Living Dhamma > Mental Body – Gandhabba > Abnormal Births Due to Gandhabba Transformations

September 30, 2017; revised February 26, 2023

Many abnormal” human and animal births reported worldwide could be due to gandhabba transformations from human to animal or vice versa.

1. Modern science and technology, especially the internet, is a handy resource to understand and confirm some concepts in Buddha Dhamma. We can now access rare events in remote places, that we would never have known without the internet.

▪I started thinking about this post when I received a youtube video of a “strange looking animal” sent to me by Mr. Tobias Große from Germany. Then I did a Google search and found many such “abnormal” human and animal births reported worldwide.

▪Such observations can be explained with the concept of gandhabba, an essential concept for describing life in the human and animal realms. I have two sub-sections on the website devoted to the critical concept of gandhabba: “Mental Body – Gandhabba” and “Gandhabba (Manomaya Kāya).”

▪Of course, gandhabba is NOT a Mahāyāna concept, see, “Gandhabba State – Evidence from Tipiṭaka,” and without that, there will be many inconsistencies, including the observed fact that there are gaps of several years in between successive human rebirths; see, “Bhava and Jāti – States of Existence and Births Therein.”

2. As discussed in those posts, human bhava (existence) could last thousands of years. Within that time, one could be born with a human body many times. When one is born with a human body and when that “physical body” dies, the “mental body” or the gandhabba state could have many hundreds of years of life left.

▪Thus, unless the kammic energy for that “human bhava” has been exhausted, the mental body (gandhabba) comes off the dead physical body unharmed. Since we cannot see that very fine body, it is said that the gandhabba lives in “para loka” (or “other world,” sometimes called nether world), compared to “this world” that we can see.

▪That gandhabba has to wait for a suitable womb to become available, and at that time it is pulled into that “matching womb.” This is why there is usually a gap of several years between successive rebirths per rebirth stories; see, “Evidence for Rebirth.”

3. During one’s lifetime, the kammaja kaya of the gandhabba changes, and sometimes those changes can be drastic. If one kills a parent, that kammaja kaya does not change instantly only because it is “enclosed” in the dense physical body.

▪But when the physical body dies, the gandhabba is automatically kicked out of that body, and instantly transforms into a kamma kaya suitable for a being in an apāya. Therefore, even if the original gandhabba had more kammic energy left for the human bhava, a cuti-paṭisandhi to a “hell being” will occur, and he/she will be instantly born in an apāya.

▪There are such ānantariya kamma that can instantly lead to births in rūpa and arūpa loka: If one had cultivated jhāna, then when the gandhabba comes out of the dead body, it will instantly undergo a cuti-paṭisandhi transition to a Brahma and will be born instantly in the corresponding Brahma realm.

4. Sometimes, a human gandhabba starts transforming another bhava while in the gandhabba state after coming out of a dead body. This happens especially for those who are engaged in highly immoral deeds.

▪For example, if one is cultivating “animal gati” (thinking and behaving like an animal), then the gandhabba will continue to generate such “animal saṅkhāra” after coming out of the dead body, and may gradually transform into an animal while in the gandhabba state. Then, if a matching animal womb becomes available, that half-human creature will be pulled into that womb.

▪Now, by “matching womb” what is meant is matching the mother’s mental state at that time. She could be a “good moral person,” but if, for some reason her mental state at that time became “abnormal,” then it could become a matching womb for that creature, who could be a half human, half animal.

▪Depending on how far that transformation had taken, that gandhabba could be pulled into a human or animal womb, i.e., be born to a human or animal mother. Here is the video sent to me by Mr. Tobias Große on an animal birth that looks partly human:

WebLink: gmx.net: Halb Mensch, halb Tier: Kuh sieht aus wie Fabelwesen

5. The following is another example of (both abnormal human and animal births) available as youtube videos (of course, in some cases “photoshop” may have been used; there are many on the internet, and I have picked one that appears to be genuine):

WebLink: Youtube: Half Animal Half Human Found In Real Life

▪Thanks to Mr. C. Saket from India for the following video. Some abnormalities shown there could also be due to gandhabba transformation together with bad kamma vipāka:

WebLink: Youtube: 10 REAL People With Shocking Genetic Mutations

▪Please send me any good videos you come across so I can add them to this collection.

6. Anything and everything in this world happen due to a cause, or more correctly due to multiple causes. The foundation of science is causes and effects. If things happen arbitrarily, then there is no way to predict the outcome of a scientific experiment.

▪But modern science deals mainly with the properties of material objects. Also, material objects only have a short “history”; a building or a car is assembled and eventually destroyed. Thus it is easier to see the link between causes and effects.

▪But living beings have minds and each has a past that extends to the deep past (due to rebirth). So, the causes that bring about results now may have been done in the deep past. That is why it is hard to see the connection between causes and effects for living beings.

7. My late Noble teacher, Waharaka Thero, has mentioned in several desanās how he saw such “gandhabba transformations” while in samādhi.

▪When an immoral human dies, the gandhabba that comes out will keep cultivating those “bad saṅkhāra,” and if they get strong enough the fine body of the gandhabba will start changing to match those “saṅkhāra” and thus “gati”; see, “Gati and Bhava – Many Varieties” and “Gati to Bhava to Jāti – Ours to Control.”

▪For example, he had seen how a human gandhabba transforms into a bird. It started with the head getting longer and forming a beak. The rest of the body then changed gradually from top to bottom. When I heard that, those Egyptian pictures seen on pyramids of “bird men” with bird heads immediately came to my mind.

▪It is entirely possible that mythical figures like mermaids (half fish, half human), and kinnaras (half-horse half human) are real; they are just very rare.

8. By the way, even some ordinary people can see those gandhabbā with fine bodies; this is due to “puñña iddhi” due to some past good kamma.

▪There are different types of “puñña iddhi.” Surviving without food and water is known as “breatharianism” and has been documented or claimed by many. an extreme case of a Hindu yogi, Prahlad Jani, is baffling to many modern scientists:

WebLink: Youtube: Snippet from "IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS LIGHT" - Yogi Prahlad Jani

▪Thanks again to Mr. C. Saket for sending this video and the comments above.

9. The ability to have very detailed memories from this life is also such a “puñña iddhi,” see, “Recent Evidence for Unbroken Memory Records (HSAM)”, where a woman describes her memories from this life going back to many years. The level of detail she can remember is amazing.

▪I am beginning to believe that in those early Buddhist Councils (Sangāyana), where Arahants recited the whole Tipiṭaka, they were likely to have VERIFIED then by actually re-visiting each sutta’s delivery by iddhi power. When you listen to the woman describing past events in such detail, it is as if she is re-visiting that event.

▪The ability of some people to see gandhabbā with fine bodies could be responsible for the misty “ghost figures” like the ones we see in popular culture (in books, movies and on the internet).

10. A human gandhabba is a finer version of a human. When a human, say a middle aged person dies, the gandhabba that comes out looks very similar to that person (if one can see it). Then with time it will show regular changes that could be expected of a human: His hair and fingernails will grow, for example. In a few years, that gandhabba WILL look like a ghost with long hair and long fingernails. Imagine what will happen to one’s human body if one doesn’t cut one’s hair, fingernails, or shave. One will look like a ghost. That is why some gandhabbā look like ghosts, according to Waharaka Thero.

▪Some of them get a bit denser by inhaling the aroma and may become easier to see for those people with the “puñña iddhi” that we mentioned earlier. However, when that gandhabba is pulled into a womb, it will shed all “added” mass (utuja kaya), and only the basic “kammaja kaya” with the hadaya vatthu and the pasāda rūpa (combined with being smaller than an atom in modern science) will merge with the zygote (the single cell formed by the union of mother and father) that is in the womb.

▪Now that “new baby” will have a different body than the body in the previous life, because it has many features inherited from the parents (via DNA) in the zygote.

▪But it is essentially the evolved kammaja kaya formed at the cuti-paṭisandhi moment still there for that next “birth” in the human world. Thus while the gandhabba keep its kammaja kaya, but the physical body will be influenced by the parents.

▪This is discussed in detail in, “Buddhist Explanations of Conception, Abortion, and Contraception.”

This world is much more complex than we realize, and the “para loka” of the gandhabbā is even more complex; see “Hidden World of the Gandhabba: Netherworld (Paraloka).”