The Agganna Sutta (Pali Tipitika, Digha Nikaya 27) is not about hungry ghosts, exactly, but it does speak about how greed binds us to samsara. The sutra presents a fable in the form of a creation myth.
The first time I heard about this sutra, someone actually was complaining that it can't be reconciled to the science of evolution. Well, no, it can't, any more than the table about the Grasshopper and the Ants can be reconciled to current government monetary policy. It's a fable. I suspect it always was understood as a fable, and not as a literal explanation of how humans appeared in the world. According to many sources I have read, ancient people didn't think in terms of literal factuality the way most of us do today.
The primary point of this fable is that castes are stupid. In the fable, people sorted themselves into castes depending on what they looked like, but when they did so they just created trouble for themselves. And the enlightened being is not subject to being sorted into a caste.
The sutra also shows us how people become bound to their desires, and to dukkha. At the beginning of the sutra, the beings are formless and luminous and needed nothing. But they got sucked into desires by sexual pleasure, and before long they had bodies that were subject to sickness, old age and death. Greed also led to hoarding and possessiveness, and some people having too much while others didn't have enough. And it led to the formation of castes.
This is a very long sutra, and my version of it is greatly condensed. A translation is available online at the Columbia University website.
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