Walking down the road to Rājagaha with Venerable Lakkhaṇa, Moggallāna kept breaking into quiet smiles while staring at thin air. When Lakkhaṇa finally asked what was so amusing, Moggallāna brushed him off with a classic deflection: let’s wait until we get back to the monastery and ask the Buddha.

It sounds like an ancient cliffhanger, but in the Maṅgulitthi Sutta, this strange roadside encounter sets up a surprisingly grounded lesson on karma, spiritual scams, and why the Buddha had little patience for fortune-telling.

Back at the monastery, Moggallāna explained what he had actually seen: a foul-smelling, deformed woman flying through the air, relentlessly attacked, pecked, and torn apart by a flock of vultures and crows while screaming in agony.

Moggallāna possessed extraordinary psychic abilities, but mentioning the sight in front of the Buddha served a purpose. It gave the Buddha an opportunity to confirm what Moggallāna had seen and explain the karmic causes behind it.

The Buddha explained that this unfortunate aerial spectacle had once been a professional sorceress and diviner in Rājagaha. Her entire business revolved around exploiting people’s anxieties. She performed fake auspicious rites, sold fraudulent guarantees, and promoted wrong views, all while separating desperate people from their money.

Her present torment—being attacked by scavenging birds while giving off a terrible stench—was the karmic result of her unskillful actions.

The story highlights a recurring theme in the Pāli Canon: the Buddha was remarkably practical. He repeatedly classified practices such as divination, astrology, interpreting omens, palmistry, spells, and arbitrary rituals as “lowly arts.” His purpose was not simply to be a killjoy. He wanted people to stop outsourcing their happiness and security to stars, omens, magical objects, or expensive ceremonies.

Instead, he pointed them toward the Noble Eightfold Path: a practical framework of ethical conduct, mental cultivation, and wisdom. If you want a better life, you build the causes for it through your actions.

The Buddha was equally direct with his own monastics. He warned monks and nuns against using sleight of hand, predictions, incantations, astrology, divination, and similar practices to gain followers and offerings. Making a living through such “lowly arts” was considered unbecoming of someone who had undertaken the training of the Dhamma.

And there is an interesting mental loophole we can fall into when reading this story.

Wait a minute. The text says she was punished because she faked the rituals. Does that mean that if the rituals had been genuine, she would have been safe?

It is a clever trap, but a trap nonetheless.

From a Buddhist perspective, karma is not a bureaucratic licensing system in which the right ritual can make an unskillful action disappear. You cannot simply chant, perform a ceremony, or pay someone to cancel the consequences of your actions.

If rituals could magically erase bad karma, the universe would effectively have a loophole for anyone wealthy enough to afford the right service.

This is also why we should be cautious about anyone who claims to possess secret mantras, rituals, or ceremonies capable of preventing the karmic consequences of our unskillful actions. If someone promises that a payment can magically neutralize the consequences of what we have done, they are selling the same basic idea that the Buddha repeatedly warned people against.

Spiritual fraud has not changed its business model much in two thousand years. The packaging has simply become more sophisticated.

Ultimately, the Buddha of the Pāli Canon comes across not as a mystical deity handing out supernatural shortcuts, but as an extraordinarily awakened teacher pointing people toward causes and conditions that can actually be cultivated.

When people asked him how to prosper and live well, he did not give them a secret incantation or a lucky number. He taught them to acquire useful knowledge, develop discipline, cultivate good relationships, manage their resources wisely, act ethically, and train the mind.

Real peace does not come from decoding hidden lottery numbers. It comes from gradually creating the conditions for a life of wisdom, integrity, and well-being.

This sutta may be short, but living out its message is a quiet, daily struggle.

Two and a half millennia later, despite the advances of science and the repeated debunking of practices such as palm reading and astrological predictions, our modern world still has an enormous appetite for magical thinking and spiritual shortcuts.

Why wrestle with the disciplined, sometimes unglamorous work of the Noble Eightfold Path when you can simply pay someone to check your aura, recommend a crystal, or promise that the planets are about to solve all your problems?

The irony is that we do not actually need any of this.

It is entirely possible to live a meaningful, fruitful, and wholesome life without relying on fortune-telling, magical rituals, or spiritual shortcuts. We can simply pay attention to our actions, understand their consequences, cultivate wholesome qualities, and take responsibility for the life we are creating.

That may sound less exciting than a secret ritual or a mystical prediction.

But perhaps that is precisely the Buddha’s point.

May all be well and happy.