Joshua Esler,   Chinese Ghosts and Tibetan Buddhism: Negotiating between Mythological and "Rational" Narratives,  Modern China, Vol. 42, No.5, 2016.

Abstract:

This article examines three narratives about ghost beliefs in China, including those of ancestral time, the state, and certain Tibetan Buddhist masters. It focuses on the ghost experiences of Chinese Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and examines how their conceptualizations of ghosts may both overlap with and differ from those of the state and their Tibetan Buddhist masters. Just as ghosts have traditionally symbolized both a fear of being forgotten and of malevolent reprisals after death，these respective narratives also selectively remember and forget elements of ghost beliefs and stories in order to propagate a wider agenda. Chinese practitioners, who have often been exposed to the state and modernist Tibetan Buddhist narratives, as well as a narrative of ghosts according to ancestral time, appear to mark out a space between these three narratives, revealing their own ambivalence, caught between "tradition" and "progress," and "superstition" and "scientific rationalism."