Graha and bhuta afflictions

Eight kinds of vyantaras and ten kinds of bhavanavasi gods are said to live constantly among people through their power of transformation, each recognisable by its own features.

Vyantara beings such as bhutas and pishachas live everywhere in the middle world and trouble people through illusion, from enmity of a former birth, for play, or from a wish to kill.

Angry great grahas are said to enter those who neglect daily worship of the five supreme gurus, commit sins, covet others' wealth and wives, eat without worship, give no gifts, offerings or alms, live in broken empty houses, and take meat, honey and liquor.

Kinnaras of their retinue, prompted by their masters, enter by illusion people who live alone or in empty houses, the impure, the wounded or wasting, and the irreligious.

The possessing kinnaras imitate their master's nature, so the possessed person takes on that being's dress and ornaments.

The grahas have wondrous divine forms of many shapes and guises and are inconceivable; out of anger they enter the human body and take control of it by their own power.

Graha fever arising from the troubles of spirits (bhuta, preta, pishacha) is said to be calmed by a fumigation of cow horn, asafoetida, black pepper, arka, palasha, snake slough, dry ginger, chasha feathers, cotton seed, white mustard and peacock feathers.

They are to be overcome by severe austerity, meditation, mantras, medicines and proven formulas.

All mental (graha-seized) disorders are to be conquered with the drugs described and with similar tasteless, repulsive, very foul-smelling drugs made into fumigations, nasal drops and eye salves.

A physician of truth, compassion and self-control, devoted to the Omniscient, should treat the curable ones with mantras and potent medicines; these grahas are called very cruel and hard to overcome, and child grahas difficult.

Devas roam mostly on the full-moon day, asuras at the twilights, gandharvas on the eighth lunar day, yakshas on the first, ancestral bhutas in the dark fortnight, rakshasas and (per the commentary) pishachas at night, and nagas on the fifth, troubling people.